Woman says her live-in boyfriend started buying a house with his sister — and expected her to follow him into it anyway

A woman on Reddit said she thought she was building toward a future with her boyfriend, only to realize she was being asked to squeeze herself into a housing plan that seemed to leave almost no room for her at all. In posts later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she said the two had been friends for 10 years, dating for nine months, and had talked seriously about marriage and having a family. But while she already owned a home in Southern California with a low fixed mortgage rate and rental income from spare rooms, her boyfriend moved in with her and then became fixated on buying a property with his sister near their parents’ neighborhood instead.

According to the post, the boyfriend’s parents planned to help fund the deal by giving the sister money toward the purchase, while the boyfriend would take on debt to cover his portion. The first house they pursued was a fixer-upper listed at $1.3 million, and the woman said they offered $1.46 million in cash with family money helping bridge the gap. She wrote that the inspection turned up major issues, including plumbing, roof and electrical problems, before that deal eventually fell apart. But instead of backing away from the larger idea, the family quickly moved on to another house, and she said the same core problem remained: her boyfriend seemed ready to commit himself financially to a property owned with his sister while still expecting her to fit herself into the arrangement.

What seemed to push the story into a much sharper lane for readers was the woman’s description of what her role would actually be. She said her boyfriend had laid out a plan in a spreadsheet that would have her paying substantial rent and a share of utilities while also forcing her to decide what to do with the house she already owned. She wrote that she felt like an outsider watching a long-term life decision get made around her, not with her, and said she could not understand why she would give up the security of a home in her own name to help support a house that was not really hers. In her update, she said her boyfriend moved out the day after closing without clearly warning her that was the plan, leaving her with lost rental income after she had already given notice to a roommate.

Then the situation got even messier. In the follow-up, the woman said she had decided to sell her own home and try moving into the new place anyway, even as she became more alarmed by how enmeshed her boyfriend’s family seemed to be. She described the parents as being there constantly, said the group was in near-daily contact, and wrote that the house felt less like a place she and her boyfriend were building together and more like stepping into an already established family system. She also said her boyfriend’s ownership stake was only 10%, with the sister holding 90%, which made his heavy spending on upgrades even harder for her to understand.

Commenters on the roundup thread were brutal about the financial side of it, especially after seeing that she had a 2.65% mortgage rate on a Southern California home she already owned. Many said the warning signs were obvious long before the update, and several focused on the fact that she was considering leaving a stable ownership position for a relationship that, at that point, had not even reached the one-year mark. The post was tagged “inconclusive,” but readers did not sound especially hopeful about where the arrangement was heading.

Here is the Original Reddit post.