Saving for the future often comes with specific hopes and dreams, but sometimes those dreams don’t align with reality.
So, what would you do if you had set money aside for your grandchildren but your daughter decided not to have kids?
Would you give the money to your daughter anyway?
Or would you repurpose it?
In the following story, a father deals with this exact situation.
Here’s how it went down.
I (58M) and my wife (59F) have only one daughter (30F).
We always wished we could have had more kids, but due to medical complications that I won’t go into, we only had our girl.
Because of that we’ve always dreamed of being grandparents, so we made long-term investments that paid off, and now we have almost $350K saved up to help raise our future grandkids and cover their college expenses.
I want to make it clear that we never pressured our daughter to have children in any way.
She simply knows that the money is there and what it’s intended for.
I’ll explain why this is relevant later on.
The daughter decided not to have kids and then made sure she couldn’t.
The thing is, our daughter recently made the decision not to have kids.
She told us a few months ago and even had a tubal ligation soon after.
We were both a bit shocked and asked if she was sure, but we also reassured her that we’d always be there for her.
I won’t lie. I’m really disappointed, but not in our daughter.
It’s her life, and it’s not our place to impose anything on her.
My disappointment stems from the fact that I won’t have grandkids.
However, if this is what makes her happy, I have no right to say anything about it.
Last week, we had a lunch at our house with our daughter, and she brought up the topic of the money we had saved for our future grandkids.
We simply told her that we will make use of it differently now.
For example, I’ll be able to work fewer hours before retirement, and we plan to use the money for travel.
Here’s where the daughter lost it.
At that moment, our daughter’s expression changed, and she fell silent.
When my wife asked if she was okay, she suddenly exploded, accusing us of punishing her for not having kids and taking away the money that she would have used if she had children.
The situation became really tense, and she stormed out after the argument.
Now, she’s not speaking to us and has posted about it on social media.
We’ve also received some unpleasant messages from our daughter’s friends, expressing their disapproval of our actions.
Let me be clear: we haven’t disowned her.
She will still receive whatever money or properties we have when we pass away.
However, we saved that money specifically to support our future grandkids, and now that we know we won’t have any, we decided to use it for our own purposes.
Is that wrong?
AITA?
It’s easy to see both sides of this, but the money did have a specific purpose.
Let’s see what advice the folks over at Reddit had to offer him.
It probably wasn’t their intention.
Exactly, the money was never going to her.
This person thinks the daughter should show some respect to her parents.
Here’s someone who understands the daughter’s decision but would never treat her parents like that.
It’s their money to spend how they want.
Since they won’t have grandkids to fill their time, they’ll use it to travel instead – there’s nothing wrong with that.
If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.
