Ego's Journal

[Ego]

@delay, yes we still have roughly a five hour eating window. We did not run this morning so we breakfasted at 930am and lunched a little after 2pm.

We took a giant spinach salad with tempeh to the Dubrovnik old town and ate it on the stone benches along the city wall where the cruise ship passengers wait for the small boats to shuttle them back to the ship. A fit old British lady sat down next to us, looked at our food and said, "That looks wonderful!"

It continues to work well for us.

[Ego]

We will be visiting the village my great-grandmother left in 1906 to emigrate to the states. I can trace our ancestors to this village as far back as written records were kept, the late 1780s. It is listed on the registry of the most beautiful villages of Italy and there is a small home for sale that we will be viewing during our visit.

https://www.idealista.it/en/immobile/27313794/

I do not want to buy a home, but the price is unbelievable. Please tell me all of the reasons I should not buy it.

[2Birds1Stone]

That place has a soul, what a view too!

I would say you would be crazy NOT to buy it......seriously, you've won the $$$ game already, the only reason would be if you never saw yourself wanting to return here on a semi/regular basis.

[jacob]

I do not want to buy a home, but the price is unbelievable. Please tell me all of the reasons I should not buy it.

Wow! The price, the size, the view. All perfect as far as I'm concerned. This would cost 10-20x more in the US. I suspect the location (no jobs) and the size (no children) have a lot to do with the low price.

Points of concern and objections if applicable:

• It's in southern Italy, so continuous/continual conditions of drought, water restrictions, heat waves, vector borne diseases, and wildfire smoke are almost guaranteed or will be within your lifetime.
• Insofar the energy rating is standard EU, "G" is pretty bad (the worst). It's leaking like a sieve. OTOH, this being the Mediterranean, you're probably not going to pay a fortune even when it's winter.
• It's in the BFE, which may be a feature or a bug depending on what you want to do there or who you want to rent it to? (I grew up in a village of 150. Lest your ultimate life aspiration was to drive a tractor or marry your neighbor, there was nothing to do there except count the cows.) I note the village does have a post office. That's a good sign that there's still life around
• I'm betting the house is rather very old which means lots of ongoing maintenance, possibly with historic restrictions on the fixes.
• Very old homes often have lower ceilings. I once fell in love with an old homestead before I realized that it had 6' ceilings. My tall great uncle lived in a place like this, always stooped over.

[sky]

That is a beautiful home at a low price. One reason not to buy is that as you travel, you will find thousands of beautiful places where you could live, but you can't live in all of them. So enjoy them and move on to find the next beautiful place.

Also, I think there are volcanoes in that area, which could explode at any moment. (Just trying to be helpful.)

[chenda]

Looks amazing

I wonder if the G energy rating is a reflection of its lack of compliance with modern building methods rather than its inherent performance. The think walls should give you plenty of thermal massing keeping it cool in summer and warm-ish in winter. Plus you'll get some free heat from your attached neighbours.

There might also be complex (or non existent) party wall agreements which will need a good lawyer to flesh out.

Getting there won't be too cheap and easy. Southern Italy isn't too well served by low cost airlines or high speed rail. 2hrs 30min drive from Naples, which might be a pain after a late night arrival. Less of an issue if you're spending long periods of time there.

I still kinda want you to buy it though

[rube]

How much time will you spend versus how often will you live there? How much will it cost you per day you'll stay there versus cost of renting a house?
It takes up mental space to take care of the house, administration, maintenance, etc.

That all said, you can always sell it, your maximum loss is limited. So sometimes you "need" to take on a project, regardless it isn't optimal from a financial or efficiency point of view.

[delay]

I do not want to buy a home, but the price is unbelievable. Please tell me all of the reasons I should not buy it.

My experience is from The Netherlands, which is smaller than Italy, from colleagues and friends who moved to a rural area. Most of them come back within a year or two. Rural villages keep shrinking.

The most common reason is the people. Villagers are set in their ways and reluctant to associate with new arrivals. After living there for tens of years you will still be the outsider. Yet the community will have expectations and enforce customs. There are few jobs. Most live on a tight budget. Many are dependent on social security. People see themselves less as individuals and more as part of a family, farm or factory. People who aspire to better opportunities have moved away. The remaining people can regroup in another neighborhood or village, and your neighborhood can turn into a ghost town.

Essentially there is less energy in a rural village. The cumulative effect of that seems easy to underestimate.

On a visit I'd look for people who moved in a few years ago and still live there.

[Ego]

Thanks folks.

Closest small grocery store is 30 minutes by car. We know no one. Airport access is terrible. We don't want to live in a rural village. It gets cold in winter and the energy rating is horrible. Closest doctor (weekly rotation) is also about 30.minutea away. I don't want to be responsible for the maintenance of another old property.

Those that really hit home were Rube's point about cost per day vs renting because I just ran this same calculation on the campervan we are renting,.and Sky's point about enjoying a place and moving on.

Thank you.all for fortifying us with reasons not to buy. We will view it on Friday and report back.

[loutfard]

I don't want to be responsible for the maintenance of another old property.

This. Depending how high up in the mountains this is, you might even have to (have someone) shut and clean out the water every winter.

[Seppia]

How did I miss this?
Huge congrats! A solid couple is the bedrock of a satisfying life.

If you still are around Slovenia, don’t miss the opportunity to visit Trieste, it’s one of the hidden gems of Italy and home to what is (in my opinion) the most beautiful square in Italy (called Piazza Unità).

Keep being awesome!

[Salathor]

Wow. Well, it IS a pretty darn cute house, but the idea of buying into a region in decline is a real one.

I don't have a ton of fantasies about moving overseas, but moving to a classic American small town tempts me, but I'm wary for all the same reasons the others listed: insular community that it might be hard to integrate into (in Italy maybe it's easier if you're all Catholic?), slow pop shrink due to the fact that people only move away, distance from services. I think I've committed to being willing to spend up a bit to be biking distance at least to a library and a grocery store.

[jacob]

In terms of "ERE City", super-gentrifying a place like this would solve a lot of the issues [with the place]. However, it would require a crazy amount of coordination on our part and as usual the natives would not appreciate it one bit.

[guitarplayer]

In terms of "ERE City", super-gentrifying a place like this would solve a lot of the issues [with the place]. However, it would require a crazy amount of coordination on our part and as usual the natives would not appreciate it one bit.

This is spot on I have often thought about it in the context of 1-euro houses phenomenon in Italy or Spain.

[Ego]

. However, it would require a crazy amount of coordination on our part and as usual the natives would not appreciate it one bit.

If the group were to include the locals in the weekly grocery run and the community bulk purchase of lentils, they may take kindly to the newcomers.

[loutfard]

If the group were to include the locals in the weekly grocery run and the community bulk purchase of lentils, they may take kindly to the newcomers.

In many cases, that unfortunately is not enough.

I remember a friend a generation older than me. He moved to a village 30 km outside his native Antwerp. Hardly the end of civilisation. He spoke the language, had the nationality, the dialect, played music in the local community and actively participate in the dominant religion. 35 years later, his wife still got charged a different price at the farmer's.

[jacob]

If the group were to include the locals in the weekly grocery run and the community bulk purchase of lentils, they may take kindly to the newcomers.

Herding EREmite cats is likely the bigger problem than adding value once we move there. For a village like this, it would take 10 of us to make it worthwhile. I don't think we have 10 of us ready to go for that place.

[chenda]

I think its better to have ERE types dispersed throughout the world where they can act as a positive influence on others rather than huddled away together in some mountain top village where they will probably end up in factional infighting.

[Seppia]

The village may be beautiful, but you are very much away from the coast in southern Italy.
That’s a huge no no

Some reasons
Nobody speaks English
Will take you a ton of time to get to civilization in general. The closest decent hospital is probably in Bari (2 hours drive).
The building looks old, and the person living in it was most probably poor. Has probably had zero maintenance.
You would never be able to make even a little bit of money from Airbnb or similar.
With 38k, you can probably spend somewhere between 380 and 760 nights in the nicest hotel near Alberona.

Compare that with the small apartment we bought on the lake. It was 120k but:
1 hour from a major airport hub
Building is populated by foreigners, so usually people with $$$.
Can be rented easily.
20 mins from Como (great healthcare, things to do)
The nicest hotels in the area cost $1500 per night, a good one $150 or so

There are a lot of inexpensive houses/apartments in Italy now.
My country is poor: outside of Milan and Rome real estate is very cheap.

Go to Alberona, take plenty of pictures, enter the bar and tell the people there who your ancestors were (they probably know someone who knew them or the family), tell them you love the place and move on

[mountainFrugal]

Congrats Mr. and Mrs. Ego!

Late to the comment game here...maybe your opinion has changed after viewing the property (today I think?), but just another set of questions I would be asking is what kind of other trips (perhaps yearly?) I could be taking for 38K. Riffing off of Sky and other's comments.