The other thing I don’t get is people who retire to full time on a beach in another country where they don’t know anyone. As an Air Force brat, I found that it didn’t much matter where you lived, the important thing was your friends and support system. Now I’m 60, widowed, childless, and with no siblings… the idea of moving somewhere totally unfamiliar is abhorrent.
So you’ve got a great place to sit and drink coffee in the morning- big deal. For people who live in areas with truly brutal winters, it’s easier for me to see how retirement in a mild climate would be appealing. But geography is no substitute for human support. At least not to me.
A few years ago, a couple I knew in their 40’s visited a location that they immediately fell in love with. They picked up and moved there. Once they got there… hel-LO! they were still… well: themselves. They moved a few more times and eventually they divorced and she wound up back here.
Another couple I know-- they’re in their 60’s-- have decided to move to the other coast just for a change. <shrug> I’m not opposed to adventure, but I can’t imagine making such a big change at my age and giving up friends I’ve known for many decades.
I might be okay with this. I assume if I could afford to retire in another country, I’d have extra money to help friends and family with airfare.
Maybe some of those folks are solitary types. Or they want to get away from friends and family.
My neighbors bought a house in Florida. They just spent their first winter there and said they had almost as much company as they did at home. But air fares to Florida are cheap, and their friends are also retired, with time to travel.
Hmmm… I’d probably assume that it would take every last nickel to buy the place and I wouldn’t even have enough $$ left over to buy groceries.
BTW today on HHI was a young American couple I’ve seen before. They bought an apartment in Paris. Spent $165,000 remodeling it. I tuned in late, so I don’t know what the apartment cost. Soon they’re getting married in a chateau and all the families are flying over. Who ARE these people???
The only thing wrong with these shows is that they are so popular they’ve knocked everything else off the channel. Now it HH every night for hours. I prefer design shows and they’ve been given much less time at odd hours. And Design Star seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. I hope they bring it back with some other prize since the big problem with that show was what to do with the winner - except for David Bromstad the winner’s shows were non-starters.
The same thing has happened to Animal Planet - surely there are other animals out there that are not parasites or River Monsters.
My favorite part of HH is the two to three word summary of the properties right before the choice is revealed. To me, it’s a metaphor for life on earth. You can take all this time fluffing up the the pluses and discussing the minuses of each choice, but at the end of the day it’s all about “Great kitchen” vs. “Fixer in good location.”
I love “Househunters”! Or, as I like to call it, the ‘nice’ show. ‘Nice’ is the single most utilized adjective on this show. I pointed this out to my son once as he was passing through the room while I was watching it. “Watch, what they say about this - I bet it’s ‘nice’!” Sure enough …
Now, every time he catches me watching the show, he comments, “Hey I bet that house is ‘really nice’, isn’t it?”
I, too, thought that the couple had already purchased a house and the other two were merely decoys (I probably read it in a previous thread here). So I was stunned a couple of months ago when I watched a HHI episode and at the end the couple didn’t buy any of the three.
They made a ridiculous low-ball offer on the one house deemed acceptable and were, of course, rejected. I think they offered $100k or $150k below the asking price. Jerks.
Years ago, there was an episode where the guy just changed his mind about buying a house. I suppose there was no reason not to show the episode anyway.
I saw the lowball one too, or -A- lowball episode anyway. Those people were really clueless. I never get the logic that says “If I make a really really low offer and they don’t get any other offers, they HAVE to sell to me!”. No, sweetcakes, they do not. Frankly, the vast majority of people are going to consider your offer so insulting that they won’t even bother with you any further, so don’t even dream of using this as a “negotiating tactic”.
I seem to recall from an earlier thread that the whole thing is almost always a sham. The couple usually already lives in one of the three properties; they sometimes redecorate a bit just to have some contrast in the before/after segment at the end. On at least one occasion, the prior thread said, one of the “possibility” houses was actually the agent’s own house, not for sale at all.
Ever since I heard that, I’ve starting watching with an eye toward, “which property are these yahoos actually living in right now?” It seems like I pick the correct one a lot more often.
I don’t watch either show much, but one HHI from a couple of months ago has stuck with me: couple and child were looking for a second home somewhere, Italy I think. But the final property they looked at was, and I’m being generous here, an absolute dump. It was an abandoned mission or something, way the hell up on a hillside (really, it was a 30 minute uphill hike to get your groceries home). The place was crumbling down, there was no electricity or running water, just a total disaster. And that was the place they bought, apparently thinking, “we’ll fix it up!” Uh huh. The “six months later” wasn’t any better. Absolutely insane. Hey, found a video!
My wife loves both HH and HHI. The shows drive me nuts.
It seems like the shoppers are encouraged by the producers to make comments as they tour the houses (because, otherwise, it’d be damned boring to watch). But, so often, the comments are inane, and have virtually nothing to do with a real decision as to whether or not they’ll buy that house:
“Ohh, I hate the draperies.”
“I couldn’t live with that color paint.”
“I love the furniture.” (Always said in a house in which the furniture is not included)
Well hubby and I just watched the episode, and personally we would have bought the ruin also.
To defend the ruin - it had electricity, it was turned off because of no tenants in the house at the time, they just had to turn it back on. The lack of water could probably be fixed by drilling a deep well, something mrAru has experience with having come from Fresno where the average well is something on the order of 3000 feet for most farms. It had a connection to the town cloaca from what it seemed like [there was an outhouse present that seemed to be draining into something] so it would be a matter of adding the plumbing into the renovation.
There was a donkey path and cart trail up to the house, add paving stones like a roman road and you would have a single lane suitable for something like a golf cart or in my case, Bounder makes an 11 mile per hour powerchair
mrAru and I figured that it would take about 1.5 million to turn the ruin into a very nice place to live. And we would put in a brick oven into the hole in the kitchen wall too !
Personal question: where does one get 1.5 million? Write a check for it? Or if financed, how does one manage to make the payments? That was the leaping off place for this thread.
Even before they invested 1.5 million, they could fix it up well enough. When the show visited after the purchase, the couple had moved in & had a nicely bohemian setup. I imagine a no-frills bathroom had been installed using the existing plumbing. The kitchen was probably a hot plate, a little refrigerator & a coffee pot; alas, they were years from Granite & Stainless Nirvana. Might there be places to eat nearby?
To the snobby in-laws & the friends with screaming brats: Sorry, the house is just not ready for visitors yet!
(I’ve read the buyer needs to have a house in escrow before the show is made. Originally, the “suspense” involved whether the offer would be selected; now, even the older shows have been edited to make the buyers’ choice the “mystery.” I just watch to be nosy, anyway. To laugh at the fools going into debt over McMansions (here or abroad). And, occasionally, to feel a twinge of envy.)
God yes. The other day I caught a show on TV where people show off their houses. The couple who had built their huge home themselves and who had later realized that floor-to-ceiling-windows looking north over the Atlantic isn’t a good idea? Works for me. The couple of architects for whom being in the show was both a way to show their house and a way to advertise for potential clients? Makes perfect sense, and I did like their house. The rich woman whose house apparently didn’t have any photographs of live people, whose only mention of family was showing her husband’s expensive-booze-and-cigars den and whose in-house gym was bigger than most public gyms? All I could think was “sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself that you aren’t lonely as fuck but ‘rejoicing in floaty isolation’”.
But a $50,000 a year job (until recently) wasn’t out of line. I worked in hotels and I can think of 10 managers making more than that and they were UNDER 25. If they had a wife, making that as well, that’s $100K per year. That’s only 10 years of income to get to a million dollars
One thing is the rich people still held up well in this recession. I go to upscale areas and the yuppies are still holding on well. I live in a lower income area, and my neighborhood gets worse and worse and worse. It’s 50% worse than it was a year ago. As witnessed by crime and drugs and such.
I can’t notice any differnce in the nicer areas. The shops haven’t closed, people are spending money left and right.
As for paying for them, that was the idea. You never really paid for the house, it was a rent.
For example you get a cheap mortage payment. Way under what it costs you to rent. So you buy the house on basically a signature loan. When five years pass your cheap mortagage payment baloons to 4 times what it was. But that is OK 'cause after paying the cheap mortgage payment, you sell the house. The house you bought for one million is now worth 1.5 millions. So you made have a million. You take that, which is now real money and can buy another home for a million dollars or a lessor cost home or even a more expesive home.
OK that’s oversimplified a bit, but you see how it works. You can also see how it’s dependent on the home you buy ALWAYS going up in value. Homes almost always do, or they did.
Well, a $1.5million house, financed at 80% will probably get you around $7000/mo mortgage. There are plenty of people out there making $500k/year which is about $25,000/mo after taxes. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable mortgage payment for that income level.
Watched one of those shows last night where every room, yard, closet, whatever these people saw, in all three houses, was “a little small”. Gawd I so wanted to smack the fuck out of those two! They had a relatively small budget, but they’re from TEXAS, so everything has to be HUGE for them. Apparently except their brains and their vocabulary.
Then there was another one with a young couple with who absolutely insisted on being with a small neighborhood. Every place shown in that neighborhood was at the very peak of their budget, and flawed somehow. The one place two fucking blocks outside the neighborhood was huge by comparison and perfect in every way. Except that it wasn’t in the Holy Neighborhood, so they didn’t end up buying anything. :rolleyes:
