son has my savings

London7766551

Yorkshire_Pud said:

London7766551 said:

ZeroSum said:

London7766551 said:

ZeroSum said:

London7766551 said:

ZeroSum said:

London7766551 said:

What's with all the condemnation of the OP's decision? It is fairly common for parents to trust their children.

In the past I have been given chunks of money (more than the OP gave) to look after. My parents trust me with their accounts. Sure I have the "power" to take all of the money and do a runner, but this is my parents money and why would I do such a thing? although I am sure it does occur. Most people have a good trusting relationship with their parents. 

Personally if I had children i'd like to think I could give them money to look after as an adult. It is fairly common as I say and if the relationship is good and normal it should be acceptable. In addition my late grandmother gave my mother rights to her account and total control of her life savings, in the event she became incapable of looking after herself, and 10 years later it happened. As I say this happens all the time, the OP was not wrong to do it assuming the relationship was very good prior to now.

To the OP, I would try to talk to your son again and apologise to his child. He is worked up but hopefully will see sense. 

Why?
The only reason really is the aforementioned benefit fraud.

Is it that common? I've never heard of it. As what you're talking about is completely different to power of attorney on an elderly relatives own bank accounts. 

Fraud? I don't see how it would be of benefit to hand over money to someone else. If they can see you have money, they can also see that you have sent the money somewhere else surely. 

Some relatives cannot handle money. ie if they have it they burn it. So they give it to someone else to keep hold of it. I admit it requires trust!

Well it is very common in my neck of the woods. I'd be very sad as a parent (I am not) to have such mistrust over my children.

If you have savings over £16k then you lose benefits. So yes, fraud.

Also if you've managed to accumulate that sort of sums, then you ain't the sort of person who money burns a hole in their pocket. 
I know those sort of people exist, and the handing over of cash to look after is no more than £100 a month just to make Xmas easier. 

I can't see how many people would commit fraud in such a way. The numbers must be very low. Lots of people only touch benefits as a last resort. They will rather burn their savings.
It would be more a case of someone being made redundant, or having some sort of win.

Of course it will be low, as people on benefits don't generally have that sort of money. 
But youre still skirting around the reason for handing over large sums of cash to someone else. There's no reason to do it. The only reasons you've given for handing over cash in general are for people who wouldnt have that sort of money in the first place. 

Redundancy, you'd need that money to live on, so wouldnt hand it over if your claim about burning through savings is true. 
Winnings, potentially comes back to benefit fraud 

People on these forums really are condescending and judgemental. I have already cited an example of my own parents giving me money to look after. It's perfectly sound if you come into some winnings or draw on early retirement funds (before retirement) to keep a chunk of the money. In my fathers case he received around 20k from retirement funds (part of his pension), he used some of this, but being someone who has vast debts he gave me the money to look after simply because he cannot handle money. If he has the power to spend it, he would have. So I kept it in my account until he really needed it. Currently he plans to use it to purchase a van but is not ready to do so yet, so I will keep the money until then. If the money was in his account, he would spend it over time and it would be gone. Should he pay off some of his debt, yes I would agree but he doesn't want to and I am not going to try to tell him how to spend the money. I would ask people on here to have more of an open mind in these matters.

Couldn’t your father use the pension lump sum to pay off some of his ‘vast debts’ as you describe instead of giving the money to you for safe keeping. Might count as a lifetime gift in HMRCs eyes.

As I said, I would agree he should pay some of the debt but he chooses not to and pays off small amounts as he sees fit. I don't know about the HMRC stuff.

uk1

People post here seeking help not unfounded speculation and attacks about their honesty.  People that indulge themselves in this bile should control themselves and reflect on their own imperfections. 

ZeroSum

London7766551 said:

ZeroSum said:

London7766551 said:

ZeroSum said:

London7766551 said:

ZeroSum said:

London7766551 said:

What's with all the condemnation of the OP's decision? It is fairly common for parents to trust their children.

In the past I have been given chunks of money (more than the OP gave) to look after. My parents trust me with their accounts. Sure I have the "power" to take all of the money and do a runner, but this is my parents money and why would I do such a thing? although I am sure it does occur. Most people have a good trusting relationship with their parents. 

Personally if I had children i'd like to think I could give them money to look after as an adult. It is fairly common as I say and if the relationship is good and normal it should be acceptable. In addition my late grandmother gave my mother rights to her account and total control of her life savings, in the event she became incapable of looking after herself, and 10 years later it happened. As I say this happens all the time, the OP was not wrong to do it assuming the relationship was very good prior to now.

To the OP, I would try to talk to your son again and apologise to his child. He is worked up but hopefully will see sense. 

Why?
The only reason really is the aforementioned benefit fraud.

Is it that common? I've never heard of it. As what you're talking about is completely different to power of attorney on an elderly relatives own bank accounts. 

Fraud? I don't see how it would be of benefit to hand over money to someone else. If they can see you have money, they can also see that you have sent the money somewhere else surely. 

Some relatives cannot handle money. ie if they have it they burn it. So they give it to someone else to keep hold of it. I admit it requires trust!

Well it is very common in my neck of the woods. I'd be very sad as a parent (I am not) to have such mistrust over my children.

If you have savings over £16k then you lose benefits. So yes, fraud.

Also if you've managed to accumulate that sort of sums, then you ain't the sort of person who money burns a hole in their pocket. 
I know those sort of people exist, and the handing over of cash to look after is no more than £100 a month just to make Xmas easier. 

I can't see how many people would commit fraud in such a way. The numbers must be very low. Lots of people only touch benefits as a last resort. They will rather burn their savings.
It would be more a case of someone being made redundant, or having some sort of win.

Of course it will be low, as people on benefits don't generally have that sort of money. 
But youre still skirting around the reason for handing over large sums of cash to someone else. There's no reason to do it. The only reasons you've given for handing over cash in general are for people who wouldnt have that sort of money in the first place. 

Redundancy, you'd need that money to live on, so wouldnt hand it over if your claim about burning through savings is true. 
Winnings, potentially comes back to benefit fraud 

People on these forums really are condescending and judgemental. I have already cited an example of my own parents giving me money to look after. It's perfectly sound if you come into some winnings or draw on early retirement funds (before retirement) to keep a chunk of the money. In my fathers case he received around 20k from retirement funds (part of his pension), he used some of this, but being someone who has vast debts he gave me the money to look after simply because he cannot handle money. If he has the power to spend it, he would have. So I kept it in my account until he really needed it. Currently he plans to use it to purchase a van but is not ready to do so yet, so I will keep the money until then. If the money was in his account, he would spend it over time and it would be gone. Should he pay off some of his debt, yes I would agree but he doesn't want to and I am not going to try to tell him how to spend the money. I would ask people on here to have more of an open mind in these matters.

Sorry but that sounds somewhat fishy, even more so with the not pay off debt then hiding the cash. 

masonic

This thread quickly moved on from the specific situation described in the opening post to a more general discussion about the pros and cons of giving money to others to look after, and possible reasons for doing so. So in the spirit of not jumping to conclusions or engaging in unfounded speculation and attacks, it would be charitable to consider the possibility that some of the comments were made in a general context and were not levelled at the OP specifically.

There are a few reasons why someone might give money to another to look after, for example if the recipient has access to savings product the giver does not, or simply that they do not have an appreciation of the risks and/or they are not familiar with other options that afford them better protection, such as joint accounts, power of attorney etc, or do not wish to go through the hassle of setting up such arrangements. An individual might be unable to open a new account in their name due to identity theft or fraud issues.

Similarly, there are less laudable reasons beyond the extreme of benefit fraud, such as an individual being in problem debt and not wishing the money to be awarded to their creditors, paying a higher rate of income tax than the recipient, or anticipating a messy divorce.

So, yes, best to keep an open mind.

Money_Grabber13579

masonic said:

Similarly, there are less laudable reasons beyond the extreme of benefit fraud, such as an individual being in problem debt and not wishing the money to be awarded to their creditors, paying a higher rate of income tax than the recipient, or anticipating a messy divorce.

But all of these will require the money to have been gifted rather than lent in order to fulfil the states objective, otherwise the creditor etc will just look for the loan to be repaid and then recover it. And that is exactly the problem the OP has found when trying to recover it, it has (for whatever reason) been treated as a gift and the OP’s son has decided they don’t want to gift it back.

masonic

Money_Grabber13579 said:

masonic said:

Similarly, there are less laudable reasons beyond the extreme of benefit fraud, such as an individual being in problem debt and not wishing the money to be awarded to their creditors, paying a higher rate of income tax than the recipient, or anticipating a messy divorce.

But all of these will require the money to have been gifted rather than lent in order to fulfil the states objective, otherwise the creditor etc will just look for the loan to be repaid and then recover it. And that is exactly the problem the OP has found when trying to recover it, it has (for whatever reason) been treated as a gift and the OP’s son has decided they don’t want to gift it back.

The default position is that money held by an individual belongs to them. However, it could be legally treated as having been lent with just some private correspondence between the lender and borrower, which would not be available to anyone else. So nobody else need know of the arrangement.

If any such correspondence exists then the OP would be in a much better position and could consider legal action to reclaim the money - only then would the evidence enter the official record. It wouldn't take much for it to be treated as a loan, a text message or email at the time the money was transferred stating it is a loan, or a third party being witness to a conversation in which it was agreed it was a loan. Of course, if one was lending the money for nefarious reasons, court action may be unwise and reconciliation could be the only option for recovering the money, which is why the reason the transaction was made does have some relevance in the discussion.

Sailtheworld

Maybe best to start on the benefits board to see what's available - it's not much of a silver lining but now they don't have £16k in savings they might be entitled to more benefits.

uk1

masonic said:

Money_Grabber13579 said:

masonic said:

Similarly, there are less laudable reasons beyond the extreme of benefit fraud, such as an individual being in problem debt and not wishing the money to be awarded to their creditors, paying a higher rate of income tax than the recipient, or anticipating a messy divorce.

But all of these will require the money to have been gifted rather than lent in order to fulfil the states objective, otherwise the creditor etc will just look for the loan to be repaid and then recover it. And that is exactly the problem the OP has found when trying to recover it, it has (for whatever reason) been treated as a gift and the OP’s son has decided they don’t want to gift it back.

The default position is that money held by an individual belongs to them. However, it could be legally treated as having been lent with just some private correspondence between the lender and borrower, which would not be available to anyone else. So nobody else need know of the arrangement.

If any such correspondence exists then the OP would be in a much better position and could consider legal action to reclaim the money - only then would the evidence enter the official record. It wouldn't take much for it to be treated as a loan, a text message or email at the time the money was transferred stating it is a loan, or a third party being witness to a conversation in which it was agreed it was a loan. Of course, if one was lending the money for nefarious reasons, court action may be unwise and reconciliation could be the only option for recovering the money, which is why the reason the transaction was made does have some relevance in the discussion.

It is always better if there is stronger evidence in writing of what actually happened.  Written evidence often simply makes a judges job easier to conclude.  However many wrongly presume that such evidence is absolutely essential and that without it, you cannot win.  It isn' true. The absence of such evidence for example could be argued that it is evidence of the degree of trust that then existed.  Verbal evidence is still very much evidence and judges have considerable experience and questioning skills to establish which version of events they believe is the stronger version.   And that is "not beyond doubt" as in dcriminal law but "on balance" which is a considerably lower test.  Often this is achieved a a few short questions and the judge will not only evaluate the words used but the way in which they were delivered. You will be amazed at how a seemingly innocuous question can be illuminating to a judge.

It is a shame that some posters decided that it was their business to firstly speculate on why the OP did this and once speculated they judged the OP and that it was fraud then degenerated the thread into the general discussion of ethics, the law etc. 

You have said "Of course, if one was lending the money for nefarious reasons, court action may be unwise and reconciliation could be the only option for recovering the money, which is why the reason the transaction was made does have some relevance in the discussion." This isn't true.  In fact it could even work in the OP's favour.  If it went to court a judge would decide whether the cash belonged to the OP or not and the reasons would be irrelavent to this finding.  The judge may believe it was for reasons he/she didn't approve of but that is not the issue in front of the judge and wouldn't effect the finding in any way. In fact if it were for "benefits reasons" for example and the judge asked and the OP admitted this then it would have the ironic impact of being exactly the sort of questions judges ask to establish credibility and proving that the OP's evidence was likely to be reliable because of the apparent self-incriminating admission.    It is a simple question of the court establishing ownership.

When vulnerable people seek help here, then posters should give them the benefit of any doubt and either try to help - or leave the thread alone.  They neither have the facts to judge or the right to judge because all that such behaviour  does is to have the effect of dissauding those that genuinely need help from others asking for it. That would be a shame.  Posters who want to have such discussiosn should start new threads in the right place so that it isn't interpreted as attacking OPs.

masonic

uk1 said:

masonic said:

Money_Grabber13579 said:

masonic said:

Similarly, there are less laudable reasons beyond the extreme of benefit fraud, such as an individual being in problem debt and not wishing the money to be awarded to their creditors, paying a higher rate of income tax than the recipient, or anticipating a messy divorce.

But all of these will require the money to have been gifted rather than lent in order to fulfil the states objective, otherwise the creditor etc will just look for the loan to be repaid and then recover it. And that is exactly the problem the OP has found when trying to recover it, it has (for whatever reason) been treated as a gift and the OP’s son has decided they don’t want to gift it back.

The default position is that money held by an individual belongs to them. However, it could be legally treated as having been lent with just some private correspondence between the lender and borrower, which would not be available to anyone else. So nobody else need know of the arrangement.

If any such correspondence exists then the OP would be in a much better position and could consider legal action to reclaim the money - only then would the evidence enter the official record. It wouldn't take much for it to be treated as a loan, a text message or email at the time the money was transferred stating it is a loan, or a third party being witness to a conversation in which it was agreed it was a loan. Of course, if one was lending the money for nefarious reasons, court action may be unwise and reconciliation could be the only option for recovering the money, which is why the reason the transaction was made does have some relevance in the discussion.

It is always better if there is stronger evidence in writing of what actually happened.  Written evidence often simply makes a judges job easier to conclude.  However many wrongly presume that such evidence is absolutely essential and that without it, you cannot win.  It isn' true. The absence of such evidence for example could be argued that it is evidence of the degree of trust that then existed.  Verbal evidence is still very much evidence and judges have considerable experience and questioning skills to establish which version of events they believe is the stronger version.   And that is "not beyond doubt" as in dcriminal law but "on balance" which is a considerably lower test.  Often this is achieved a a few short questions and the judge will not only evaluate the words used but the way in which they were delivered. You will be amazed at how a seemingly innocuous question can be illuminating to a judge.

I did mention that evidence could be a witness to a conversation in which it was agreed it was a loan. I'd be surprised if it came down to a simple case of her word against his, that a judge would be able to rule that on balance the transfer was more likely to be a loan than a gift, but I don't have any personal experience of such court cases and you could be right, especially if the son lacked credibility.

uk1 said:

It is a shame that some posters decided that it was their business to firstly speculate on why the OP did this and once speculated they judged the OP and that it was fraud then degenerated the thread into the general discussion of ethics, the law etc. 

Yes, though quite predictable that such a thread should descend into a slanging match with much moralising about others conduct. Countless others have gone the same way and I'm sure this one won't be the last.

uk1 said:

You have said "Of course, if one was lending the money for nefarious reasons, court action may be unwise and reconciliation could be the only option for recovering the money, which is why the reason the transaction was made does have some relevance in the discussion." This isn't true.  In fact it could even work in the OP's favour.  If it went to court a judge would decide whether the cash belonged to the OP or not and the reasons would be irrelavent to this finding.  The judge may believe it was for reasons he/she didn't approve of but that is not the issue in front of the judge and wouldn't effect the finding in any way. In fact if it were for "benefits reasons" for example and the judge asked and the OP admitted this then it would have the ironic impact of being exactly the sort of questions judges ask to establish credibility and proving that the OP's evidence was likely to be reliable because of the apparent self-incriminating admission.    It is a simple question of the court establishing ownership.

Yes, I didn't mean to imply it would always be the case that legal action would be unwise (hence "may be" and "could"). There are certainly circumstances where the converse could be true, such as if "deprivation of assets" should rear its ugly head, a CCJ against the son would settle any doubt the money was given away.

uk1 said:

When vulnerable people seek help here, then posters should give them the benefit of any doubt and either try to help - or leave the thread alone.  They neither have the facts to judge or the right to judge because all that such behaviour  does is to have the effect of dissauding those that genuinely need help from others asking for it. That would be a shame.  Posters who want to have such discussiosn should start new threads in the right place so that it isn't interpreted as attacking OPs.

People will tend to add to a discussion that already exists (and won't want to respond to a post made in a different thread), so this may not be a realistic expectation, and you are unlikely to get universal agreement on where to draw the line. I do see your point about some of the later discussion being off-putting and that's unfortunate. Some forums are much more rigorously moderated than this one, and a thread like this could conceivably be split into two with a bit of duplication for context. Though there is a danger that such action could lead to useful information for the OP that has come about through the more general discussion being moved (your comments on the legal process being a good example).

Anyway, we're in danger of doing the very thing you don't want us to do, so perhaps we should leave it there.

Sailtheworld

uk1 said:

Bella2016 said:

back in 2916 I put 16000 in my sons bank account for him to keep for me so I didn’t use it as I wanted it for my retirement then we had a argument over my grandson in November 2019 and in March I asked my son in a text message to transfer my savings as due to the locked down coming I needed to use some of it and he messaged me back saying what money I haven’t got your money I said the 16000 I have for later in my life he denied having it then I said do your not giving it back to me 
then a few weeks after that he said it’s not my money it’s rent money that I saved for him over 5 years where he didn’t even pay that amount in rent over that time and I’m a single parent and a carer to my daughter who has special needs so why would I do this and why would I give all my savings to one of my kids and not the other 2 since then I’ve had a solicitor letter from him saying I’m lying about it’s my saving so I e gone to CBA and the lady was so lovely she helped me with a letter to his solicitor as I have mental health issues I was in hospital last year which my son knows this this is killing me how he can do this to his own mother and to the point I have so many debts I need to pay I’m sitting here with a smashed phone screen my glasses are broken with only one arm in them while my so called son sits with all my life saving doing his house up with his new girlfriend I’m heartbroken 

Sympathies.

You need to get the advice of a solicitor.  Ask the CAB if they can recommend a sympathetic one. Can one of your other children give you support?

There appears to be no dispute that he had the cash only your intentions in giving it to him.  If this goes to court it will be a matter of whose version of events the judge believes.  If you have any texts or letters either between you and him or to others about this cash it will help you.  Do not believe that you need to prove your intentions to a level of 100% certainty and that having little written evidence means your situation is impossible.  Judges are good at testing the honesty and credibility of witnesses by asking penetrating questions. If on balance the judge believes your version is the more likely then you should win.  However before you start you need to be certain that if you win then there are assets or cash that can be used to pay you back. 

Genuine sympathies and good luck.  Do post progress here and as any questions you have. 

This is quite poor advice. The OP's motive for handing the money to the son matters. If it was to defraud the benefits system the last thing they need a judge who is good at testing the honesty and credibility of witnesses by asking penetrating questions. Sure, a judge might conclude they did intend to defraud the taxpayer and it wasn't a gift - mother & son leave the court as confirmed liars.

In the first instance they'd be better off doing what most people would do in this situation. Talking to their son and  trying to reconcile the difference of opinion between what the money was for. Perhaps using the threat of a small claim might help. £16k is too much to use the free mediation service.

The likelihood is that the money has gone forever and there's no point giving the OP false hope of recovery.