Microblog Memes

Here's the story of the house we bought last year - which took us 6 years to find.

My wife and I had been looking for a nice house in our area. We moved here just before the pandemic and we knew the prices around here, and they were within our reach at the time.

Then the pandemic happened, house prices went through the roof and never went down.

On top of that, our village in particular tends to be gentrifying at supersonic speed: this used to be an isolated village, but the big city nearby is expanding, so now it's turned into a fashionable place to live that's not too far from the city: the lake is now managed, so it's not a putrid mosquito-invested swamp anymore, we have two supermarkets, solid bus service... Wealthy folks buy old houses here, tear them down and build new, super-expensive mansions on top of what is now prime land.

Before the pandemic, houses here were still affordable(-ish). Nowadays, it's minimum 3x as much for the cheapest old house (to destroy and rebuild anew, remember!), which are getting rare, and new ones are running into half-million territory.

So we had been watching for houses in the area like hawks on the various local realty sites for 6 years, not holding much hope for this village, but still including it in our search, because why not.

And one day, this house turned up at a surprisingly low price - the one we're in now. Long story short: it was so poorly advertised by the realtor that nobody bid on it. But I knew it because I had seen it before while riding my bike in that street, so we bid immediately and we scored it.

It's one of the last old houses, but it's in perfect condition for its age, because the previous owner was in the construction industry and built it to the most modern standards of the time. And it's located in one of the most highly sought-after streets in the village, with direct access to the lake, gobs of land, and located 200 yards from the stores and the bus stop.

Our house is insanely great and we got it for cheaper than pre-pandemic prices!

Why you ask? How does something this lucky happens?

Because the previous owner, a nice little old lady, sold it for cheap because she got tired of her children bickering over who would inherit it after she dies, how much profit they would make if they sold it, and trying to move their mom to a retirement home so one of them could move in early, or convince her to sell it now so they wouldn't pay the tax on property inheritance.

The lady literally told them "Fuck the whole lot of you!" She put the house up for sale at bargain-basement price in order to sell it and move out as quickly as possible, so none of her kids would get anything at all after she's dead.

And that's how we got to live in this increasingly posh neighborhood without really having the kind of money to belong here 🙂

I live in Denmark and the saying here goes 'if there is anything left for the family when I die, then ive miscalculated '

This is part of how wealth concentrates in countries without a welfare state. The property market becomes more and more unavailable for young people, and older people have to sell their homes to afford proper care.

Here's how this is actually gonna work, at a broad social scale:

With some rare exceptions, the Boomers will sell their homes to pay for medical expenses, and die alone, in either old folks homes, hospitals, or much smaller homes/apartments, or if they're very lucky, homeless or in a concentration camp for the homeless.

They'll have to sell their homes because private equity/credit is imploding, and all their pensions and 401ks are ultimately based on that, even if they say they're not.

And home prices are crashing because:

1 younger generations don't get paid enough;

2 climate change costs are finally coming due via insurance now actually reflecting climate risks + outsized proportion of the last ~2 decades of new homes being built in high climate risk areas;

3 property tax rates are skyrocketing due to decades of local government mismanagement of budgets and infrastructure.

A fun fact that people do not like to acknowledge is that while yes, big Wall Street investors do largely set the tone and tenor of the housing market, the vast, vast majority of homes are owned by small time "mom and pop" landlords.

And the majority of existing home sales are Boomers selling homes to other Boomers.

They did this to themselves (and to everyone else), and the result will be that they impoverished their children while chastising them for being poor, enriched faceless corporations while claiming they hate them, destroyed the climate while claiming climate change isn't real... all while claiming that everyone else is entitled, poorly informed about how the world works, and financially irresponsible.

I keep reading about how the boomers are going to be the biggest wealth transfer in history when they die, but all I’m hearing about in practice is boomers selling their assets and spending the money.

I see the issue here less as "the kids get nothing" and more a concern at where they money ends up.

Houses get massively inflated over time.. Older parents sell, but the money all ends up at some retirement home. Retirement homes are owned by a bunch of hedge funds and/or rich folk. Staff at these places often aren't paid particularly well either.

The end result is still higher prices for everyone else, while the rich folk get richer as everything rises into unaffordabilty.

Millennials: "We're not entitled"

Also millennials