Is it better to buy parents' home or inherit it and buy them a new house?
Hi all. As we know in this day and age, boomers are not passing down anything to their children and hoarding onto generational wealth for life. And typically if they do pass anything down, they then proceed to downsize their life. Well this is a situation for you. My parents live in a wonderful home (technically two-family) home and they've owned it for 30+ years. Beautiful neighborhood and close to NYC. It's not huge in size but has double everything being a former 2 family home. We've been utilizing it as a one family the past few years. If you been on the Northeast, you know what I'm talking about! Not huge but definitely an great and stable property in the suburbs of NYC metro. Because its in this area, property value is VERY high.
For years, my siblings and I who are now grown adults and working have been wanting to keep the home in the family. Ideal situation would be our parents to let it be part of the family as its technically our only asset from them. But, they also want to move to a bigger house.. they've been wanting to move to the south for awhile now and want to sell this current home for a mansion in the south. (Keep in mind, none of their children will live there with them and we have no appeal for the south as most of our life is here in the Northeast and NYC area.) They can get a great value for selling and even have some money left over after by buying new house in the south.
With houses in the south being cheaper than that in the north - our siblings are trying to convince our parents to let us buy them the new "cheaper" house and keep our current one as an inheritance. We don't want to keep it for money sake but for obvious sentimental values, potential property value down the line, and life-association with this home!
Is this stupid of us?! If our parents sell this current home, then buy a huge mansion in middle of nowhere Texas where no one wants to move or live, then we are stuck with that burden of a home down the line. It feels less of a burden for us to just give them money to buy their new home and that's it..
Or buy the house from them at a lower cost compared to a local investor etc, and then let them use that money to buy the house... but at the same time parents will want the $$$ thats these local investors are offering (thats where the boomer mentality steps in)
I know this isn't too well written out but I wanted to get people's opinions on this..
I know its our parents and they can do what they want, but we're telling them, if we lose the house, we really lose all our potential of general wealth etc lol.
(and also it is a cultural thing but we'd be more than glad to help them buy a new house rather than sell this current one off. love my parents and want to see them get what they want but dont want us to miss out on potential "heirloooms" )
TLDR: Parents want to sell house to buy new larger house for themselves in south, but we rather buy them a new home so we can inherit the current one and not lose it's value!