Locking it away until she is 24

steampowered wrote: »

The above poster's analysis assumes that the money was given to the daughters.

No, it is based on the information provided by the OP that it was given to him (for his daughters) and he then gave it to his daughters:

malcolmalisle wrote: »

As the money is not mine I put it into savings accounts previously setup for my children which are looked after by my wife.

steampowered wrote: »

I'm not sure that is the case. It sounds like the money was given to the father, on the understanding that it would be given to the daughters when they hit 24. That's not necessarily a trust.

As xylophone says, there was a bare trust created when the money was given to the father.

A trust also exists in the children's savings accounts.

steampowered wrote: »

If the account is in your or your wife's name Op, I would simply keep it there.

It isn't. The money is in accounts that are in the children's names, with the mother acting as a trustee.

steampowered wrote: »

If the account is in your daughter's names, they will be able to access it when they hit 18. In which case I would have a conversation with them about your sister's wishes.

This is the situation.

ValiantSon wrote: »

No, you are wrong about this. The daughter is the beneficial owner. There is no way that you can prove the "administrative error".

I don't need to prove anything as I wasn't there and neither were you. I merely made some comments that depart from the standard advice given to people on the forum.

The sister's verbal instructions are irrelevant as the OP chose to pay the money into a savings account in his daughter's name.

So, it seems OP made some sort of a mistake, which is between him and his family and not you or me.

The wife controls the account as a trustee. Trustees are required to act in the best interests of the beneficial owner. [STRIKE]Stealing [/STRIKE] Putting the money in an account in somebody else's name is not acting in their best interests.

If the dad accidentally paid his money into the wrong account due to a misunderstanding, as is my contention (in assisting the dad with a way out of his predicament), then it is in the best interests of the beneficiary of the account to just give it back and prevent further hassle. If I had money in my account that wasn't supposed to be there, I'd give it back to mitigate ongoing problems, rather than obstinately keep it. It's in my best interests in terms of hassle down the road.

You are changing your argument. I said nothing about whether or not they could ask the daughter not to touch the money. What they cannot do is take the money away from the daughter. She has absolute right to that money.

Practically, they can do what they want. If they put a toy in her toybox marked "daughters toys", they can still take it out.

They have put it in the account that belongs to the daughter, due to a mistake. The mother and father didn't intend it to be given to the daughter and for it to be vested in her with absolute entitlement from a young age. At least, according to the father, who is seeking to deny access to the daughter due to what the original intention was.

I'm glad that you aren't my parent if you would throw me out of home because I didn't want to hand over £10,000 of my money to your tender care!

Well, I'm glad that you aren't my daughter if you would seeek to spend, and deny the return of, some money provided by a relative that you know very well wasn't actually intended by anyone to be accessible by or controllable by you before you turned 24

Wrong again. The aunt had every opportunity to set up a trust that would have allowed her to restrict access until the OP's daughter attained 24 years of age. She didn't take this action, and instead gtave the money to her brother

As I said, the aunt doesn't control it.

It may be a mistake by the father (although really the mistake lies with the aunt by not taking more care), but that is now irrelevant.

From a practical perspective, the father making a mistake is not 'irrelevant' to what can happen in the future, given the father or wife controls the account and can rectify the said mistake

And no, the wife couldn't take the money out of the account and put it into her own as that would be theft. Do you have other people's money "resting" in your account?

Actually I do, but that is neither here nor there.

If I, being of sound mind, give someone some money and tell them it is to be used in a certain way, I have no legal rights over that money any longer and they can use it howver they wish. I cannot, at a later date, say that they must return the money to me because they didn't use it the way I wanted them to. It was a gift and in such you lose all existing rights over the money.

They might not at present use it however they wish because they may not even have signatory authority over the account until they are 18. Seems quite easy to reverse the error.

If you of legally "sound mind" but not thinking clearly, put some cash in your daughter's bank account and then later realise that you didn't intend to do that until she was much older, then in order to score points for being right on the internet you might like to think that in some legal way it is gone forever and she will keep it without you having any remedy for the situation in which you find yourself. But in the real world, it isn't, especially as she doesn't even have legal capacity to control the money anyway. Just let her sue you if she has read on MSE that you've committed a heinous fraud upon her. She won't, because she would realise she is being silly.

It doesn't matter how many times you say it, this is still irrelevant.

You seem to have taken my posts from 9.24 and 9.38 and broken them up into twenty separate extracts in order to attack each one with basically the same argument. As you already provided your comments on the matter at 7pm and have not added much in the way of new reasoning since then, I don't see that twenty separate replies from you really enhances the debate, especially if you are going to say that the facts don't change no "matter how many times you say something".

:rotfl: You really are a sore loser aren't you!

On 18th April, aj23 asked if anyone had received their bonus yet: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?p=74209249#1

On the same day you replied that you would eat your hat if anyone had received the bonus: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?p=74209249#3

The clear implication of your post was that nobody could expect to receive the bonus anytime soon, and certainly not before May. You are now trying to weasel out of it.

I know you will write another inordinately long post to argue against this, so don't bother. Have it your way.

I'm loath to comment as this will not be of interest to the OP of this thread here, but from those quotes it seems we are agreed that in response to a post on 18 April about whether anyone had received their LISA bonus from Skipton by then, I certainly did indeed agree to eat my proverbial hat if they had. In the end, nobody reported receiving their Skipton LISA bonus until 25 April, one full week later, so no hat-eating was required.

I realise you can't bear other people being right and you not be, as we've seen on other threads; so when I point out that I had been entirely correct on that point, it's not surprising that you tried to deflect and say that I am trying to weasel out of my position, and that I will write an inordinately long post to argue it, to make it seem like a post defending that position is wrong just because of length. Yet, I am not trying to weasel out of anything. I maintain the accurate position I held in relation to Skipton LISA bonuses, it was a correct position to take, and these two paragraphs aren't an 'inordinately' long way of telling you that.

I've bolded the salient points for you. The money does not belong to the aunt and she surrendered all rights over it the day she gave it away.

Well, please don't feel you need to bold things for me. We're all agreed the aunt gave the money away

The father then gave it to his children and, likewise, he surrendered all rights over it too.

He put it into their accounts by mistake, not realising at the time that he would frustrate his actual intention to not let them have access it until age 24. Now he has realised the mistake, perhaps he will conspire with his wife to fix the mistake, with no practical consequence because the teenage daughter isn't going to sue. Alternatively he may just educate the daughter not to drain the account before age 24.

You would lose the case in court. The money is the property of the daughters. That really is the end of it.

I would not be taking the case to court. Out of court settlements are way more practical. Presuming the father has the balls to go through with it, the daughter would cave - as she holds few cards, despite being beneficiary to the account that currently holds the money.

Your suggestions encouraged the OP and his wife to engage in a conspiracy to defraud. You meant well, I'm sure, but you were grossly misguided.

I encouraged them to fix their earlier error. Actually the first thing I encouraged them to do - in chronological order, in my first post - was my option (1), instruct the daughter not to spend the money until age 24. If that is unlikely to work, look at other options, option (2) or beyond.

ValiantSon wrote: »

The account is held in trust. You claim to know what a bare trust is, but you don't seem to understand the legal responsibilities of a trustee.

I do understand them, but thanks

You claim that the money shouldn't be there, but there is no evidence to prove this. The money was given to the daughters by the father. That makes it their property. If the aunt wanted otherwise then she had the option of creating a discretionary trust. She didn't do so.

This seems quite repetitious. In your 7pm post you mentioned "If the aunt had wished to set up such an arrangement she should have created a discretionary trust." Then in your 10:05 post you said "The aunt had every opportunity to set up a trust that would have allowed her to restrict access until the OP's daughter attained 24 years of age. She didn't take this action". Then, despite there being no posts from anyone else between your 10:05 post and your 10:19 posts, you are telling us again at 10:19 that the aunt had the option of creating a discretionary trust and she didn't do so. Do you just like hearing your own voice? I thought you had passed comment earlier about "it doesn't matter how many times you say it..."

For the avoidance of doubt, yes we know that the aunt didn't create a discretionary trust.

There has not been an error where an individual or company mistakenly paid the money into the wrong account. The father paid the money, knowingly (as he admits in his post) into the account of his daughter.

He now realises it to be a mistake as the money isn't his because it's not residing in his account but his daughter's, and the intention was for him to only let his daughter access it at 24, which is not the case, due to him giving it to her, by mistake -a lack of understanding of banking and trust law. So, you can call that what you like but some would call it "an error where an individual paid the money into the wrong account", even if there's more to it than that

What utter nonsense. She did not "accidentally" deposit it in in the daughter's account! Here is what the OP said:

Well, however he worded it, he didn't mean for it to be placed into an account that his daughter had absolute entitlement to at an age earlier than 24. We can tell that by the way he has pulled together his senses and is looking for guidance on how to make sure his daughter doesn't access it before 24. While he sees it as money which will belong to his daughters, he doesn't actually want that to happen so it was a mistake to give it to them earlier than the age at which he should have given it to them.

:wall: No it couldn't! It is the children's money and the parents have no rights over it. The mother is a trustee and must exercise her duties as trustee accordingly.

She must act in her daughter's best interests, and could consult with the daughter on that and explain why it was an error to put the father's money in that account when the father didn't really want her to get access until later. The daughter may quite reasonably come round to the idea that it might be in the daughter's best interests to give up beneficial ownership of the £10k (the gift made by the father in error) in order to receive £10k plus interest or investment returns later and still be in the family will, receive financial and emotional support etc between age 18-24 etc etc

I'm starting to worry about your attitude to the law.

Oops. The last thing I would want is an anonymous stranger on the internet being concerned for my attitude to the law.

It is illegal, and that is my point (one you seem to be having a hard time understanding).

You are trying to argue against something that I never wrote. What you propose is illegal, so cut it with what you believe is such a clever piece of argument.

You said it was not about morality but the law. The interpretation of law is what will be determined in a court, and may be cut n dried ; yet the court will only get a chance to do that if someone takes it to court and does not give up or settle before that point in order to keep up the family relationships and other support that goes with that.

So really it's the morality or relationship / touchy feely stuff that rules situations like this and when you have access to funds which you got for free from a trusting family member (aunt or father) that explicitly did not intend for you to get access to them until some other later point in time -wherever the cash currently happens to be sitting - you will probably freely give the money back without feeling you have been defrauded and being minded to sue.

At no point have I said that the parents shouldn't have a discussion with their daughter about this money and her aunt's wishes,

So you agreed with my common sense option (1) in my original post but couldn't resist trying to assert the moral high ground on the other practical options. The law is the law, however history is written by the victors so if the father takes back the money (which the daughter might not even know exists anyway) to correct the error he made in the past, and then writes it into discretionary trust for her, or simply gifts it later, he will probably get away with it.

but they may not make the decision for her.

They may not take her money, and when they drive her over to see her favourite generous aunty they may not drive over 70mph on the motorway or at 31mph in a 30 zone, which is also against the law...

If they do either of those things, they will probably get away with it quite amicably.