My son closed on the sale of our house today!! He is over the moon, filled with gratitude for not only me and DH, but his grandmother, who, in 1994, so generously gave us her inheritance from her mother's passing as a down payment for the house that we had rented for 9 years prior.
She held the mortgage, because we were in the crapper in those days. In 2004, DH and I finally found well-paying careers and we got our own mortgage and she transferred the deed. In 2019, my son moved in, after I told him we would probably have to rent the house out and live permanently in VT because of DH's health issues. I told him he had until 2022 to s**t or get off the pot.
He expressed his desire to buy the house in the fall of 2021. It has taken a long time for him to realize it for various reasons, but finally, fait accompli!!
I think about sacrifices families make for one another, and I think about my mother-in-law who constantly gave us her life energy in many ways--money being just one. She was a clerk in Macy's for most of her life, and lived very frugally (bringing her own tea bags to restaurants and asking for hot water is one example). But I have a thick wad of cancelled checks written over the years for things that we needed or things she wanted to give us, which I rescued from the pile of documents that BIL was going to shred after she died. I keep them in my great-aunt's desk, as a reminder of the generosity of my elders and a model to strive for with my own children and grandchildren.
I feel very lucky today. Yeah, we could have probably gotten $50k+ more for the house if we had sold it recently on the open market, but, hey, it's only money.
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Originally Posted by iris lilies
