Selling the Place

A lot of time has passed since I first posted to this blog.  Too much time.  There has been a lot of water under the bridge and many lessons learned. The first is about dealing with family.  I'm not going to write about anything you don't know.  But I may have a slightly different twist on it you have not considered before.

One thing I have learned: It is IMPERATIVE to do everything "according to Hoyle" when you are dealing with anyone else, but especially family.  If you say you are going to vote on something, then ACTUALLY DO IT, and don't just talk about it.  Have all your meetings according to some standard, such as "Robert's Rules of Order."  No one wants to cause any disagreement, so they don't say anything.  But you can pay me now, or you can pay me later - with a LOT of interest accrued!  Trouble is, even though we truly wish to be magnanimous and trusting, we are human and can't get out of the box.  By that I mean we will see and remember things according to our own lights that differ according to our circumstances.  Even though we mean well and truly love the other person, we will see and remember things differently.  Even doing the best we possibly can.  It is much, much better to have a secretary and write everything down, and vote to "approve the minutes" so we agree and then to save the minutes so we can all get on the same sheet of music years later when we all remember things a little differently.  As far as being magnanimous, it is FAR, FAR better to be more of a jerk up front (if that is what it takes) and insist on doing things right than to argue forever about what "really happened" years later.

That is what happened to us.  We all truly love one another, and want only what is right, and we are truly trying our best ... but we remember things a little differently and never truly agreed to anything at all.  Years later, when we need to make a decision, there are no records, no minutes, no anything.  And each of us remembers what happened just differently enough to put it all in doubt.  That would not be the case if we had actually kept minutes, and saved them for future reference so we could all get back on track with the actual reason we did what we did.  But not wanting to offend at the time, no one demanded any such thing, and now, after one of us has had a stroke and others have only grown older, we cannot agree completely on our actual motives and what truly took place.

FROM MY POINT OF VIEW, the house was basically sitting empty and going down hill fast.  I wanted a different place to stay and the home of my youth enticed me.  I figured my daughter and her children would soon need to stay with us, and the place I was living at was too small for that.  I proposed to my siblings that we move into mom's bigger house.  We would buy out our sibling's share of the home if they agreed to carry the loan.  My proposal was based on the best guesstimate of the value of the home.  We had a meeting.  I came prepared with a proposal.  I recall that we were all in agreement, but no records were kept and no vote was actually taken.  I think one sibling wanted to sell the place for reason's of her own that I would discover much later, but the others were still wanting to hold on to the place, especially since the real estate market was going downhill fast.  I EXPECTED we would have an actual vote and execute a contract, but that is not what happened.  No one wanted to seem to be the distrusting one, so we just did it on a handshake, so to speak.


Now it is many years later.  No contract was ever executed.  I never got a title. I THOUGHT my wife was paying my siblings what I was calling "rent" each month.  Evidently she did not understand completely and did not pay them as we THOUGHT we agreed.  But no one said anything. Ever.  In a couple of years, the executor of the estate had a stroke and stopped keeping any records whatsoever.  I think one sibling actually kept a record of the proposal, but everyone but me evidently THOUGHT we had agreed and a contract was actually executed.  It never was.  Everybody just went back home thinking they understood what we just did.

Years later I am much older and cannot even remember the price I concluded the house was worth.  I can't even find the proposal I made with the home values.  I thought my wife was paying each of the siblings every month and apparently she was not.  No one said anything at all, and I went on blissfully unaware for years,  and now the claim is I owe them so much that I can't possibly come up with it.  But I never even had title to the house.

No records exist of the deal that was made between us all, and we cannot even remember the details of the agreement.  Real estate values are finally back up now, and some of the siblings are in trouble financially.  They want, and deserve, their fair share of what my parents left.

I evidently did not figure well enough on the expenses and time in maintaining an older home on two acres.  Since there was no little amount of confusion as to whom actually owned the house, property taxes went unpaid for a number of years.  My daughter and her children did have to move in with us, but it did not work out as I thought.  I want to do the right thing by my siblings, but I don't think we can agree on any figure because we all "remember" what actually transpired so differently.  How do you do what is right if you cannot even remember what it was?

Have I learned anything?  Yes!  At the risk of SEEMING to be the "doubter" and having less trust for your siblings than the others, it is necessary to do everything right up front.  One can afford to be magnanimous later.  One cannot keep from making mistakes, but at least you will have a record of what you did and why you did it so that when one tries to rectify past mistakes at least one can agree on what actually took place.