What Was The Cost Of Your Very First House, Then & Now?

I just looked. It's actually less than that...$610/year. It's an old house in the country, but the surprising thing is that there are no fire hydrants around here...we're all on well water. So if I have a fire, it's basically S'Mores time.

What I don't understand is why my car insurance is so high. The accident rate in this sparsely populated area should be pretty low and I haven't had a claim for 25 years... and that was just me sliding in the snow.

 

Mine's assessed at around $150k here in rural central Virginia, at about 1/2 your square footage. But we both know the government plays the Assessed Value/Tax Rate game to yield the tax bill they want.

The issue here is earthquakes (who woulda thunk it?), which requires a separate rider. I understand that it's hardly worth it...the premiums and the deductible as so very high. If you recall the quake that shook the entire east coast in August 2011...I'm roughly 5 miles from the epicenter. We had aftershocks for several years. I got real good at guessing their magnitude.

And as you know, the issue driving premiums in the DC area is the higher assessed/replacement values. The neighborhood that I lived in for so long averaged $50k assessed value when I moved in, and $1M assessed value when I moved out. (And people told me that I overpaid.)

 

So you were including the benefit of liquidating that housing asset you would no longer require should you move into assisted living.

Of course, depending on the required draw-down, that would be a diminishing annual benefit.

 

That's his point.

If he moved into assisted living, he would no longer have need of the house and could sell it and invest the cash @ 4% return.

It was just an awkward way of stating it.

 

So having not looked into this, but also having considered a retirement community where I would be free of self-maintenance burdens, about how much do you think assisted living costs per month? And in what geography?

 

Just to point out what I believe may be a misunderstanding in your original post, that $10,000 for 4% of $250,000 is an annual amount, not a monthly amount. So it's closer to $830/month.

No way I could afford $80k a year unless I hit a lottery.

 

DC was even more dramatic.

I bought a house in in Vienna VA in 1978 that I used to deliver newspapers to when I was a kid. The whole neighborhood used to be small bungalow homes like mine (±600 ft²) built after WW2. The even tinier house next door used to have a shed in the back that was the bunkhouse for the construction workers who traveled from West Virginia and who built that neighborhood. One by one those small homes were torn down and replaced with "McMansions." Mine was the last original home left in the neighborhood. I lived there until 2010.

The buyer paid nearly $500,000 solely for the lot, and then incurred the cost of tearing down the existing house and hauling it away before he could begin construction on his new home. Can you imagine? $525,000 for a 1/4 acre lot before you start construction????

The whole thing is currently assessed at over $1,000,000 (typical for that area.) The guy who bought it and built the new home was a retired civilian worker from Dept of Defense. He cashed out his long-term family home up the street and wanted to stay in the neighborhood.

By way of comparison, my real estate taxes on my current 1,300 ft² house + 51 acres is half the taxes I used to pay 10 years ago on that tiny house + 1/4 acre of land. This is just a 2 hour drive away.

There is no sanity in real estate.