This story has a lot of facets; a lot of interested parties. I'll try to be succinct... three years ago, our dog (then a puppy) was hit by a car and broke both hind legs and punctured a lung. After an ER visit and a long hospital stay with two surgeries as well as a 6 month rehab process and about $9k in debt, he's back to normal. Full use of both rear legs, no lasting issues with lungs or anything. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) was ***offered*** a loan of basically any amount by her sister to help out. My girlfriend declined at the time because we had covered the cost of his treatment with credit cards.

Fast forward a few more months and we're having trouble paying off the credit card debt and staying afloat on our other debt (we had just bought our house literally two weeks prior to the accident). Again, ***without solicitation***, her sister ***offered*** a loan of basically any amount to help out. After some discussion we did decide to take her up on the offer this time and asked for about $4k to pay off one of the credit cards (we used two and the second was almost paid off already). Immediately after giving us the money, and with both of us as witnesses, the sister said not to worry about paying her back, but ***whenever we had saved up the money to pay her back, use the money instead to build a fence in our backyard*** to keep the dog penned in so he doesn't get hit again. This was both sensible and very kind of her, but complications soon arose.

A couple more months down the road and me and my girlfriend get married. My now sister-in-law and father-in-law get together and pay for the fence to be built in our yard. This "wedding present" as it was referred to by both the sister-in-law and the father-in-law seemingly nullified the $4k we owed sister-in-law on paper. I say "on paper" because neither me nor my wife believed that this ended our obligation to pay her back in some way. We weren't sure exactly what to do, and she kept insisting that we shouldn't worry about it, so eventually we did stop worrying about it.

Some more time passes and my wife landed a really sweet job and I got promoted, so we're making ends meet and then some; and we've had the opportunity to start saving more and just being more financially solid. In case it wasn't obvious, my sister-in-law is already financially pretty solid (this whole family that I married in to is very financially savvy), and even though she's on her own and doesn't have a super-high-paying job, she was still able to save up *almost* enough to put a great down payment on her dream house.

...*Almost*.

To get a 20% down payment on her mortgage and still cover her closing costs she needs, you guessed it, $4k, which she asked my wife for just the other day.

Now, a little about my wife and I and our saving habits. We have our retirement accounts, our long-term savings, and our short-term savings. As I said, we were fortunate enough to have some good luck in our careers, but that was only just recently (like, it was less than a year ago that we stopped living paycheck-to-paycheck), so while we are doing much better, we are far from wealthy. We don't touch our retirement; our long-term saving goal right now is *solely* to make a cross-country move in the next few years so we can start a family in a place we really want to live, and short-term goals are a few minor home renovations and a new vehicle. We were trying to get the vehicle before it started snowing this year, but, if we give my sister-in-law that money there's no way it can happen... so... I advised my wife not to give her the money ***at this time*** because of our need for a vehicle.

The shit storm this has caused with her family was something I wasn't prepared for. That's probably a story for another sub, so long story short, just yesterday we relented and wife is going to give her the money out of short-term savings. So one of us is going without 4WD again this winter (mucho inportante in the area we live). So, am I the asshole? I genuinely don't know. Sister-in-law got really pushy about it considering she kept telling us not to worry about it. But the fact that we didn't pay for the fence... just don't know.