My mother-in-law stole $25,000 from my husband’s emergency fund. We donated to charity rather than give her a birthday gift — and she cried foul.
Dear Quentin,
Shortly after my husband and I got married, he discovered that his mother was using power of attorney to withdraw thousands of dollars at a time from one of his bank accounts. I took $25,000. As his agent, she had access to his emergency fund. The bank helped him transfer the remaining funds, and asked him in writing to cancel the power of attorney.
He also sent the cancellation to his other financial institutions. He was unable to close the bank account because his stepfather’s name was on the account, which was his mother’s idea. Interestingly, she withdrew $25,000 by illegally using power of attorney when her husband could have withdrawn it legally since his name was on the account.
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A few weeks later, she reminded him of her upcoming birthday and wedding anniversary. He wasn’t going to send an expensive gift after she received $25,000, so instead he sent a card and made a donation to a charity. She replied that donating is appropriate when someone asks you to do so, and that she prefers gifts.
Justification for stealing it
When she stopped working years ago, she was taking care of her father, who contributed to her household expenses, and after his death she received an inheritance from him, which she used to go on to Italy and a cruise in Alaska and Ireland. (There were no trips to see her son, even though he had been traveling to visit her all these years.) That money has run out.
They put their house up for sale last April, and it is still listed. I think she justified the theft by thinking of it as borrowing from her son who owed her for raising him (she talks about how much she spent on him when he got older and uses that as a reason why he owes her all the time), and she probably thought she was going to pay him back when she sold the house.
There is still the open account problem. We can’t close it because his stepdad’s name is on it, and he feels like he needs to constantly check his accounts in case they somehow come in and make withdrawals. Someone suggested a credit freeze, but a friend recommended against it. Is there anything else you recommend we do to protect ourselves in the future?
Happily married
Dear happily married,
Dial “M” for your mother-in-law.
Ireland is a beautiful place to visit, but as an Irishman, I’m obviously biased. It was the only good decision your mother-in-law made. The rest leaves a lot to be desired, including her belief that she should receive a gift Instead of donating. One woman’s life-threatening emergency is another woman’s trip to the hairdresser. The boundaries were blurred from the beginning.
The power of attorney has a fiduciary responsibility to put the donor’s interests above all else. Your husband can give his mother another gift for her birthday – a lawsuit. He could sue her for abuse of her role As a power of attorney. Fair warning: This can be expensive and timely, and since she was a co-owner (assuming she wasn’t just a co-signer) it could complicate things.
It’s time to redraw and enforce some boundaries. Your husband must ask his stepfather to close the account, and if he refuses, he must delete his name from the account. This should be relatively straightforward with most banks, as long as there are no outstanding debts. This will also help prevent your mother-in-law and her partner from accumulating debts in your husband’s name.
Usually the opposite happens: younger relatives exploit older relatives. I have received many letters about financial elder abuse, particularly regarding adult children beating their parents for money or stealing from their parents’ bank accounts by convincing them to add their names as co-signers (so they inherit the bank account after the parent dies).
I remember the case of Axton Betz Hamilton, who discovered this The woman she trusted most was stealing her identity: her mother. She got a copy of her credit report when she was 19; It was filled with fraudulent credit card entries and credit collection agencies. Axton won an award for her work on identity theft, and her mother even attended the ceremony.
There are ways to set ground rules moving forward in a relationship: “What happened to the $25,000 in the bank account?” (You may obfuscate and claim ignorance.) Questions can be more powerful than explanations. In the end, your husband is just telling her that he knows what she did, he is not looking for explanations or justifications.
But acting as if nothing has happened sets a bad precedent.
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