I’m rich I tell you
I got one of those papers in the mail from the state saying how much my land and house is worth this year, and shows the value last year. The value of the land and house combined has risen $47K US Dollars in one year.
I am shocked at how high it has risen. I purchased this house three years ago at $156K. It is now just under $250K. The price just sounds so high. Think of it. That is 25% of one million dollars. ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!! I can’t even imagine what it is doing to my taxes.
I lived most of my childhood in an old three story farm house on an acre of land that was worth $100K. Throughout the time that I have lived here, my house has increased by the total value of my parents old home.
I was astonished at the prices of houses when I started looking compared to the value of the house that I grew up in. My brother got his condo at $86K and it is small. My sisters don’t have there own homes yet. So this means I’m the sibling with the most expensive house, and the only sibling who actually has land.
Unfortunately, my house isn’t all that grand. I have a third of an acre that is a pain to mow. The wiring in the house is not all that great for a computer geek/dork/nerd like me either. One day I’ll upgrade to those new fangled 3 prong grounded electrical outlets.
I strangely feel that my wife and I deserve better. I would love to live in those fancy new houses that offer the following:
- Lots of space for sectional living room furniture
- A bay window for the cats to nap in the sun
- Grounded electrical outlets. If I’m lucky, they will all work as well.
- A dependable heating system that I am comfortable with such as a heat-pump
- A house that isn’t a “Fixer-Upper”
- A two-car garage connected to the house
- An attic that is accessible with real steps
- A shack to hold garden supplies and the lawn mower
- A nice wooden deck that isn’t deteriorating
- A back yard that is level and where the trees are a safe distance from the house
- I would love to have a fence that isn’t rusting, bent up, and overgrown with weeds
- A garden that actually gets sunlight.
Unfortunately, those houses are in the $350K - $500K area down here in Woodbridge, VA. Maybe if I wait five years, my house will be worth that much and we can move to one of those fancy houses.
March 19th, 2005 at 4:47 am
Except that by the time your house is worth that much ($500k), the one you want will be a million bucks. I’d say, sell what you got, and move to the middle of Texas or Kansas, where you can get what you want for the equity balance in your home and telecommute from there..
March 21st, 2005 at 9:49 pm
You are one lucky bastard, we got our paper telling us how much more our house is worth now than when we bought it a year ago.. and with that paper came a nice huge property tax bill…
March 21st, 2005 at 10:24 pm
I don’t know if I have any bills with that as well. My mortgage company convieniently hides all of that from me.
February 9th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
[…] Last year I thought I was rich. I always get impressed with the assessed value of my house when I receive them in the mail. Today I heard about a website called Zillow. This website gathers public information about houses and makes it easy to find out how much your house is worth. […]