I’m flying out to Seattle this weekend to take another step in the probate process after my mother’s death. I’m meeting with lawyers and bankers — can you imagine anything more fun?
I’ve been getting all this paperwork together, going through my mother’s birth certificate, marriage certificate, social security card, death certificate, etc., etc., etc. I’ve also got all the same stuff for my father — they skipped probate at his death, since everything was in both my mother and father’s name at that time, but now all that has caught up to me. It’s depressing to see a whole life reduced to a small pile of papers.
Next week everything gets shut down, her official existence is over, and every penny gets shuffled into an account in my name, before I have to start divvying it up and sending checks to all the heirs…after we sell off the house. Anyone want to buy a 4 bedroom house on the road between Auburn and Lake Tapps? It was good enough for almost 50 years of homey living and 6 kids.
I hope to have PZ’s maturity and ability to see the positives when my aging parents eventually leave this world. Also, you can share the listing of the house if you want. I might tell my sister and her husband about it as they live rather close to the house and would like to start their own family one day (renting a small-ish home isn’t ideal as you can imagine).
Once we get it listed, I promise I’ll be advertising it.
Don’t be shocked (I was) the estimates we’ve seen on the place so far have been in the $400,000 range. Seattle area housing prices!
Best wishes. Sounds like a good house in a nice location. I’m not looking for a house but sounds attractive. Average Seattle housing price is about $700,000 last I heard. A seller’s market (which is horrible for most people who need a house).
Joe Felsenstein @3
I hate to say this because the amount of collective pain involved in the post-subprime market meltdown, but around 2012 I was eyeballing houses on a whim and there were some not so bad places relatively cheap at the time, though I’d had to have held on to my current place and eat property taxes sans homestead exemption for a few years to wait for the market to spike again. And I would have taken on a new mortgage after paying off my previous one. Buyers are often also sellers and the timing per market fluctuation is tricky. 2012 seemed a good time though.
Given the current market hopefully PZ and other heirs are able to get enough to help with whatever financial situations they are in. After 2008 or so things would have been much bleaker for that outcome.
It kinda sucks that in our capitalist system places you live are also investments and people do stuff like flipping and what not in order to profit greatly from market upswings. Musical chairs. When the music stops somebody is in for a world of pain. I don’t know how sustainable the current real estate upswing will be and if another bubble pop will eventually come. The mid oughts implosion doesn’t seem like a very common Santayana moment. People can’t afford 400,000 dollar mortgages nor current rent prices though. And market resets that make housing more affordable crater the job market, so…
The weirdest thing I recall before the subprime bubble popped was the phenomenon of rental units being converted to condos because the condo market was so hot until it wasn’t. Weird stuff. I wish we in the US had some sort of guaranteed housing as a baseline at least. Housing should be a basic human right.
Yikes. $450K+. It’s cute, but that’s a lot of money for a little house that’s that old, but then I imagine it’s pretty typical for a Seattle suburb. And an interesting feature I noticed is it’s right next to the Bible Chapel! How ironic.😉
You do not want to look at the housing market in Australia — Sydney is the least affordable city in the world after Hong Kong. 25 years of braindead neoliberal policies from both sides of politics will do that.
I know how it feels to put away the last vestige of your parents’ lives. I did it younger so have had more time to get over it.