Money & Inheritance·
PROMISED CAR, BROKEN FAMILY
A daughter fights for a promised car fund from a dead father as sisters justify keeping the estate, driving a rift that stretches across the family.
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Her dad died, and now a promise he made about a car has split the family wide open.
The woman at the center of it says she and her sisters are due to receive money from their father's estate after his death. But alongside the grief came a detail she could not shake: years earlier, her dad had promised her a financial gift toward a car, the same kind of help he had already given to her sisters.
She laid out the backstory in a post: her younger sister, now 27, had received money from their dad last year for driving lessons and a car. The poster says she had been told she would get the same amount toward a car when she bought one. That promise, she says, was made before life got in the way.
When she was 17, her older sister had already been given a car and driving lessons. But five years later, when the poster turned 17, the family's finances had changed. There was no money for the same arrangement, so she never learned to drive.
Instead, she went to university, moved abroad, returned to the UK, and spent years in a big city where public transport made driving less urgent. Only now, as she gets older, does she want to learn, "for when I have kids - hopefully in the next 5 years," she wrote.
So after her father died, she asked her mother about that long-promised money. Her mum told her to bring it up with her sisters, since both of them had already received financial help from their dad with buying a car, while she had not, because she had not started learning to drive.
That conversation did not go well.
When she raised the issue with her sisters and asked to receive that amount from the estate, they pushed back hard. They told her it was not their fault that their dad died before she started learning to drive, and that she had no claim to money she had been promised.
The poster argued that it was unfair, since both of her sisters had already received the money and she had not. Her older sister was especially blunt, saying that because she learned to drive at 17, it was ridiculous to even bring it up.
What followed was a huge argument. The older sister stormed off and called her names, and the poster says the fight has left real rifts in the family.
Now she is left asking the question at the center of the mess: if her father promised her the money, but died before she got it, should it come from his estate? "AITA??" she asked.