brb moving to Montenegro.
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Never been to Phoenix, huh?
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The Italian one appears to be an apartment or condo, not a house.
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My wife has been looking at those articles a lot these days. We cannot really live year round in our Colorado place, and North Carolina is losing it’s charm recently.
So the example for France is Britanny, and yes, you can get a house like that for $300,000 there. I’m currently looking in Paris, though, and $300,000 there will get me a 320 square-foot studio (or possibly 1-bedroom) apartment. Looks like I’m going to be renting…
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Ha! Dollars are monopoly money! Do you have any more viable currencies to offer?
There’s a lot of variation even within cities.
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Of course then you would have to live in Texas or Kentucky… 
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Well yeah St. Louis (I kid, I grew up there…) but 111K will get a room in Clayton and a closet in Town&Country as you pointed out already.
300K won’t get much in Seattle for sure.
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What’s wrong with NC? We just put an offer on a older house with a bit of land outside of Asheboro. Our primary home is in Austin, TX and we like spending the end of summer an the beginning of fall there.
But for your 300k you get a lot of different stuff in each of these places. In Boston you get a “hawribble” accent and access to the Boston working class (hawribble). In Worcester, you get Worcester, also hawribble, and a city unpronounceable outside Mass. In Springfield you get unemployment, and a lot of ( A LOT) of drugs! At the New York border, you get to leave.
All for only $300,000!
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Yeah, but in Fergusen, you have to factor in fines and legal fees.
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The taxes are pretty high, there is more political rage than I really want to be around, and pretty much all of the family is in Colorado or Texas. The trip between NC and Colorado is getting pretty tedious as well. It is not that we have really found somewhere that we prefer, just that we are exploring the possibility. But we have pretty specific requirements. We need a lot of space, inside and out, and water. Preferably the flowing kind. My parents spend the winter in Corpus, but I would not live there, except in their house, which has a bunch of waterfront land and a giant dock. But people like me do not get to buy places like that. We keep talking about taking a long road trip to explore unexpected options.
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This seems kind of a one-off article. While some people might be able to afford a $300,000 mortgage, it is still Scrooge McDuck mansion money to a lot of people. What I’d like to see is “What kind of housing is affordable to someone making minimum wage around the world”. (Affordable meaning no more than 30% of income to housing.) That, I think, would be much more revealing. Especially if it could be contrasted to housing affordable to middle-class workers.
One commenter on imgur posted a link to a Detroit house that I thought actually looked pretty nice. But even so, even in what is supposedly one of the most depressed housing markets in America, I couldn’t help thinking that house shouldn’t cost more than $50,000-$100,000 (considering prices of other things relative to homes). Maybe I’m just old, but maybe the real-estate bubble is still bubbling, even a decade after a crash that shook the world.
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Would you prefer ningys or PUs?
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We must be. I still can’t help thinking that a house should cost somewhere in the neighborhood of the $86K my parents paid for a 1300 square foot tract home 20 miles east of San Diego in 1980. Or at most the quarter-million my movie-director brother paid for his Hollywood Hills pad in 1985.
So when I bought my 1680-square-foot 1909 Craftsman 3-bedroom in early 2006, right around the top of the market, I really felt like Mister Big-Shot. The damn thing cost $680K, fully $140K more than the previous owners had paid for it a year and a half previously. Oof.
So these pictures kinda hurt. I live fairly modestly; our cars are 9, 12, and 46 years old, all our kitchen appliances need to be replaced, and the kids go to public school. But if we sold our current house and bought something of similar size and condition in, say, Laredo TX, I could get this joint right here and have well over a cool half-million ca$h money left over to spend on Twinkies and root beer, or I could just buy what appears to be the governor’s mansion and still have money left over for a used Honda.
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Long commute, though.
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Triangular Triganic Pu, of course. No one wants to deal with fiddling little small change like the ningi.
Edit: Triganic, not Triangular. That’s what I get for going from memory!
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