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By DAMON DARLIN
Published: September 10, 2006
It’s often said that immigrants do the jobs Americans don’t want to do. They’ve just been assigned another task: Buy the homes of the baby boom generation. But this task is one that native-born Americans simply can’t do. There won’t be enough of them.
Many of the 78 million boomers, the first of whom turn 60 this year, will sell their property over the next two decades, says George Masnick, a research affiliate with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Some will move to a smaller home or to their second home, others will move into a managed-care complex. And for some who never moved, it will be their estate making the sale. What many boomers should be asking right now is who will buy their 34 million homes.
The problem goes beyond immigration: who is going to buy the glut of recently built McMansions, at a time that demographics show a preference for homes 1800 sq ft and less? As in North Dakota, I think we’ll see lots of homes sell below construction cost. McMansions and Hummers, a symbol of the overconsumption and waste of early 2000, will be shunned. Who will buy them?
It will be an era of great job opportunities and low housing prices. Boomer retirement will create millions of vacancies, and the glut of homes will drive down prices.
Not too many; between pension funds going under (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp insures only a fraction of the obligation), home prices goind down (retirement backup for many), flat wages, and rising debt, not too many.
Did you see the Frontline story about the new trend of boomers working part-time after “retirement”? I posted it this summer… According to Frontline, traditional retirement is history!
Working part-time in old age is a good idea so long as you enjoy what you do. People who work live longer (god forbid) healthier lives. I plan to work, at least in some capacity, until I die.
Traditional retirement was made for an industrial age where people’s bodies were exhausted from a lifetime of physical labor. There’s no reason to retire anymore.
My dad is 78 and I convinced him to go back to grad school rather than staying idle at home. Elderly people need to exercise their minds in order to avoid Alzheimers disease.
I wonder how many Boomers will have the finances to actually be able to retire?
Probably not alot.. but lifespans are longer, and medicine is more advanced so most of these folks will probably work another 5-10 years more than the generations before.
If they want to retire earlier, they can always move to a cheaper country where their dollars will get them farther. Why not build tunnels and send all the US retirees to Mexico?!
Joking aside, there are more and more US retirees moving to cheaper foreign places, in Europe for the wealthier, Mexico, Central America for middle class. European health care system, although not as good as the US in many way, is still not bad on average, and most of the time cheaper. I don’t know if Medicare would cover US retirees abroad (I doubt it), but it could be a solution for cheaper healthcare.
Living in Western Europe is substantially more expensive than America in my opinion. I’m not sure Americans retirees are ready to trade-in their roomy houses for a small flat in Europe. Plus Americans are foreign language averse so the only places their could live are Ireland, the UK, perhaps the Scandinavian countries, Germany and Switzerland. Those countries are too cold and dreary in the winter.
By comparaison, you could buy a house in areas of America (Florida, Georgia, Carolinas, etc..) for $100k.
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