Fair tenancy in common agreement with mother?

[Yika]

I have just bought a house with my recently retired mother, to enable her to buy a decent-sized place with a garden and space for family to stay. The house is exclusively for her. I live abroad and don't actually yet own a place myself though would like to buy soon.

I have put in 30%, she's put in 70%. We will hold the property as tenants in common. Rather foolishly we have left drawing up the trust deed till after the purchase, and are trying to work out how best to do it now, so that it is fair to both. We now somewhat disagree as we didn't have anything clear in advance and now it's all 'well you gave me the impression that' and 'what I really meant was'... sigh

Anyway I would appreciate your views on what would be a fair solution.

So, so far our solicitor has proposed 2 draft deeds.

Deed 1 says we own the house 70-30, full stop.

Deed 2 says we own it 70-30, but my mother will have sole right of occupancy and will also be responsible for all major property expenses/renovation, which she will recover on sale before we split the remainder 70-30.

Either of these would be fine with me, except that my mum doesn't actually want to follow the second one in practice - she expects me to contribute more money to renovation/improvement works. I don't want to - I've put in a lot of money already, and want to keep the rest of what I have for my own needs. On the other hand, I accept that I may have given this impression in earlier conversations - at some point I said I would go up to 80k total investment. I've now put in 75k so I can accept putting in the extra 5 - but don't want to spend any more.

How best to reflect this in the deed?

I am afraid of ending up on bad terms over this. We don't share the same view of what the arrangement represents. She sees it as a good investment for me, and seems to think I have the same interest in doing it up as she does - even though I will never live there. I see it more as a favour to her - parking my money in a kind of long-term loan with no capital guarantee - so that she can live well. There's also a considerable cost to me in that my own purchasing power is constrained when I come to buy my own place, whereas - as I see it - most of the benefit of the arrangement accrues to her.

Would it be better to reflect this in the deed, so that instead of splitting it into percentage shares, I simply ask for a fixed amount back on sale? e.g. original amount plus small percentage? Would this make the ownership/responsibility issue clearer?

[azazello]

You poor thing, sounds a very difficult situation. I've also bought a property with my parents and we now own it 50/50. Before we bought 50%, DH and I were funding improvement works etc on the basis that if the house were sold, we would be repaid our actual expenditure plus an amount to be calculated in accordance with the house prices index (We were going to use RICS) to work out how much the value had increased by overall.

This sounds very like your option 3 and sounds much clearer, especially if you cannot put in more money.

[Yika]

Thanks, that's a good suggestion. I think it gets too complicated if you keep having to split costs as you go along (when one party doesn't actually live there).

I know I should really have insisted on having this sorted out beforehand ...