Reading through the New York Times, a link to a real estate article caught my eye: “What You Get For … $8 million“. While we are in the market for a house (sort of), this is a little out of our price range. Still, I was wondering, “What can you get for that kind of cash?”

Big houses, to be sure.

But what really made my jaw drop were the property taxes. A nice little place in Sun Valley, Idaho gets hit up for $26,870 annually, and there’s a quarterly home owners’ association fee of $625. That comes out to $30k a year, just to pay for the privilege of owning that property. (I initially had a typo in that sentence that seemed a bit more appropriate: “the privilege of owing that property.”)

The listing from Greenwich, Connecticut has property taxes of $39,636 annually.

When in 1979 my parents bought the home I grew up in, they paid right at $40,000 for it. Granted, it was not in Greenwich , Connecticut; granted, it was on the small-ish side; granted, it was not in an upscale neighborhood; but still — $40,000. My parents got a thirty-year mortgage and their monthly payments, by today’s standards, were a joke

And there’s the key, the point of all this: the saddening realization I’ve been having as I grow older about the reality of inflation. As I was growing up, the thought of paying over $120k for a house seemed incredible. “Who can afford such a place?” I’d ask myself as we drove by homes with the flimsy sign in the yard, sometimes listing the price as well as the real estate agency. Looking for a house in Asheville these days, we’re desperate to find something other than a “fixer-upper” under $200k. Strange as it may seem, it took me, a man in his mid-30s, some time to shake out of my head the prices fixed there twenty years ago.

As far as paying $8 million for a home in Connecticut, I’d rather pay $4 million for a 27-bedroom “Hall” in Britain…