Play Tweakers

My wife and I have been planning to build a long term home for our growing family. We make a good living but are fairly conservative when it comes to spending capital, and therefore have tried our best to stick to a budget that gets us what we want but also doesn't leave us house poor and unable to save and enjoy our hobbies.

My wife is very close to one side of her grandparents and has often talked about the plans we're drawing up with our builder ,grandfather was a contractor/owned a decent sized commercial construction business, so it made sense to run our plans by them.

Rate hikes and other factors led us to deciding to downgrade a substantial portion of the house in our plans. Which said grandfather noticed when we sent him the final layout we were preparing to commit to. To our surprise (we've never asked for any money from any family member in the past) my wife informed me that they wanted to formally pass along some portion of what they believed/planned would be our inheritance to fund our house and allow us to commit to the full plans, an extremely generous amount of money.

Informing my wife's parents of the developments things got strange, rather than seem happy for us they seemed somewhat distant. The following day my wife received a text from her mom that she urgently needed to talk one on one about our house situation. My wife's mother informed her that her and her father had not planned well for their retirement. Keeping up with the Joneses, going on vacation and other things meant they hadn't saved much in their 401k and were in a fair amount of debt. They planned that their inheritance would be the backbone of their retirement and a way to pay off the debts. They in the past informed them in such discussions that they would redistribute money to their kids (my wife) themselves in the future.

The ask from her mom was that we politely decline the offer and tell her grandparents that we'd just save for the addition sometime down the line, later (my inlaws) would try and help pass something along if they could.

Later that week meeting with her grandparents they were upset when we refused the money. When my wife walked away with her grandma to look at something in the garage her grandfather pryed me for why we were pushing back, insisting that we would be receiving this money anyway in the future and they would rather see the fruits of it while they were still alive. I cracked and at that point basically said that her parents preferred if they managed the money that was received later down the line. Not long after the visit my wife got an extremely angry call from her mom asking why we had told them they were the reason for us not accepting the money. My wife broke down (never have heard her parents yell at anyone let alone her), I admitted to the limited information I told her grandpa and now for the last couple weeks she's been extremely distant. Her parents haven't spoken to us in the same amount of time.