Second/Vacation Homes

[skaredshtles]

<snip>
So, in conclsuion, if you have some family with a 2nd home, be nice and offer to help out with the upkeep and taking care of the little things when you get a chance to use the place and avoid the mortgage, utilities and property taxes.

It's kind of like a boat in that regard.

It's better to have a friend with a boat than to own a boat.

[hawkgt]

So, in conclsuion, if you have some family with a 2nd home, be nice and offer to help out with the upkeep and taking care of the little things when you get a chance to use the place and avoid the mortgage, utilities and property taxes.

truth, wife's grandparents had a lake house down on Table Rock lake, southwest side. linked up to part of family other side of hill to the next cove. sweet property, i put in my sweat equity for sure over the years. they loved me when i showed up and they put my ass to work.

[Core Shot]

My grandparents owned a cottage on Lake Michigan in SW Michigan (well, technically up the hill in the woods off the lake, but it had deeded beach access down a path which I think was the best of both worlds). My grandpa was an architect and he designed and self built a guest cottage/bunkroom on the property as the family grew. They owned it from before I was born up until a couple years after I finished college.

I'm incredibly sad that it is not in the family anymore. But the timing of them wanting to be free of it just didn't work out with either my dad or his sister's ability to buy it...and they did the classic grumpy old man thing of not really being willing to discuss their finances or motivations for selling with their children. They started trying to sell it in the wake of the financial crisis (though it took several years) and my Aunt/Uncle had just made the choice to move further away and buy a more expensive house than they were planning on...a little "heads up" or willingness to work out the money (e.g. answer questions like "what do you need the money for? How much do you actually need *right now*? etc.) could have changed things.?).

Are we related?
SW mich lake house. Third generation. I can’t see selling. Ever.
Only there for one or two weeks.
But memories. Mine. My parents. Aunts uncles cousins my kids etc.

With no emotional attachment it’s harder to justify a second home. Unless you’re wealthy enough.

[frorider]

There’s a tradition of sorts in my extended family of having a modest place in the city of employment (apartment, small house..) to enable having some sort of getaway cabin or yurt or whatever in the mountains or at the beach.

My aunt & uncle (NZ) intentionally built a cabin so small that it could never host a family get together. Just big enough for two overlooking a black sand beach. Otherwise it can turn into just another location for the daily grind of cooking/cleaning etc. Solar power, simple heating system, etc. Sorta like #vanlife but it doesn’t go anywhere.

My grandparents had a biggish vacation house & while I enjoyed it as a kid I’m glad it was sold. Would’ve been a massive headache for the family to maintain.

Seems like careers & divorces etc spread families out so much that the idea of a collectively supported & enjoyed vacation home feels old school to the point of being impractical :shrug:

[riser4]

Place for two off the grid on a black sand beach sounds like paradise to me.

[tang]

We considered a second place up in the mtns at one point but decided we preferred 1) the freedom to travel and explore and 2) the simplicity of a single home base. No regrets.
We’ve also stuck mostly to hotels when traveling since airbnb seems to generally be a curse on humanity.

[easyrdr]

Shit I got all the answers on this one, just bought the vacation cabin two weeks ago. Getting 5 weeks in it a year, renting the rest the time to pay for it. Once it’s paid down enough, stop renting and use it more.

[singlesline]

https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Family.../dp/141331841X

Are we related?
SW mich lake house. Third generation. I can’t see selling. Ever.
Only there for one or two weeks.
But memories. Mine. My parents. Aunts uncles cousins my kids etc.

With no emotional attachment it’s harder to justify a second home. Unless you’re wealthy enough.

I think it is no surprise that plugboots' book about saving the family cottage is written by three *Michigan* attorneys.

And I really think the maintenance woes go down a lot if you're willing for the place to be smaller and low-frills. You want a cottage to have "charm" not "luxury"...although you still need at least some people who derive some enjoyment from doing the work.

The sad thing is that my grandparents died with plenty of assets to leave to my dad/aunt. Not anything crazy...but enough that they clearly didn't really need the proceeds for anything (and my grandpa lived to his mid 90s so its not like he died early and just didn't have time to spend it)...but the obstinate old man "we don't talk about money" crap prevented a plan to save it. Instead his kids inherited cash and a North Carolina home that was promptly liquidated because nobody wanted it or had any attachment to it.


A couple of cottages were torn down and a bunch of trees were taken out to build this 8bed/10bath mansion just down the beach...


No thanks...who wants to take care of or clean that thing?
Made the lakeshore ugly AF for everyone else too...all the old cottages are tucked away into the trees/bluffs and then this thing just plopped down (and cut an ugly road to the beach to be able to get down all their noisy toys).

That's the person whose hands that book is trying to keep away from your cottage. They'll buy it because the grandkids can't agree on how to deal with it and then they'll ruin it.

[riser4]

We’ve also stuck mostly to hotels when traveling since airbnb seems to generally be a curse on humanity.

This

[Danno]

.

[Danno]

Interesting thread, as I am hoping to buy a place in the next year. My situation differs from what many here describe as it will be a "ski condo" so there will be a lot less (but not zero) home maintenance tasks.

We have considered renting it out a lot but I am warming to the idea of buying a place we can afford and just using it and allowing friends to use it and sparing ourselves the hassle of renting.

I assume we will use it a lot because it will be 90 minutes away (if in Grand County) or 3 hours away (if in Steamboat). But my girlfriend has been adamant that we will still camp a lot, she is afraid of the phenomenon of having to go there all the time and not going elsewhere. I'm fine with camping a bunch -- twist my arm! -- but my parents owned a place in VT and went there all the time, and rarely went elsewhere, and I didn't mind it because the place was so peaceful.

[Mazderati]

They're only a burden on a budget. Afford to buy vs afford to maintain. Everyone likes options.

[XXX-er]

$35K per year in property taxes? This sounds like a bunch of horseshit.

she showed a pict of a really nice house on a lake out eastern US somewhere, she is just some fucking American from Colorado and they are all full of horseshit or they should be so you are probably correct eh

[old goat]

We bought a house on Donner Lake when our eldest turned 5 and we realized we would be competing with other families with school age kids weekends, holidays, and summers. It's only an 1 1/2 hr from Sacramento. We were there most weekends when the kids were in school (sometimes over their protests) with long weekends summers and winters. After the kids got older we were often here more than at "home" in Sacramento. We hope to keep it until we die and pass it on to the kids (2) if they want it. They both love the place now. It's a lot of work but a lot of the work is stuff we enjoy--carpentry, landscape maintenance, minor repairs. We have never regretted it. Now it's our full time home. We're hanging on to Sacramento in anticipation of getting too old for the winters. If we never had kids we probably wouldn't have bought it and traveled more although we've done a fair bit of traveling since the kids left home.

My aunt and uncle had a cottage on a lake in SW MI--30 minutes from NW Detroit. They spent all summer there, my cousin rebuilt it and spends as much time as he can there. We spent a lot of time there as kids and it's some of my fondest memories.

The devil is in the details. Affordability (make sure you're not dependent on rental income), close enough to use enough, enough to do keep you occupied, accept that it will come at the expense of relationships in your primary home since you'll be at the second house so much. And you'll likely entertain visitors a lot.

[easyrdr]

Curious to know if folks who have purchased/inherited family vacation homes have enjoyed them or came to think of them as a burden? Both?

I realize I didn’t exactly answer this in my other post. The answer is both. The second home we just bought is 850sq ft, 3bd 2 bath, on the lake. Small, manageable, but also something I wouldn’t put my family of 5 in for year round living.

My family had a cottage on the lake growing up. Five generations moved through it. Then when it went to my parents/aunts uncles, they decided to build bigger to fit the growing family. Totally ruined the place, shit pile more maintenance and upkeep. Now the next generation either doesn’t want to deal with it or if they want it they can’t afford it. Writing is on the wall it will go up for sale when it passes to my generation. Keep it small, keep it simple, keep it as that getaway and it is awesome. Make it anything more and it doesn’t work.

[The Reverend Floater]

We have a cabin outside Stanley. We use it a ton and I can tell you exactly why…because it’s only an hour and fifteen minutes away. I can run up there to grab stuff or deal with something and come back in the same day pretty easily.

I believe realism in terms of proximity is the most important factor by far. Saves you money and just makes it less of a production.


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[GoldMember]

We bought a ski condo at Schweitzer in 1992. It's 400 sf and cost us $38k. There's virtually little to no individual unit maintenance and it's so small that cleaning it when we leave is a breeze. We only use it in the winter, usually, and don't even think about it when ski season's over.

With real estate values there going through the roof, whenever we do decide to sell, we will come out of it at 12-15X by today's estimate. So the way I see it, we will have 30+ years of being ski-in/ski-out on the mountain, no real headaches, and being paid well to have owned it whenever we sell. I can't think of any negatives to that.

On the other hand, when I was a kid and I'd go with a friend to their lake cabin, we always had a great time. The mom would be doing whatever, us kids were sailing, swimming, roaming the woods. The Dad would always be tied up on some kind of maintenance project on the cabin. No way did I want that so never wanted a lake place. Condos are great as they're virtually maintenance free.

[Buster Highmen]

I grew up with a dad who loved to have a place to build and work on, so we had a little place with no running water in MN, then a really cool 5 sided partially subsurface place in northern WI. I spent a lot of time at each of those places, swimming, fishing, shooting innocent small animals, skiing and lots of stumbling around in the woods stoned.

The place in MN was 90 minutes from our home around Minnetonka and the WI place was 6 hours from our place in Shorewood, the latter while I was in JR high and high school. I got used to spending a lot of time driving.

For my first home, I wanted to avoid a mortgage, so we bought on contracts a little fishing shack on a local river and over the course of 15 years, built an amazing 4000 ft^2 house with 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, a turret, library, mondogourmando kitchen where we did a bunch of the work ourselves, subbing out serious stuff but doing finishing and particularly tile in bathrooms and kitchen. Brought our kids home from the hospital there. It was a shitload of maintenance, but I could catch salmon 60 feet from my door.

But as things changed and kids got bigger and more work, with a shitty local school system and a fucked neighborhood, we decided to sell just before the market crash in 2006. We made bank and found a cheaper old hippie house in the woods closer to my in laws farm that was the nexus of my kids preschool lives.

In the final years at the riverhouse we were looking for a place to have a ski house. We'd skied all over the west and while the big resorts had big attractions, they were expensive and overrun. More development brought less enjoyment of places like JH before the sublette quad. So, in 2002, when our son was 1 year and 3 months, we bought a family lifetime pass to Silverton Mountain. Don't ask, I won't tell, but it was a song and I reserved a spot for our kid yet to be in the deal. As such our daughter was born with a lifetime pass.

So, in 2006, we rolled some of the profit from the riverhouse into a shack in Silverton and agonized for years how to fix it up. It had a shitty cellar that was collapsing, so we scraped it and built new, big enough to accommodate friends and we spent 10 super fun years there, The M.O was for me to drive our stuff the 20 hours from Seattle to Silverton, stopping in Ogden, SLC, Telluride, etc to visit friends and ski and then roll down to ABQ to pick up the family or sometimes friends, stopping at Wolf Creek, Taos or Ski Santa Fe. ON the way back, sometimes we'd boogie the 6 hours straight back, but lots of times we'd do a few days at Taos. We probably spent around 6 to 8 weeks a year there and had a fucking blast, the Memory Mint. Our kids were for a little while the youngest to ski off the chair at SM. We made tons of friends there, especially among the guides and the Brills who were incredibly kind to us. Skied a ton at T'ride before it got too expensive and many days at Purg when the SM chair was still. Some bc days too.

That went on for about 10 years until my son decided that the extra days off from school made his goals of perfection in academia too difficult. So, for the last 7 or so years, I've been going solo, now complicated by the fact that my in laws are failing and my wife is a devoted caregiver. Now I'm down to 3-4 weeks a year and wondering what the plan should be for the future. In the last few years, we rented a room to some of the SM guides, pilots and staff, but we haven't finished one of the bathrooms, so the town shut down our rental, stupid given the demand for housing.

I'm getting old and approaching some junctions in life, but fwiw, doing a second home at that time in that place was among the best and luckiest things I've ever done. Fuck the profits and shit, I'll cherish it on my death bed for all the wonder and joy it brought.

I've kept all this on the dl for years due to some bad situations that arose from some less than decent people knowing about it. My friends have always been welcome, but I'm pretty leery of any solicitation.

[neufox47]

I’m about to find out, we close on a 1,000 sqft cabin in Soda Springs next week. It’s keeping me up at night but it’s a lifelong dream. ?


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[Name Redacted]

We had a second condo in a ski town that we used because my wife worked there and we rented it out on weekends/holidays. It was OK, but like having a second job for sure. Ended up selling it and making a decent profit.

My folks had a lake house in bama. It was super cool, but a ton of work. They sold it and probably broke even or lost money on it. They bought a condo in the town I live in so they have a place to stay when visiting. Rent it out the rest of the time. It is a good investment, but they generally break even on it besides the equity. It is great because they don't have to stay at my place though.

Personally, I know RE is a good investment generally, but after the experiences above, I'll probably try to invest in ways that are more passive and spend money on traveling. I prefer to go to new places and explore rather than being tied down to visiting the same place all the time and having to work on it when I am there. Worrying about spending money on a whole other home sucks.

[AdironRider]

accept that it will come at the expense of relationships in your primary home since you'll be at the second house so much.

This is a very important point, and often very much overlooked. My wife seems fine with it but I struggle with it sometimes. No one else in our social circle has a place to get away to and it does lead to some missed opportunities.

I've pretty much settled on taking as much advantage of the place now while our son isn't in school, for as others have mentioned, he will soon be to busy to spend every weekend there. That said, I don't want him to be left off the invite list, notably because he is an only child, and to miss out on building solid relationships of his own.

Very much a first world problem.

[singlecross]

I recommend buying an Island, and I think Harry does too.

[ticketchecker]

I recommend buying an Island, and I think Harry does too.

Those heli bros moving in next door to you?



Interesting thread for my world.

The GF and I own two 3 unit buildings in a great neighborhood (we live in one of them) and the clock is running out on my tolerance for apartment living and how long I want to continue being a landlord. Currently we rent out our own unit at different times to cover renting places to live elsewhere. It certainly works and to an extent it's better than having to maintain these temp second homes. It just gets old living in other peoples houses for extended periods of time and we missed the boat on RE costs to grab a camp on the cheap.

So the big question for us is do we buy a third property or sell one of the apartment buildings and grab a house somewhere. The math pencils out to go either way on the equation, but in life the things we own can end up owning us.

That 3 months in EU plan sounds pretty good

[zion zig zag]

Some of y’all are talking about a level of maintenance and upkeep that I haven’t experienced. If I go use the place for a three day weekend, I bet on average only a couple of hours of that is spent doing housework. Sometimes none, sometimes a bit more, but it has never stopped me from getting the biking or skiing time I wanted.

[Bunion 2020]

My "ideal" is 10 acres in the middle of BFE that has decent access, a concrete pad you can park a camper on while visiting, possibly a well and power and eventually a small building (< 200 sq ft) that houses a kitchen and full bathroom.