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We'd been at our Scottsdale place (second home) for a few days when late at night I felt "weird". I checked my pulse repeatedly and sure enough, I'd contracted atrial fibrillation. It's not hard to detect if you listen for it.
I mention this because of the possibility of any of us having problems with Afib. I have to go back to Stanford in a few days to get my monthly Nucala injection. There are long stretches in that 600 mile jaunt where there are no top-notch EDs. I'm wearing a Holter monitor now.
My husband wants to sell the Scottsdale place. I get it: There would be substantial gains. And he would see his friends more often.
Was this recently?
Questions about Afib: Was your pulse noticeably faster and were there other symptoms? I’m wondering what you mean by listening for it.
Was this recently?
Questions about Afib: Was your pulse noticeably faster and were there other symptoms? I’m wondering what you mean by listening for it.
Apparently, sometimes Afib doesn't create noticeable symptoms, but you can probably always detect it when checking your pulse. I've had one episode so far. Felt breathless, pulse was pounding (not necessarily faster, just oddly throbby and erratic) light headed and unsteady, basically unwell and increasingly uneasy. I didn't know what was wrong but I had had a cardiac thrombosis + mild heart attack 2 years before and because of that, verified the SVT I was probably born with and began paying more attention to heart rhythm. When symptoms didn't seem to be letting up after a day I drove myself to the ER. We don't have "urgent" clinics here and I knew I probably wouldn't be able to walk in to see my PCP. It wasn't until the ER nurse put me on a monitor and said "Oh yeah, you're definitely in Afib right now" the idea ever occurred to me. They did a cardioversion then and there.
Nice photos and interesting stories. The fact remains that in the world of Europe in which I lived, there was a disproportionately large number of only children who bought their home (usually a condo) in or near a large city while their parents still lived in some house in the countryside, and inherited an ancestral house (eg, on the coast) which they subsequently used as the vacation home. If there were two siblings, they tended to split the ancestral house as the vacation home. I know of a lot of that, enough that I consider it very common, among people in all types of economic status. And the parents (or grandparents) that left the house as an inheritance were typically closer to poor than to rich. Having a vacation home is common in Europe, and the vacation home is usually acquired by the mechanism I just described.
My acquaintances in Europe (from the 1960s-70s when I grew up on that continent, and those from other Euro countries that I met in various contexts) tended to be all urban dwellers. I don't really know how people lived who still lived in remote villages around 1945-1970 - maybe they still had ten kids, in which case the average between them and urban dwellers with 1 or 2 kids would have been 6 kids, which is indeed a baby boom :-). But growing up, and later meeting various Europeans, I did not know anyone with a large family.
I agree with you, the home that I lived in belonged to the eldest son my mom's brother, and is now a B&B and still in the family also in Europe.
We moved back to the farm during the war for safety reasons.
Just depends on the personal way people travel. As a kid we had a trailer (didn't work out well for our family)
Several friends RV FT and PT with trailers and it's just perfect for them.
Trailer is better if you go to a destination (get there early) and stay a few days to a few months.
We often drive till 2-4AM (as a truckdriver- I prefer light traffic and cool weather). Your neighbors, 4 ft away in a campground are not gonna appreciate the yelling and cursing of backing a trailer into a tight spot in the dark.
We often find spots we like that have no space for a trailer.
(We seldom have a set plan... if we find a spot we like, we stop and stay. 1 day, 1 week. We can make it a month in a small vehicle (if necessary / in NZ or Europe), but... in USA, we are seldom stuck together for more than a couple days (RV or at home),
Each person has different tastes in accommodations... and they change a few times during a long retirement
We've been a month in one of our remote cabins (16x24). It's about right. Has a loft, bath, kitchen. But we are not inside very often, except more on long winter evenings. 40x70 shop is a 100yrds away if we need some space / hobbies / shelter. We have destination venues within 20 minutes in all directions. + a large rural acreage with a wonderful view and lots of wildlife and livestock. Easy to stay home when needed. Small town ~18,000 (with everything we need, including a college, library, and most Big Box stores, + Dollar Tree, Geriatric Health Club with lap pool and hot tub, and 10+ tex-mex cafes) is 8 miles away. It's a really nice break from PNW weather. 70+ and sunny for next 7 days.
Must head home (PNW mtns) for Christmas, then to some other destinations for Jan - Mar ($29 fares on SWA within CA, AZ, NV, and & HI was $82 (with one companion for free $5.60 taxes). We fly to SMF (Sacramento) for $39, then all over CA, and nearby states for $29 one-way. 1/4 tank of fuel at CA prices.
I think you could drive most of the way to your destination and then stop at a rest stop for a few hours while you wait for the sun to come up before heading into the campground. I would imagine that tractor trailer friendly fuel stops would be RV friendly, too. I haven't figured out all of the logistics but I'm sure we would learn as we go. I don't see us pulling into a campground in the middle of the night and causing an uproar while we tried to park. I'm sure that happens but I can't see us doing that.
The RV thing would be a phase of life before moving into an active over 55 community.
I agree with you, the home that I lived in belonged to the eldest son my mom's brother, and is now a B&B and still in the family also in Europe.
We moved back to the farm during the war for safety reasons.
Thank you for chiming in with the confirmation. Yes, very common in Europe to preserve real estate in the family and therefore have multiple homes, sometimes (but not regularly) used commercially. Not associated with being "rich", but
common among the middle-middle class.
I'm responding here to your post in the other thread, because that thread was allegedly not for people with second homes. I strongly agree with you that anyone who pays property tax to a municipality should be able to vote in municipal elections - at least if the taxpayer is a US citizen (for non-US citizens, it could be impossible legally).
Finally, someone (maybe you) brought up an idea that property tax should be flat, ie, the same dollar figure for all properties regardless of their value. That I can't agree with - thinking of owning a property in terms of owning a share of the city, if you own a more valuable share of the city, then I do think you should pay more than someone who owns a less valuable share, meaning that the tax should be a specific % of the value of property (as it indeed is right now) rather than the same figure for each property owner.
It wasn't me.
But having said that, wealth taxes are not a good way to raise required tax revenue compared to other methods.
The property tax in particular has bad characteristics. And no, you do not own a share of the city.
Let's say things are in an equilibrium: house prices are stable because the desire to sell and the desire to buy are pretty well matched. This means a given home's value is pretty constant and the tax is predictable.
But then let's say there is an exogenous shock - for example, pandemic-induced desire to work remotely, or a $5 Trillion helicopter drop or the like. All of a sudden, a bunch of people who live in, say, San Francisco decide they want to live in Park City. Their mere desire to live remotely in Park City drives up the value of my house for property tax purposes. I didn't do anything -- yet my the County Assessor now says I must pay more property tax simply because of New Yorkers or Texans or Californians might want to buy my house one day.
That is just dumb. We can fund municipal services differently (and, by the way, eliminate the County Assessor's office altogether, saving $$$).
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