Our DD estranged us then went off to university

There is no link that backs up anything you have implied about the OP VS. That she was unwilling to fill out forms, was not interested in D's wish to go to uni, was un supportive and was putting her own wants above the needs of her D.

No there is not

eazybee

There is a very careful drip-feed of information so I doubt if all will be revealed.

Indeed.

Fascinating thread. I was unaware rules existed regarding estrangement, student loans, accommodation, etc. Very informative, causes me to wonder about my sons-in-law university fall outs many years ago. [I'll never ask]

I wonder why going to university in the other country vs the UK was not a possibility

eazybee

There is a very careful drip-feed of information so I doubt if all will be revealed.

Isn't that true of most original posts of this kind though?

People give you their 'side' of the situation from the standpoint that they are being unfairly treated and feel upset because of it, Very few are able to be completely objective - I know I wouldn't be, which is why though I've been tempted on occasions to get thoughts and opinions from others, I could not be sufficiently objective to get any meaningful responses.

Apart from which, giving the details of the "other side" of the story would in fact reveal too much personal information which might lead to identification in real life.

So, yes, I'm sure there's more to this situation than we are being told but I do think the OP is genuinely not in the 'know' quite why her daughter has estranged her. But the complete silence from the daughter does not necessarily mean that something dramatic has happened that we are not being told about - young people can be very determined when they decide to go their own way and clam up like the proverbial shell.

Hithere

I wonder why going to university in the other country vs the UK was not a possibility

I don't really understand what you mean?

Would the daughter have eligibility given that their parents had given up the expat life and residence/work visa and returned to the UK?

The parents had decided to move the family home before university.

Who would have paid for the DD to attend University abroad as a non-resident?

There may also have been issues that the DD did not meet the educational requirements to study abroad - for example if she had attended a British curriculum private school for expats and didn't have GCSE/A level in the local language.

Not to enter into the emotional side of the question, it IS actually true that under the current student support scheme, the amount a student can borrow via student loan for maintenance as opposed to tuition IS means tested, and if your parents rrefuse the means testing, your ability to borrow is set at the absolute lowest level.

So under the scheme the girl was applying under, NOT living independently from her parents could (would?) have meant she couldn't even borrow the money she needed for her university maintenance.

It's monstrously unfair in my opinion, but that's how the calculation is done. So it is very financially possible that the only way the daughter could access sufficient finance for university at all was to be able to evidence that she was financially independent of her parents. Which she could, by having a flat of her own for a year etc.

It's not about the amount of debt, it affects being able to borrow the money at all.

The university fees are covered by the basic loan. This seems to have been misunderstood throughout this thread

I agree JJ. I don’t know why it’s still having to be explained.

No one has misunderstood

There are 2 parts 2 the loan

University fees

Maintenance (living expenses)

The second part is means tested

I even posted a link explaining...

It's certainly not us who isn't getting it

I fill these forms out every year lol

I think a number of people are genuinely confused - the link is clear though.

I certainly get it as one of mine is at university at the moment, well not today as it is boxing day!

The maintenance loan should at least cover halls though. I wonder when this changed? As I've detailed earlier in the thread, the top up amount for rent is quite a lot (university based accommodation) if you only qualify for the base level amount.

Hi

I started this thread in Dec 2023, a lot of people posted helpful comments and suggestions, for which I thank you, but almost two years on, I'm looking for a bit more advice.

To save you having to re-read all the previous posts, here is a summary of the story so far:

Suddenly and without warning, our DD went "no contact" in July 2020. We have tentatively reached out to her a few times since then, including sending her a birthday card and a Christmas card for the last two years (thanks for that suggestion) but received no response.

Because it happened so suddenly, we don't know for sure why it happened, but we think it was because we had some difficult discussions with her about how we were going to fund her through university. The background to that was that we had recently come back from a foreign country where we had been working, but didn't realise that the country we had come from punishes expats who leave by whacking them for enormous amounts of "departure tax" - in our case, the equivalent of £208,000 in local money. We fought the foreign tax authorities over it but couldn't win and had to hand it over. It came at the worst possible time because it was just before DD was supposed to go to Uni, so we ended up handing over what was supposed to be her Uni money and our retirement savings to the tax authorities, which pretty much cleaned us out of cash.

We never discussed the tax thing with DD, and we think (although we don't know) that DD just thought we were being mean and manipulative over money, and decided to do her own thing by claiming "irreconcilable estrangement" from us in order to claim Government grants and loans as an independent student. And to give her due credit for initiative, it worked. She got her money from the Government, we were never asked for any financial contribution, and off she went to Uni where (as far as we know) she has been ever since.

We have now had no contact from her for over five years, and we are thinking it's now time to stop trying to reach out, accept that she may never be coming back, and just let her go. But it would be tragic if all this happened as a result of a misunderstanding, because she just didn't know that we were forced to send back all her Uni money to the tax authorities. So I'm wondering whether, before we stop reaching out, I should try one last time and write her a letter explaining what happened, maybe enclosing a copy of the bank statement to prove it, saying that we respect her decision to stop contact and we are not going to try to contact her again, and wishing her all the best for the future? Or maybe we should continue sending her birthday and Christmas cards? Or maybe we should do nothing and just let go?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I’m so sorry for the last 5 years of estrangement you have experienced- just heartbreaking.
I would absolutely write and explain why everything suddenly changed, & personally would have done this way before now, otherwise how is she to understand what you did?

I would have thought it quite obvious that your DD felt badly let down by you and her Dad. Parents know if their earnings are above a certain amount it means they are supposed to pay to make up the difference for a full student loan. You must have had the earnings but chose not to give her the top up. This system has been in place for years so it's not like you needing to pay to enable your DD to go was a shock for you. Most parents save up over time. Because you couldn't support her your DD couldn't go when she wanted to do she probably things you stole her dreams away from her. Your DD moving out was probably because she didn't want to be anywhere near to you and she may have realised if she waited as an independent student she would get a full loan. My advice leave her alone. If she wants contact she knows where you are. If you fund her brother it will hurt her even more. Have you been saving for him to prevent this from happening again?

There is absolutely no reason for you not to tell family and friends the true situation. The pretence is unsustainable.

You cannot go through your life pretending you went to her graduation, talking about her "career", met her partners, went to the wedding, are excited she's promoted/ pregnant/ married / you have a grandchild etc. That you visit her and she visits you.

Don't go there.

For your own sake it's time to come clean and tell your friends and family and work colleagues the simple truth

"Our daughter doesn't keep in touch with home any more, we don't quite know why because she just stopped and has never told us why. It's very difficult for us."

If they ask questions you just keep repeating " I wish we knew the answers but we don't. This situation is her choice, not ours."

Or just tell them YOUR truth.

" I don't want to talk about it. It's too upsetting"

This is your daughter's decision; you cannot and don't have to explain it on her behalf or defend her behaviour.

Don't go down the MH rabbit hole of denying your own reality , covering up , pretending everything is absolutely normal.

Writing and explaining without a response from your daughter won’t hurt any more than it already hurts. I would do so, without being too hopeful, but if you don’t you will always be left wondering. Did you pay your son’s university fees?
I don’t understand why you didn’t explain at the time, but better now than never. It’s worth a last try.

Why didn't you explain the situation to your D at the time? .

OP We have now had no contact from her for over five years, and we are thinking it's now time to stop trying to reach out, accept that she may never be coming back, and just let her go.

Yes, accept and let her go - she's gone.

Thanks for all those comments / suggestions - although it's a bit of a mixed bag! Just to answer a few questions:

If we were clairvoyant and we had known what was going to happen, yes, we would absolutely have sat her down (tied her to the chair if necessary) and explained to her about the tax thing. However, it's difficult to explain a complicated tax situation to someone if they insist on storming off to their bedroom and slamming the door without giving you the chance to explain. And then there was no contact, and the chance was gone.

The financial problem in 2020, as some of you have gathered, was high income (making us liable for significant contributions) but zero savings (because we'd just had them all taken away by the foreign taxman). So one proposal we put to her was, would you consider postponing Uni for a year? That would have given us chance to save some money and stabilise our financial situation. That idea wasn't well received, although it's what she ended up doing anyway, because in order to qualify for the Govt grant on the ground of "irreconcilable estrangement" she had to postpone Uni for a year, because you can only get it if you have been estranged for a year.

And yes, her brother is going to Uni this year and we are paying for him, because we have been able to save up for the last five years now the foreign taxman is off our backs. That is what we wanted to do for her.

Personally I don’t understand why you couldn’t have prefaced any discussions about student finance with a conversation in which you explained the foreign tax situation to your daughter. Things might have turned out very differently.
But I think it is still worth explaining now, though it is probably too late to expect anything to change.

Oh my goodness I totally understand your situation is different now, but you so casually say you’re son s off to uni and you ll be paying for him, made me gasp. Had she has always sensed a difference in your behaviour towards her and your son

Obviously it was a problem when you were overseas and there was some financial irregularities causing you to pay a lot of money back but that wasn’t her fault Surely you could have encouraged her to go to Uni as she obviously badly wanted your approval and if you’d been wiped out of money wouldn’t she have been approved for government help anyway How could you be guarantors of her flat and buy her furniture for it if you were wiped out of money ? I m missing something here if you had too much money for her to get government help why couldn’t you help her ! It really wasn’t her fault you had messed up overseas

Anyway that’s all out of the picture now she seems to have managed very well for herself and hopefully got her degree and making use of it It’s an awful shame she has cut the relationship off but she obviously feels very strongly that you didn’t encourage her at the time and hasn’t got over it
I really really hope that time and distance will melt all the hurt away and you can be reconnected even if in a smaller way

Did this non communication really come out of the blue
or was it the result of a final straw situation from your daughter's point of view?

Honestly, it came so out of the blue that even after it happened, we didn't realise for a while that it had happened. We set her up in the flat she wanted. Being the guarantors of the flat didn't cost us any money, it was just an undertaking that if she didn't pay the rent, we would. I even went round and assembled some furniture for her and figured out how the electrics worked because the landlord hadn't told her. Then a week or so later, I dropped by with her younger brother who was curious to see where his big sister was living, and she wouldn't let us in. I thought "OK, maybe she's just out of the shower, or maybe her secret boyfriend is in there or whatever" and thought no more of it except that it seemed a little odd. But that was the last conversation I ever had with her.

I can tell people are still confused about the money / tax situation. We were confused about it too, especially when we were in the thick of it and we couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. We battled over those taxes for seven years. The foreign tax authorities gave us conflicting advice about what we owed, but they threatened us with daily interest payments on whatever that turned out to be. We couldn't pay because a lot of the money was tied up in investments which we couldn't access. It was impossible to find out who was dealing with our tax account or to contact them to ask questions. The tax system is so complicated that only they understand it. It was like dealing with the Mafia. It was a nightmare that we really didn't want to drag our daughter into, but of course with hindsight that was a mistake. We could afford to spend £300 on furniture for her flat, but we really didn't know whether or not we could afford £30,000 for a university course because we didn't know how much (if any) money we would have left when they were done with us.

And no, we have no favourites, her and her younger brother have always been treated the same and we love them both equally.

The reason I posted here was because I was looking for your thoughts about what I should do, and your votes so far seem to be:

Send the letter: 3
Walk away: 2
Just carry on sending Xmas cards: 0

So I think I'm going to take a deep breath and send the letter.