Your Mother-in-Law Pays Off Your Student Loans, Then You Divorce Her Son. Now What?

Here’s another case for the “it’s always better to get it in writing” file. Although here the failure to get the contract in writing doesn’t doom recovery, it does just add an extra layer of analysis that might otherwise have been avoidable. 

The case, out of Alabama, is Julie Gerstenecker v. Janice Gerstenecker, 1160144, and you can probably guess immediately from the shared last name that doubtless the reason the contract wasn’t in writing was because of the familial relationship between the parties. In fact, Julie was Janice’s daughter-in-law. Janice, concerned about the interest rate on Julie’s student loan, claimed to offer to pay off the loans in their entirety, in exchange for Julie paying her back interest-free at a rate of $700 a month (later to raise to $1,000 a month). Julie sent Janice an e-mail with the student loan information (including specific instructions as to how Janice could pay them off) and Janice thereafter paid the student loans off. Julie then paid Janice, as allegedly agreed, for four consecutive months. However, after that Julie and Janice’s son divorced and Julie stopped making any further payments. Janice sued for breach of contract. 

Julie denied there had been any contract, although I think her credibility was undermined by her testimony in response to why, if there had been no contract, she had written the checks to Janice: Julie claimed not to be able to remember why she had written the checks at issue to Janice. At any rate, she tried to raise a statute of frauds defense, asserting that the contract could not have been completed in a year and that therefore it should have been in writing (which it was not). However, she raised the defense so late in the case that the court basically deemed she had waived it. 

The court then went on to address Julie’s argument that there was not enough evidence of mutual assent. Julie agreed that she did e-mail Janice her student loan information and that she did give Janice the checks at issue, but argued that evidence was ambiguous and did not indicate that she had accepted Janice’s offer. The court disagreed. Julie provided Janice with all of the information Janice needed to pay off the student loans, and then Julie began her performance in response by beginning to pay Janice (no other explanation for the checks, after all, had ever been offered). That was enough evidence that a contract had existed. 

The only thing left to debate was the measure of damages. The trial court had awarded Janice the entire repayment amount. However, the appellate court concluded that was incorrect because there was no evidence that the contract contained an acceleration clause. Therefore, Janice could only receive a judgment for the amount of money Julie already owed in missed payments.