After 33 years and four children, Baby Boomers Marta and Octavian Dragos say they feel trapped in what was once their dream home in El Cerrito, California.
Both over 70, the Dragos are empty nesters, and like many of their generation, they’re trying to figure out how to downsize from their 3,000-square-foot, five-bedroom home.
“We are here in a huge house with no family nearby, trying to make a wise decision, both financially and for our well-being,” said Dragos, a retired teacher.
But selling and downsizing isn’t easy, appealing or even financially advantageous for many homeowners like the Dragos family.
Many Boomers whose homes have surged in value now face massive capital gains tax bills when they sell. This is a kind of tax on the profit you make when selling an investment or an asset, like a home, that has increased in value.
Plus, smaller homes or apartments in the neighborhoods they’ve come to love are rare. And with current prices and mortgage rates so high, there is often a negligible cost difference between their current home and a smaller one.
… What’s the issue?
They paid for the next place, including fees, and still have $50k in their pocket? How greedy does someone need to be, exactly, before we consider the behavior repugnant?
The issue is that they sold a large home and bought a small home and had very little money left over. It doesn’t make financial political sense to do that. They might as well stay where they are. There is little incentive to downsize.
Part of the solution to the housing crisis is solving that incentive problem.
Aww, poor them. They only had enough left over to pay fully for their next place and pocket $50k.
As long as you ignore property taxes and maintenance costs. Which normal people don’t ignore.
Maintenance costs are probably fairly minimal given how little wear and tear happens in an empty nest. And property taxes for elderly folks are usually frozen or nearly frozen in place - meaning the next buyer will be paying a much higher tax on the same house because they won’t qualify for those exemptions.
It seems like you don’t own a home, so I’m not sure there’s much point in continuing this conversation.
To the contrary - I own a large home in an urban area and it is filled with my children. But we don’t have to have a conversation - I was only pointing out the flaws in your logic. My tax bill will be $12k this year while my elderly next door neighbor’s will be a fraction of that. Our homes are identical (3k sqft over 3 floors). She’s not leaving because it would make little financial sense to do so. This is quite common.
Sounds like one of those people that doesn’t take a raise because it’ll put them in a new tax bracket. People that don’t know how the adult world works.
The have their new property paid for and also have a much smaller property tax bill and lower maintenance costs. There’s still plenty of incentive to downsize.
Paying taxes on profit might hurt a little, but it’s a good problem to have.
What? They would have a much bigger property tax bill
If their smaller new house is worth less than their original the property tax bill will be less. This is one of the incentives to downsizing.
That’s not how property taxes work in California. They’re likely paying way less than they would be if they bought a new house, even if it was smaller
I think the issue is that with mortgage prices and the incredible costs of homes in California, capital gains tax comes into play for them when the vast majority of homeowners never even consider it.
So you have people with a large single family home wanting to sell and move into a small single family home (1-2bed) or even a condo and they end up with no benefit from doing so and potentially even an expensive mortgage. Essentially they are selling an Escalade to get a Civic and breaking even, which seems odd.
I think the capital gains tax exception should be expanded to be waived for single family homes under XXXX sq ft, with the above stipulations (living in the home continuously). It’s not these people’s fault their neighborhood shot up in price outpacing regulations meant to protect normal home owners.
Their only real out in this situation is to move away from where they’ve lived their whole lives.
Waive tax for primary residence, tax the everliving fuck out of non-primary residences to the point nobody wants to rent them out anymore.
Nope. No exceptions. You made money for doing no work, you pay taxes on that money. Plain and simple. Cap Gains tax rates are already absurdly low, so frankly anybody asking for a further reduced rate or exception is already a greedy pig not worth listening to.
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I see you’ve never sold a house. If you do, have fun losing 15% of that value. The only way to prevent that is for your house to not accrue any value while you lived in it.
Cry to someone that gives a shit. Be less greedy. I’ve paid my share of capital gains, you don’t see me crying like a greedy little piggy about it.
It’s too bad no one agrees with you and you’ll die mad about it.
Seems like plenty people agree taxes should be paid. In fact so many people agree that it’s a law. Your greed will never fill that void, btw.
You can actually deduct the cost of any improvements you’ve made to the home. You can’t do much about inflation costs, but are you really arguing that it’s bad to only receive 85% of free money rather than 0% by not selling?
Except you aren’t just selling. You also have to buy. And if from the tax and high housing prices it’s a wash to downsize, there’s not nearly the incentive to.
High housing prices also mean a high selling price for you too and taxes being percentage based means there’s never a scenario where you wind up with less money than you would from selling a smaller, cheaper house because regardless of where you are, bigger houses sell for a lot more than smaller houses. The only scenario where this makes sense is if you sold a large home in a place like rural Oklahoma and moved to a shoebox in San Francisco, but that’s not what’s being described in the article.
You’ve missed the point. People are breaking even downsizing. That’ll mean they won’t. It goes over this in detail in the article.
If I’ve missed the point then why can’t you explain how big houses are selling for nearly the same as small houses to the point where people are breaking even going from 3000sqft 5 bedroom homes to a 1200sqft 2 bedroom? A 15-20% loss from capital gains over 500k isn’t going to do that nor is an additional 15% tax from California.
The only possible scenario where that makes sense is if you’re comparing a $500k home from a married couple to another couple with a home valued at 30% over $500k. For those people, they’re going to receive the same as the couple who had $500k in capital gains. This is a math problem so you can’t just waive it away with “my opinion is different and you missed my point.”
The example in the article is absurd as a single family home with property isn’t going to sell for slightly more than a condo unit in some giant complex. That’s why they had to rely on an example with made up numbers. If you look up a home their size in El Cerrito, just outside San Francisco, you’re looking at $1.6M while a condo is going for $400k. Surely they could afford a $400k condo with $1.37M in profit.