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.
I also see it as a problem of the economy. Their kid, will never be able to afford that house. He will never be able to live in a house like that again. He also got royally screwed.
Home ownership is a luxury. Reality is being stuck renting. Renting is preventing upwards mobility.
Id just count my blessings that my parents can take care of themselves in retirement and beyond and not have to count on family to come in and take care of them, which is an unfortunate truth for a lot of families in the states.
I dont expect shit, and it almost seems morally bankrupt to expect a generational handout. You get something or you dont, thats life.
I agree it’s a blessing to have your parents be financially independent into their later years. I do think there’s a generational disparity. I don’t think there’s an obligation for parents to pass on some early inheritance, but I just can’t imagine letting my kids face a lower standard of living assuming their career paths and lifestyles were similar. It’s not their fault our leaders and elite have designed a system that reducing the quality of housing and cities while making them more expensive (IMO).
Maybe I’ll feel different when I’m older and I think everything they do is wasteful or something?
I can agree to most of that.
To clarify, what’s morally decrepit is someone passing judgement on an expectation thats the result of distilling down the richness and complexity of a relationship to something transactional and material, so devoid of empathy and compassion.
The truth is that the OP meme is meant to point out how a kid is being slighted because there MAY not be a transfer of wealth. We have no idea how wealthy the parents are, whether they are spite spending it, whether they didnt have retirement saved up and couldn’t afford the house and viewed it as their retirement. I agree that it’s admirable to want to and then to actually leave wealth to your children. But the expectation is repugnant.
I think we’re on the same page because I was more replying to you than the OP. I think the meme is a bit extreme and that was either the joke, or it’s specifically crafted to piss of both sides of the aisle, like so much content today.
I agree with your point with the corollary that if they make that choice, they had better not come knocking on my door if they run into trouble.
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Neither of my parents have any kind of savings at all, they basically only ever made enough to get by. My mom gets a very meager stipend from being a teacher. They both retired this past year and are drawing social security. It’s already really tight for them. I know when they get older I’m gonna have to sell their houses to make sure they have enough money to live on and the medical care they deserve. No idea where they will live at that point. Isn’t America great? Work hard your whole life to struggle to make it when you’re too old to work…
I’m in the process of doing this for my teacher mother with dementia. It’s a fucking nightmare.
I live with my parent, Iv not had much luck in life job wise so I work min wage job and help my parents so they never end up in a home. Thankfully my girlfriend understand why I’m doing this so I don’t have to stress about that.
Will have to do the same in a couple of years. Both parents are retired but my dad got cancer about 10 years before his retirement, so he basically didn’t have an income during that time. They are now unable to move since they are both too old, so it’s going to be me and my brother handling that when the time comes.
Hence why being able to bankrupt two casinos is quite the achievement.
3 casinos actually and either 5 or 6 bankruptcies between them.
I inherited a house, and it is ruining me. I say bullet dodged.
How is the inherited house ruining you? Does it need repair?
How?
Unless it’s a mobile home on leased land, or you live somewhere property, and land aren’t valued as assets.
You can always sell it …
Taxes, maintenance, upkeep, utilities etc. Legally, I can’t sell it for some time as that is part of the will.
Can you take out debt against it to pay for those things? If you’re net negative while it’s in your possession then the math should work out if you can extract some of its future sale price against its current cost.
I am currently looking at options like this, yeah.
Sounds like it’s a problem with inheritance. Not owning a home.
Which is relevant to the meme that was posted.
You said the house was ruining you but that’s not true. What’s ruining you is the condition of the contract you accepted in order to obtain said house. The meme is about selfish parents pulling the ladder up. Not conditions set on an individual that is subject to them alone.
I never stated that the house is ruining me.
I said:
I inherited a house, and it is ruining me
The meme is about pulling up the ladder behind them.
You got a ladder installed and they bolted it to your house.
People buy houses all the time they can’t afford. Hidden costs, thinking taxes and insurance won’t shoot up, depending on the size might cost and arm and a leg to heat/cool.
There’s even a term called “house poor” when you buy a house but don’t have the money to furnish it so you just have big empty rooms.
My mother owns a house and I’d be fucked if I inherited it. Just the property taxes, insurance and utility bills for it come to over $30K a year which is more than I even make (before income tax) as a school bus driver. Selling it would require a lot of repairs first which I couldn’t afford. In theory you can sell the house for its book value less the cost of these repairs, but in my township you’re legally required to fix some things before a sale can even be approved (e.g. replacement of the entire sewer line out to the street). I could maybe rent it, but typical rents here would barely cover the expenses even assuming the tenant doesn’t trash the place.
I’d mortgage part of it to repair it, then sell. That way you’d walk out with the rest of the money.
Yeah, it’s one thing if it’s in a nice location and well maintained…
But good chance it’s got some serious issues because they haven’t fixed anything in decades and no one wants to live there, so you might be 50k in the hole for things before you can even show it to serious prospects…
Or take the hit and sell it as-is to some crappy company that will probably underpay by 200-400k dollars, even accounting for all the “repairs” (probably just blast everything with paint and hope to sell it to some sucker that doesn’t take the potential problems seriously).
They’d make it a rental property more than likely. These companies are buying up homes in general to do that.
Idk. Grandparents owned a really nice home I had fond memories of. They actually didn’t sell it, they lost it. Turns out if you just pay the mortgage by remortgaging the property multiple times that maybe isn’t a good idea. Place had serious issues, but I would have tried to buy it, had I the money at the time, before it went up for auction. Property alone was worth quite a bit due to the neighborhood. Most properties in that neighborhood now go for 1-2 mil.
We really gotta implement a land value tax.
An important thing to consider if we have any chance at shifting the trajectory of shelter insecurity (abolishing property would be better but we can do taxes way more easily). One thing I’d be worried about is any elderly people who wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the property tax to live in their own home. This happens all the time already, and god knows most of them don’t live in a place where property tax raises proportionately to the land value, and we should consider why that’s a problem.
The elderly are already in a massive blindspot in popular pro-socialized healthcare discourses, and even “developed” healthcare systems struggle to find support and housing for people as they age. If we start using these sorts of indirect eviction tactics as a means of transferring wealth to the younger middle class via affordable property ownership, many of those people will straight up be displaced into deadly living conditions. I can imagine how this sort of system would make us more vulnerable to the state as we ourselves aged.
Policies like these could easily be used to divert attention from other socialized programs and services that could be improved in a way that generates greater material security more generally, but whose effects would be less immediately apparent to the kinds of people who could even afford an inexpensive house.
I agree that the elderly are often overlooked in this discussion since so much of the housing discourse revolves around boomers that own property and outright dismissing the fact that a large contingent of them are rolling right into infirmity with just about no retirement.
I think nursing homes are going to have to function differently in the coming years to accommodate this, and it’s not going to be easy. Breaking apart the current health"care" bureaucracy will free up a lot of medical staff to practice actual medicine rather than just push insurance paperwork, but the lack of people overall will require leveraging of technology to fill the gap. Technology that is currently being used to burn up our aging infrastructure for the benefit of the Epstein class.
The next few years are going to be filled with grueling work just to ensure we don’t have collapse of social order.
Add the tax but use some of the money to build a shit ton of government housing like the UK did after WWII. Their housing problems only started after they stopped building subsidized housing and started relying on the market (lots of other factors, too, but there is a strong correlation on the timing here).
Yes, that is what I’m saying. When I say that this idea of a property tax that is oriented toward increased property value exclusively runs the risk of satisfying more affluent young middle-class people who are really just expressing aggrieved entitlement to the way of life that their parents and grandparents enjoyed.
A common liberal tactic to disarm broader wealth distribution and social welfare movements is to satiate an element of their criticisms for a substantially powerful group within that movement. Think about how the New Deal disproportionately benefitted white labourers and effectively dissuaded broader socialist and anticapitalist sentiments that had grown in the previous decades, or how queer marriage rights afforded security to property-owning gay men who are now the most conservative-voting queer demographic.
That there is such a risk of victimizing vulnerable elderly people, a group that has BTW been increasingly devalued since COVID started, means that if this policy satisfies enough voters specifically – which is to say suburbanites – it could effectively disarm the accompanying reforms that recognize the interlinked issues of shelter unaffordability and insecurity, healthcare services, education, and food insecurity while simultaneously normalizing policies that disproportionately harm specific groups. Programs exactly like what you referenced here were eroded by those same means, and the luxury of suburban home ownership itself was an immenseley effective tactic in disarming labour unions in the mid-twentieth-century US.
i’m leaving everything to kids. if she needs help it’s up to them
Rather than setting up a reliable inheritance structure, my Silent Gen parents set my brother and me up as joint tenants. The reason, they told me, was “to make it hard to sell the house.” Well, my stepdad left the place a hoarder mess worthy of reality TV, and we still had very little trouble getting a decent chunk of change.
Yeah. Fuck the boomers. They destroyed everything.
this is culture war garbage, i imagine your working class boomer grand / parents are not to blame for the failing of the state.
this has been and always will be an issue stemming from class, economic structure and social stratification.
I’ll throw in an argument that a lot of that generation are either unable or unwilling to understand the plight of their offspring and why they don’t just do better. There is a lot of intra-generational sabotage amongst them as well. I would like to see numbers of men with successful retirement to women, especially given the power disparities in that generation, early on in particular. There’s a lot of not undeserved angst for them, but a lot of them were also screwed over the by rich and those who pretend they are.
Good. Generational wealth is not good for society.
i agree, but for many it is the only social safety net available. once the state is actively helping it’s citizens, only then can generational wealth be filly uprooted.
The parents job of providing is up until either 18 or 21 if college is involved, get your own house after that entitled little fucks 😅
Maybe in traditional american culture. The rest of the world cares about the family at every stage.
Yes American culture values independence but most other cultures are interdependent. There’s pros and cons to both. In many interdependent societies, kids stay with parents until marriage which helps keep costs low and allows kids to save or focus on career. But parents can also be extremely overprotective over kids (ex. helicopter parents) and keep kids from pursuing new things or risky endeavors (ex. family gaslighting you for trying something different bc it goes against their worldview).
“And that’s why dad went into the cheap retirement home and doesn’t live with us.”
So glad I never wanted family in this clown world.
Guess you’ll not have any housing anymore that isn’t owned by a landlord. Hope your swept up in any fallout from your failure of a country.
Millennials: “We’re not entitled”
Also millennials
You do realize that generational wealth has been a thing forever right? You’re not making some amazing gotcha point here.
I’m not trying too.
But I think I have.
I mean, here you are thinking you’re entitled to every penny and asset of your parents
God forbid parents do better than the bare minimum when committing to one of the biggest decisions in a human beings life.
I live in Denmark and the saying here goes 'if there is anything left for the family when I die, then ive miscalculated ’
In the US the financial times have been so bad for decades that, without assistance, education and having a house are directly correlated with family wealth.
I’m not defending the shit–it fucking sucks.
My brother made an investment portfolio to my nieces because, as he said he’ll leave nothing alse to them lol they are 3
Why do the Dutch bury their dead face down?
So they can park their bicycles.
Petah?
Butt cheeks
Respect
Det finns inga fickor i svepningen.
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 🙂
Good for her.
If those were my kids I would kindly tell them not to contact me again.
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.
legend. I’d have her over on christmas every year.
We invited her - not just for Christmas. She doesn’t want to come because this whole affair was a heartache for her, and she misses her old house enormously. We maintain good relationships but we don’t push her.
Please chrish that old woman in stead of her supposed children
For me it was the other way round sadly. We lived in a house (rented) in a city district that was basically dubbed “the little cozy village right in the city”. We had the prospect of buy this house one day for quite cheap, but then the gentrification happened very fast before we could do that. There were many old houses in that area - often times so old, that the only real way to deal with them was to tear them down and rebuild. Even those were sold at sky high prices. Don’t even think to stay below 800k to 1M. And that before all the additional construction needed. Since this price hike only took about ~1 year to reach this point, we hadn’t really time to realize what was going on. We even got a very good offer to buy the house, but with all repairs and such needed, we’d have still been on the hook for an estimated ~900k total.
We bought our house (20 years ago) from a 95 year old lady. Her family was trying to get her into a home for years and finally convinced her. They put the house on the market at the price the came up with when they first started talking about moving her so the price was about $80k out of date. I guess the family got really pissed at the agent because we bought it the second it got listed and they thought they should have got way more money. So we got lucky too. Except our house is a bit of a shit box and had lots of stuff wrong with it. It had cardboard plumbing for fucksakes.
From wiki:
Orangeburg pipe (also known as “fiber conduit”, “bituminous fiber pipe” or “Bermico” or “sand pipe”) is bituminized fiber pipe used in the United States. It is made from layers of ground wood pulp fibers and asbestos fibres compressed with and bound by a water resistant adhesive then impregnated with liquefied coal tar pitch
Oof, that sounds like it was a fun project to remediate
I understand that the old lady was in some sort of emotional frenzy but odd that she didn’t sell the house for its market value, it would have sold quickly anyway. And good thing (I guess) one of her kids didn’t swoop in and buy it at the low price she listed it for. 🤔
Yeah it was weird. I bought it for the under the price of the land alone. I think her idea was to buy herself another place somewhere with the money (which she did) and leave her kids skint.
And I don’t think she would have agreed to sell it to one of them - not to mention the family feud that would have ensued if one of them had tried.
