Reply to Where is your vacation house? Where would you get one?

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[quote=Anonymous]We live on the west coast now and have a place in the mountains that is 55 minutes away from our house. We don’t rent it out and spend ~25 weekends/year there plus random longer stretches. Reasons we bought it, in case it is helpful:

1. Space: Primary house is small but the amount we spent on 2nd house would get us only an additional ~300 sq ft in the city. We use 2nd house for off-season storage, space-consuming activities and hosting groups of guests who wouldn’t fit in our city house. We can host one small family at our city house, but 3-4 families and packs of kids in the mountains.

2. Kid activities: It is in a ski area that we went to already and one of the kids’ winter activities is skiing. Having an activity at the 2nd house helps increase the days we are there, although inevitably birthday parties, other sports tournaments, and religious stuff complicate our mountain weekends.

3. Flexibility: We ski a lot but it was annoying to have to rush back to let the dog out or hire a dog walker on ski days. It is really nice to just walk home and take a shower and not race back through traffic. We often leave for the city at 7 am on a Monday if we feel like it. Since we don’t rent it, it’s nice to leave perishables in the freezer and not have to pack or put away our personal items.

Nothing about our purchase is especially rational or financially sound. We don’t plan to retire there and aren’t really sentimental about the house. It can be a pain to hire people in the mountains and we deal with power outages, avalanche danger, and wildfire risk. There isn’t trash collection and it took us years to get internet. Sometimes we leave something important at one house or the other and have to drive back in the middle of the night or during the week. We feel wasteful booking trips to other places when we have a perfectly lovely place to go to that we’ve already paid for. But we’ve also found that we entertain more spontaneously and happily in the mountains and get to experience a different side of our kids and their friends when we’re there together.[/quote]

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