Baby Boomers & Falling Real Estate Prices

[NotCranky]

Congratulations slacker. Your life style and plans sound really great! My situation is a little different in severals way. I have 3 kids under 5 years old and I am 44.I have fairly nice house 2280 sq feet on 20 acres that I built with the ideas of living debt free and of capitalizing on my efforts at resale time or when we put it out as rental. I don’t mind enjoying that luxury until then. My two greatest puposes are to be able to stay close to my kids and to increase our financial freedom. I am not a frugality purist but I have those two reasons to keep me on track.

Bugs you are a really smart man..I think you are a man? You said you are only good at what you do for a living. If you don’t do speculative cultural analysis (I made that up) for a living you are a genius in at least two fields. I think you are an appraiser of pretty complex projects? Maybe that is someone else on the blog? Your line of thinking on the topic of baby boomers reminds me of something that I think might be an emerging trend. Extended families a la Mexico.That would be a cause and an effect of the shrinking economy scenario.I just can’t see people not having to pool resources in the future. I enjoy the idea myself,at least in theory.There is a family that is living like that out near where I live. Yes they are white. Three generations with multiple siblings in all three.I think the oldest generation may have mostly passed but there is at least one couple left.

[Bugs]

Idiot savant. Barely functioning. Counting on fingers and toes. Eat with hands. Drink beer. Married monogamous white male of 50; socially inept and barely tolerated in public. So I stay in. I do surf, though – but only because nobody in the lineup seems to mind.
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The demographic angle isn’t mine and I couldn’t take credit for it. I read it in a book a while back, the title of which escapes me. The economist was talking about wealth transfer to the Boomers from the Greatest Generation (although the book precedes when that phrase was coined). He said that the consumption patterns and refusal to save of the Boomers was heavily influenced by their knowledge that their parents would pass on inheritable estates to them before the boomers would retire. Boomers have basically been spending their inheritances.

He also said the consumption patterns would wind down rather quickly as of 2010, which would have corresponding effects on the general economy. He noted that the GenX kids coming up had different definitions of success, and that lifestyle and leisure time would be more important to them than corporate titles and suits and commuting. That’s one reason for the extended childhood that’s currently in vogue; it isn’t all the result of Boomers spoiling their children.

I didn’t agree with everything he was saying at the time, but I did see enough parallels close to home to pay attention to him.
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The generational house for the extended family isn’t new, not even in the U.S.. Neither are communal living arrangements of various sorts. Remember the boarding houses commonly depicted in the westerns? Bunkhouse on the ranch? Single room apartments with shared bathrooms down at the end of the hall and a dining room downstairs? I appraised a building like that in downtown San Diego about 10 years ago; it was recently converted to condos but that required totally gutting the interior.

All told, I think the nuclear family may yet turn out to be the anomoly.

For a while back in the mid-90s I was thinking about buying a nice triplex or 4-plex to run my own version of the extended family compound; minus, of course, the weapons cache and bunkers that are favored by the religious nutcases. The idea was to start a family trust and pass it from generation to generation. My oldest was a teeneager at the time. I came to realize that if they have the opportunity, most adults prefer to be off on their own and not participate in a patriarchal hierarchy. The spouses of the kids suffer a bit in many of those situations, and privacy is tough. Plus, my wife hated the idea. That ended that.

I think people will gravitate towards small and medium-sized condos and townhomes before they choose to double up in a large house. I think it’s practially a crime that the average tract house ever got any bigger than about 2,000 SqFt. With that said, I also think its possible that doubling up may become a lot more common because of the economics involved.

Now which fork do I use for the salad? I keep forgetting.

[Author]

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