Median price for a home in Columbus, OH is $186,000.
One of the women who is on EOC and whose husband is also on EOC was telling one of my frolleagues about her family's lake house and how her dad and his siblings are selling it. She was like: "It is my lake house too! I don't want them to sell it!"
Apparently she said: "It is a $1,200,000 lake house. The property taxes are $30,000. So they want to sell it and split up the money."
My frolleague was like: "Wow... The property taxes are more than half my salary!" But the woman who is my boss's boss said just went on lamenting the loss of her lake house.
She consoled herself by saying: "Someday my husband and I will buy a lake house. That way our kids can grow up with a lake house because I grew up with one and my husband grew up with one too. We want our kids to have that and our grandkids too."
Median income for 2 wage earners is 52k. We have discussed cashing out and moving but have lots of friends, so many things to do all the time. Plus beautiful and perfect weather.
I don't consider this to be an example of EOC. I know I'm not alone in that if you are lucky enough to have grown up on the water in the summer with family, you develop very strong emotional ties to the house. I can definitely speak for myself, having lived on the beach in my great-aunt's cottage in the summer. I idealized that place for decades and to this day I refuse to do a Google Earth on it because I couldn't take the emotional toll if I saw that someone HGTV-d it. I was devastated when my mother sold it, and I probably took the words out of your friend's friend's mouth.
My husband had a similar experience in the summer with his relatives. Our common history with family beach houses is probably a strong reason why we wound up here with a house right on the lake.
Taxes on a beach house can be extremely ridiculous, that's true. I became FB friends with the guy who lived across the street from me at the beach (and with whom I had adolescent summer fling in 1965. . He and his sister finally sold their cottage, which had been in the family since the turn of the century, because they couldn't even use the cottage in the summer. They rented it out to pay the taxes.
So your friend's friend is just having a normal emotional response to what she considers a huge loss. I think you can cut this particularly EOC a break. Family vacation homes are a luxury for sure, but they're not about the money.
"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
www.silententry.wordpress.com
Well, because you don't have relationships and always want to be ready to run with what fits in your vehicle, you wouldn't understand what it is to be a family, make a home and feel rooted in the life created over decades. So I shouldn't be surprised that you think everyone should simply pick up and move. Sigh......
EOC to me is defined by the following statement: The authors also make the observation that UAWs tend to have children who require an influx of their parents' money in order to afford the lifestyle that they expect for themselves, and that they are less likely to have been taught about money, budgeting and investing by their parents.
There are couple of terms that probably need to added to this discussion:
1. Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAWs) - defined as "age * income * 10% = net worth"; so a 50 year old has an annual income of $100,000 should have a net worth of $100,000*50*10% = $500,000. If that person / family has less then that number then they are UAW.
2. Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAWs) - The inverse of UAW.
UWAs from both the book and my observations of certain family members not in our household want to spend their money on stuff. They haven't met a dime they didn't want to spend. As a result their children adopt the lifestyle and need more money than they make. The dominos really start falling when mom and dad can no longer work and need help.
That is an excellent summation of the EOC material from the book, eleighj! I had forgotten about the PAW/UAW and how that factored in. I think you really nail it here:
"As a result their children adopt the lifestyle and need more money than they make. The dominos really start falling when mom and dad can no longer work and need help."
I spent my summers on a cabin at the lake. When we went to Wisconsin we located it and walked the property. I brought pictures to show the owners but they weren’t home. It was a small resort when my folks owned it. I understood when my folks sold it. Here you have to be wealthy to own anything on a lake.
My experiences are, it isn't wealthy parents who tend to have kids that are EOC, but those that would still be classified as middle class income.
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