Not having a second / vacation home makes me feel poor & depressed. Anyone else?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I really wonder about our future when these are the existential problems people are experiencing.

5 years later and where do things stand in our now present?

Everyone who owns a second home has hundreds of thousands in appreciation and has been enjoying it for five years, while the miserable know it all proles remain miserable know it all proles in their $hit shacks.

I’m not going to be mean but there is some truth to above. Our place has gone up about 700k. We love it and have made so many priceless memories there. No way are we cashing out and plan to hold for a long time.

Sometimes it’s not about the money but about family and time though. Yes we vacation elsewhere for new experiences but the second home is where we spend many weekends and the place that our kid will fondly remember spending growing up. Some things you just can’t put a price on.

My in-laws thought there kids felt that way, too. But being dragged away from their friends and activities weekend after weekend throughout their childhood has left feelings of resentment about the place and their parents that still flourishes well into their 50s.

Good lord. I'm skeptical of this story. I grew up going to a summer house and we left the day after school ended in June and didn't return till the day before school started. I remember the mad rush to Staples to get school supplies after the long drive back from Cape Cod. Not once did I or my siblings ever resent being "dragged away" from our hometown friends for the summer. We had a whole summer life on the Cape.

Any adult in their 50s who has resentment feelings over having to go to a family summer house or weekend house has other problems - if they exist.

I don’t know, this story sounds legit to me, and I speak from experience as well. For a large chunk of my childhood we’d spend all summer every summer at a lake house in upstate NY, and while there were parts of that I loved, I always hated knowing I wouldn’t see my friends until after Labor Day. Getting back would always be hectic too, since my parents always wanted to be at the lake until the last possible moment.

Do you sit around in your 50s holding a grudge against your parents for spending weekends at a weekend or summer house when you were a kid, 40 years ago? There's more to the story than we're being told and it's less the weekend house and more other issues with the parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pre pandemic you could find super charming cottages and gated golf community homes in Florida for just a few hundred grand. Those days are long done. Millennials and gen Xers who didn’t buy when prices and interest rates were low missed the boat.

Often, prices only seem low in retrospect. If you can't afford it today, it doesn't matter that 10 years from now (with a different salary) that old price seems like a bargain.

[Anonymous]

It’s basically free? By the time you sell and deduct all you spent on having the home, you broke even or came out ahead, so you had a free 2nd home during that time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s basically free? By the time you sell and deduct all you spent on having the home, you broke even or came out ahead, so you had a free 2nd home during that time.

Basically, although that money in the market would have made money. So you lose opportunity cost and compound interest but gain the ability to enjoy your money.

I’m coming up on 16 years of second home ownership. Sink about $5k into my place so far this year, need new windows and siding and have visited maybe six times this year for a night or two, which has been the average for me over the past three or four years. But it’s more than doubled in value and costs about $5k a year to carry, aside from the big ticket items every 5-10-15 years.

[Anonymous]

I'd really like one but it'd have to be very very cheap because I want a tiny mortgage, if any. Looking now and I wish I bought in early pandemic days when things were still affordable.