AITA for not letting my daughter use her college fund for a wedding or house?

A Redditor finds herself in a difficult position after her daughter, El, learns about the college funds set up for her and her siblings. El, who dropped out of school at 16 and is now struggling financially with her own family, believes she should be able to access her college fund for a down payment on a house or a wedding.

However, the Redditor insists that the money is meant solely for education, prompting an emotional conflict between mother and daughter. As tensions rise and the family faces backlash from El’s fiancé’s relatives, she questions whether she’s in the wrong for setting conditions on the use of the funds. Read the original story below to see how this family navigates the complexities of financial support and parental expectations.

‘ AITA for not letting my daughter use her college fund for a wedding or house?’

Backstory: I (43f) have 4 kids. El (22f) Katie (17f) cam(15m) isla (5f) and I’m also currently pregnant. Me and my husband (50m) started adding to college funds every month for each of our kids pretty much as soon as we found out we were pregnant. I won’t say the exact amount but my husband has an excellent job so it’s more than most.

We never told our kids because it just didn’t feel necessary. El got pregnant when she was 16 and ended up dropping out of school. I was very disappointed but I understood. However I was under the impression she would return later, but she has no plans to. The dad stuck around and now they have 1 more kid (3) and one on the way.

They are engaged but don’t plan to marry until they can afford it. They were doing okay financially for a while but due to the market right now they’ve been struggling because El can’t get a job since she doesn’t have a diploma so we’ve been loaning them money.

Katie is a senior and just got accepted into college, we’ve been setting everything up and obviously she knows about the fund now. Katie and El were talking and she was telling El about the school and El asked how she was planning on paying for it, Katie responded “my college fund” I was in the room while they were talking and this made me panic.

We had just planned on splitting it between the remaining four since we knew they were going to college. El asked me if they all had one and I wasn’t going to lie, so I said yes. She got really excited and went to call her fiance and tell him the good news. I was confused and told her she couldn’t have the money, she asked why and I said it’s for school.

She got upset and left my house. The next day I get a call from El, she was crying and begging me to let her have the funds so she could finally afford a down payment and maybe even a wedding. I told her she could have the money if she went back to school and whatever money was keft over she could use for whatever she wanted.

She got super mad and started yelling at me and saying it’s her money. I told her that it was MY money and those were my conditions and she hung up. Now we are being harassed by her fiances family (they aren’t as fortunate as us) calling us assholes and a lot of other names.

Saying it’s all gonna go to waste if she doesn’t use it, were setting her up for failure, etc.. Now I’m wondering if I’m the a**hole because my dad said we should give her the money as we “saved it for her after all”.. So am I the a**hole?

Here’s the comments of Reddit users:

LoveBeach8 −  NTA. I’m going to be downvoted a million times but hear me out. You put money into a college fund for each kid. The whole purpose was to help with their education. It’s a generous fund and not everyone is able to do that for one kid, let alone 4 plus one on the way.

She made other choices and that’s fine. Just because she was unaware of the college fund doesn’t mean she can just collect it now, after finding out. She was happy with her relationship until she found out, right?

But can you find a compromise to smooth everything over? Say, she gets her GED and 1-2 years in a community college or trade school, graduating with an AA or certification and the rest of the money is hers.

Would that satisfy you and your husband? Plenty of SAHM have put themselves through nursing/dental assistant/hygienist school, for example, with only grants and loans and did it through sheer hard work and determination.

(Her fiancé’s family had absolutely no business sticking their noses into this. I find that appalling and disrespectful. They need to be told to b**t out.) EDIT: I meant dental hygienist or assistant, not dental school. Sorry.

prairieislander −  ESH. Should she feel automatically e**itled to the money? No. But that’s about the only way she’s an AH. There’s a whole flock of reasons you are. You speak dismissively about the committed man who’s stuck by her side through teenage pregnancy, another child and has asked her to marry him.

You speak as if she’s less than because of a mistake she made in high school. You say you’re under the impression she would return later, but she didn’t know about the education fund. So do you think maybe her lack of funding would have influenced her decision to not go back when she had a baby at home? You are also under an assumption that all your remaining children will decide on further education.

That’s a pretty silly assumption. It’s your money. You can do what you want with it. But as a grandmother, you think you’d be happy that your daughter wants to give her children a home and two married parents. Edit: to everyone coming at me, check out a few more of OPs comments. It’s not about money or education. It’s about control.

StAlvis −  INFO. We had just planned on splitting it between the remaining four **since we knew they were going to college**. You **_know_** that your 5yo and *unborn future maybe-kid* are planning to go to college?

FoolMe1nceShameOnU −  **NTA** It is not “her money” – it never was – and it was never a trust fund. It was money set aside to fund an education for her, and you have made it clear that it is still very generously available to her to do exactly that.

Frankly, as a 22-year-old high school drop-out with two children and a third on the way, at this point she should be realising more than ever (if she has matured at all, and based on her and her husbands’ struggles of the last few years) that going back to school and getting an education (or vocational training of some sort – am I incorrect in thinking that you would be willing to pay for vocational school, as long as she is in fact getting an education?) is the best possible thing that she could do for her future and her family’s financial stability.

The fact that she doesn’t see this, that she thinks that you “owe” her something, and perhaps most importantly, that she thinks that money given to her should be spent on a wedding and perhaps a house (which latter she likely couldn’t afford the taxes and upkeep on in the long term given her poor career prospects without even a high school education) tells me that she is still making bad choices . . . only now she’s making them as an adult, with dependents.

You are absolutely NTA, and I think it’s actually important that you stick to your guns, for HER sake. Tell her that the money will continue to be available to her to use for an education, which would help her in the long run far more than a wedding or a house down-payment, but it isn’t a trust-fund and never was.

Odd_Trifle_2604 −  NTA a GED is affordable and doable. She’s choosing to keep having kids she can’t afford. She doesn’t need a wedding, she needs a reality check. If she was putting forth minimal effort to better her life it would be reasonable to ask for some money.

A fancy party does nothing to feed and clothe her kids. You offered her what’s left from the fund if she goes to school. She’s decided that school isn’t important, save her funds for the grandkids

Aiyokusama −  EDITED: In light of the OPs educational snobbery, you ARE the AH. YIKES! NTA. Choices have consequences. And you were specific about what it was for. Now here is a question: would it also apply for trades school?

evieeeeeeeeeeeeeee −  NTA, this may not be the popular opinion but a college fund is a college fund specifically to avoid student loans and they have all been given the same opportunity to earn it, if you pay for your daughter to buy a house and get married you’d have to do the same for all of them to be fair to each child – she isn’t e**itled to the money for any reason the people butting their nose in to your finances can fund it if they’re so bothered

cekay3 −  INFO Is the reason your kid never went back into education because they were worried about how to afford it with childcare etc.? I don’t understand why she never knew about it as an option for her.

JessicaFreakingP −  ESH. Maybe she didn’t think going to school was an option for her once she became a teen mom because she didn’t think she’d ever be able to afford it. You withheld information from her that could have influenced her decisions and helped her see that she still had options.

**Edit:** Anyone commenting “but El is an AH now because XYZ” like that negates OP from also being an AH is not understanding the point. You are retroactively applying what is going on today to something that happened several years ago in an attempt to justify OP’s previous actions.

OP was an AH when she chose to withhold this information for years. The fact that the daughter is in poor financial shape now and feels e**itled to the money is irrelevant to OP’s prior decisions.

tatasz −  NTA. Your money, you use it as you please. I may be downvoted to hell, but I don’t think it’s wise to give money to a person that keeps having kids like that because kids are expensive. Well, first one was an accident, but the second one?

PS: where I live, at this point, the vast majority of the jobs require a diploma, so you need one even if you won’t work in the field, you just need the paper. If you don’t get one, you won’t be able to get a job unless you have some very specific skill set.

Do you think the mother was right to protect the college funds for educational purposes, or should she have allowed her daughter to use the money for her immediate needs? How would you approach a similar situation where financial support and personal aspirations clash? Share your thoughts below!