Boomers wanting to downsize face huge tax bills
Boomers wanting to downsize face huge tax bills
After 33 years and four children, Baby Boomers Marta and Octavian Dragos say they feel trapped in what was once their dream home in El Cerrito, California.
After 33 years and four children, Baby Boomers Marta and Octavian Dragos say they feel trapped in what was once their dream home in El Cerrito, California.
Both over 70, the Dragos are empty nesters, and like many of their generation, they’re trying to figure out how to downsize from their 3,000-square-foot, five-bedroom home.
“We are here in a huge house with no family nearby, trying to make a wise decision, both financially and for our well-being,” said Dragos, a retired teacher.
But selling and downsizing isn’t easy, appealing or even financially advantageous for many homeowners like the Dragos family.
Many Boomers whose homes have surged in value now face massive capital gains tax bills when they sell. This is a kind of tax on the profit you make when selling an investment or an asset, like a home, that has increased in value.
Plus, smaller homes or apartments in the neighborhoods they’ve come to love are rare. And with current prices and mortgage rates so high, there is often a negligible cost difference between their current home and a smaller one.
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Most homeowners don’t have to pay capital gains on their home when they sell. Thanks to tax legislation from the ’90s, a gain of up to $250,000 for a single tax filer or $500,000 for a couple filing jointly is exempt from tax. That’s providing the sale is of the homeowner’s primary residence and that they meet other requirements such as living in the property for two of the past five years.
That means if a couple bought a median priced home in 1987 for $100,000 and they’ve lived there as their primary residence and are selling it today for $550,000, the $450,000 gain from that investment is not taxed because it falls under the $500,000 exclusion to capital gains taxes.
However, if those same $100,000 homebuyers lived for 37 years in an area that has seen enormous growth in home values — as is the case for many parts of California — and their home now sells for $2 million dollars, that’s nearly $1.9 million in profit, of which only $500,000 is excluded from taxes.
Oh, how horrible. /s
If it was just a problem of paying more taxes then the argument would be bullshit. The main problem is buried at the end of the article:
A homeowner who keeps all the profit of a home that sells for $500,000, for example, may find that a condo in their same area, where they can age in place, is $450,000. After calculating realtor fees and closing costs, the profit hardly covers the new purchase, let alone provides any extra income for retirement.
This is the real reason they are not moving. They would be stepping backwards financially instead of stepping forward.
Feels like the crux of this whole thing is that housing shouldn't be an investment.
Good luck changing that. Housing has been a promised vehicle for wealth growth to multiple generations.
How could it be changed so it wouldn't be?
Land is mostly a set resource with new developments and cities slowing. Home development follows land and while there's been a boom, overall it's been slowing. As there are more people, demand for housing increases.
All of this drives cost of homes up. So the longer you are in a home, the more it and/or the land it worth. Usually outpacing inflation. So when you sell, it's worth more. It's an investment by default even for those people who own 1 normal-sized single family home. It was an investment even when housing prices were reasonable decades ago.
How could it be changed so it wouldn’t be?
I watched a video a while back that talks about how in Tokyo housing is seen as more of a consumer good than an investment, and explains why:
Interesting. So there's 2 main reasons and 1 knock-on effect on why Tokyo (not Japan, just Tokyo) has affordable housing.
- They build a LOT of housing. Tons of dense housing which most other countries don't match.
- 55% inheritance tax, no exemption. Meaning generational accrual of wealth from houses can't happen.
The first one is achievable nearly everywhere and would be quite popular. Except with those who already own homes. Building high-density housing will lower housing prices for those nearby. The video covers this well.
The second isn't going to work in the US. Homes are the #1 generational wealth is accrued and how people rise in economic standing. From paycheck-dependent to stable, etc. Trying to take that away without some other way to build wealth and especially without a national retirement system is going to be deeply unpopular.
Another aspect I found very interesting: Tokyo demolishes and rebuilds every house on average every 30 years. That's wild to me. They build for safety but not longevity. No one wants a pre-owned house. Couple this with the inheritance tax and I imagine most older people will just sell their homes or pass down only a small amount. Japan's Public Pension System makes this feasible as well and without that I can't see this becoming viable in America.
I also wonder how wasteful that kind of demolition ends up being.
Extremely wasteful - and that's to say nothing of the obvious climate impacts from said waste. It's one hell of a drawback to what I would otherwise describe as a system that works pretty well.
Everytime people talk about "the market" i realize its become a religion. The market doesnt magically do shit. The market doesnt just happen. We can make the market do any damn thing we choose because the market is actually............people.
A-fucking-men.
"The market" sets wages. My ass, the market is Billybob greedy asshat saying "I won't pay more than this." Then Timmyjoe fuckwit says "well the market has spoken, it would be stupid of me to pay more when Billybob is only paying x"
And for you theorists out there "supply of labor will affect wages" let me introduce you to the new excuse: "No OnE wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE!" Can't hire at the shit wage that's out there? Just complain no one wants to work!
This comment is essentially commodity fetishism ELI5'd and I love it
Public housing would be a step in the right direction
We've had that in the US and they're referred to as "the projects."
What's your point?
That it was an abject failure of an idea and most of these places were torn down. I'm not arguing that public housing is bad but I don't think we're capable of implementing it in a good way here in the US.
It could be changed to penalize or disincentivize people from owning multiple homes through taxes. Like maybe tax the shit out of anyone that owns more than two in order to allow the middle class the chance to purchase a rental property but stop the ultra wealthy from from buying up entire neighborhoods.
The way my town does it is everyone pays the same rate, but you get a huge exemption on your primary home, so effectively higher taxes on investment properties
Or build more apartments maybe? The entire housing crisis in the US could be easily solved by adding sufficient apartments in the right places.
... What's the issue?
They paid for the next place, including fees, and still have $50k in their pocket? How greedy does someone need to be, exactly, before we consider the behavior repugnant?
The issue is that they sold a large home and bought a small home and had very little money left over. It doesn't make financial political sense to do that. They might as well stay where they are. There is little incentive to downsize.
Part of the solution to the housing crisis is solving that incentive problem.
Aww, poor them. They only had enough left over to pay fully for their next place and pocket $50k.
There is little incentive to downsize.
As long as you ignore property taxes and maintenance costs. Which normal people don't ignore.
Maintenance costs are probably fairly minimal given how little wear and tear happens in an empty nest. And property taxes for elderly folks are usually frozen or nearly frozen in place - meaning the next buyer will be paying a much higher tax on the same house because they won't qualify for those exemptions.
It seems like you don't own a home, so I'm not sure there's much point in continuing this conversation.
To the contrary - I own a large home in an urban area and it is filled with my children. But we don't have to have a conversation - I was only pointing out the flaws in your logic. My tax bill will be $12k this year while my elderly next door neighbor's will be a fraction of that. Our homes are identical (3k sqft over 3 floors). She's not leaving because it would make little financial sense to do so. This is quite common.
Sounds like one of those people that doesn't take a raise because it'll put them in a new tax bracket. People that don't know how the adult world works.
The have their new property paid for and also have a much smaller property tax bill and lower maintenance costs. There's still plenty of incentive to downsize.
Paying taxes on profit might hurt a little, but it's a good problem to have.
What? They would have a much bigger property tax bill
If their smaller new house is worth less than their original the property tax bill will be less. This is one of the incentives to downsizing.
That's not how property taxes work in California. They're likely paying way less than they would be if they bought a new house, even if it was smaller
I think the issue is that with mortgage prices and the incredible costs of homes in California, capital gains tax comes into play for them when the vast majority of homeowners never even consider it.
So you have people with a large single family home wanting to sell and move into a small single family home (1-2bed) or even a condo and they end up with no benefit from doing so and potentially even an expensive mortgage. Essentially they are selling an Escalade to get a Civic and breaking even, which seems odd.
I think the capital gains tax exception should be expanded to be waived for single family homes under XXXX sq ft, with the above stipulations (living in the home continuously). It's not these people's fault their neighborhood shot up in price outpacing regulations meant to protect normal home owners.
Their only real out in this situation is to move away from where they've lived their whole lives.
Waive tax for primary residence, tax the everliving fuck out of non-primary residences to the point nobody wants to rent them out anymore.
think the capital gains tax exception
Nope. No exceptions. You made money for doing no work, you pay taxes on that money. Plain and simple. Cap Gains tax rates are already absurdly low, so frankly anybody asking for a further reduced rate or exception is already a greedy pig not worth listening to.
You can actually deduct the cost of any improvements you've made to the home. You can't do much about inflation costs, but are you really arguing that it's bad to only receive 85% of free money rather than 0% by not selling?
I see you've never sold a house. If you do, have fun losing 15% of that value. The only way to prevent that is for your house to not accrue any value while you lived in it.
You can actually deduct the cost of any improvements you've made to the home. You can't do much about inflation costs, but are you really arguing that it's bad to only receive 85% of free money rather than 0% by not selling?
Except you aren't just selling. You also have to buy. And if from the tax and high housing prices it's a wash to downsize, there's not nearly the incentive to.
High housing prices also mean a high selling price for you too and taxes being percentage based means there's never a scenario where you wind up with less money than you would from selling a smaller, cheaper house because regardless of where you are, bigger houses sell for a lot more than smaller houses. The only scenario where this makes sense is if you sold a large home in a place like rural Oklahoma and moved to a shoebox in San Francisco, but that's not what's being described in the article.
You've missed the point. People are breaking even downsizing. That'll mean they won't. It goes over this in detail in the article.
If I've missed the point then why can't you explain how big houses are selling for nearly the same as small houses to the point where people are breaking even going from 3000sqft 5 bedroom homes to a 1200sqft 2 bedroom? A 15-20% loss from capital gains over 500k isn't going to do that nor is an additional 15% tax from California.
The only possible scenario where that makes sense is if you're comparing a $500k home from a married couple to another couple with a home valued at 30% over $500k. For those people, they're going to receive the same as the couple who had $500k in capital gains. This is a math problem so you can't just waive it away with "my opinion is different and you missed my point."
The example in the article is absurd as a single family home with property isn't going to sell for slightly more than a condo unit in some giant complex. That's why they had to rely on an example with made up numbers. If you look up a home their size in El Cerrito, just outside San Francisco, you're looking at $1.6M while a condo is going for $400k. Surely they could afford a $400k condo with $1.37M in profit.
Cry to someone that gives a shit. Be less greedy. I've paid my share of capital gains, you don't see me crying like a greedy little piggy about it.
It's too bad no one agrees with you and you'll die mad about it.
Seems like plenty people agree taxes should be paid. In fact so many people agree that it's a law. Your greed will never fill that void, btw.
Condos generally aren't much cheaper than houses. They would have the same issue if their region's real estate was half as expensive. They would have had this problem 10, 20, 30 years ago if they were retiring. If you sell a house in an expensive area and want money left over, you either have to choose a shittier house/apartment to live, or a cheaper area.
Their home is worth 2mil. They absolutely would not be stepping backward.
It's a ridiculous scenario considering the real value of their home. They might as well have invented a scenario where these people only get $100k for their 3000sqft, 5 bedroom home and then have to pay $2M for a one bedroom condo on the bad side of town.
That's a fictional scenario, though. Why would an entire house be selling for the same price as a tiny condo with HOA fees? These people have a huge house worth millions of dollars, so I'm confused why they would use a $500k sale price in their hypothetical scenario.
Sure those are made up numbers but they illustrate a real issue. Where i live, and I’m sure other high cost of living areas, it’s the land that’s expensive, in short supply. The actual house might be a much smaller part of that.
What that turns into is prices may be insane, but a house isn’t much more than a condo isn’t much more than a vacant lot. Then when you buy, taxes are reset to the new value, so property taxes will now be much higher and realtors commission will be insane. So they need to take a mortgage and take a cost of living hit on the taxes, then are clobbered by high interest. They may literally not be able to afford to downsize
Haha, I mean I get it... Giving away money to uncle sam sucks but I agree with your sentiment. They are coming out ahead, that house was an investment that is paying dividends. I am hoping to have that problem some day!
Contributing financially to the democratic society in which you spent the entire time of gaining monetary value able to vote which enabled the increase in value of your property? That’s the thing here, this isn’t throwing money away, and it isn’t imposed without your say. Taxes aren’t fun, and we don’t always like where they go, but as adults we should be able to respect them. They’re part of how our society functions and a necessary component of many nice things we need in order to prosper.
This long time anti tax attitude in this country is part of what destroyed our infrastructure, ruined our regulatory bodies, and contributed to our massive wealth gap.
To be fair, it wasn't the attitude that destroyed the infrastructure. Despite people's attitude toward taxes, they still paid. The problem is precisely that they don't like where that money is going. In most cases, their taxes are just funding a trust fund baby's extra paycheck while they sit in office and neglect their duties while discussing divisive politics to distract from the fact that they are robbing the American people. A lot of people aren't against the idea of paying taxes, but rather America's inability to appropriately spend money on the common good.
That attitude that the majority of taxes go to paying politicians is part of the issue. Yeah politicians suck and many are overpaid. The military is too. You me and everyone else knows these will be cut after infrastructure and welfare. Fighting for tax cuts then becomes “I don’t want to pay for infrastructure or welfare”. And seriously look at anti tax sentiments, they’re often anti welfare or anti government assistance.
I forgot about all the people howling and foaming at the mouth about the "death tax". Boomers gonna boomer I guess.
Rent it, buy a new house, die, and the tax threshold on estates is $2 million.
Isn't this where the boomers use a 1031 exchange and convert the large home into a smaller luxury condo for themselves and a few lower income units to rent out to struggling Millenials?
On the other hand; would you personally make that choice if you were in their situation? I am willing to bet you, nor any other reader, would not. While that doesn't excuse the greed aspect of it; it does cast at least some light upon why they are refusing to sell and take a loss on it.
If you only paid $100,000 and you made $1,000,000; you'd have $900,000 profit; of which you'd probably only see ~60% to ~40% of, if Capital Gains taxes are anything near what I think they are. If we assume a "worst case", where the Federal Government takes 40% and the State takes about 20% more, that means your tidy profit is only about $390,000. That means you've probably got to secure another $140,000 in financing on average to pick up a more modest $500,000 home (in today's market) to retire in.
But villainizing the boomers isn't going to solve the housing crisis easier either. We legitimately need more homes. We. Need. Them. Yesterday. So maybe the policy needs to lean towards bigger developments that cost less. We did it during WW2; where massive amounts of homes were built cheaply. We probably need to achieve that again, and do better than we did during a war that was diverting supplies away from the effort.
How do we achieve that? I don't know.
If you only paid $100,000 and you made $1,000,000; you’d have $900,000 profit; of which you’d probably only see ~60% to ~40% of, if Capital Gains taxes are anything near what I think they are. If we assume a “worst case”, where the Federal Government takes 40% and the State takes about 20% more, that means your tidy profit is only about $390,000. That means you’ve probably got to secure another $140,000 in financing on average to pick up a more modest $500,000 home (in today’s market) to retire in.
Capital gains taxes range from 0-20% Federally, depending on your income. In Cali, the addition is up to 13%
Which means that worst case scenario, you sell a property in Cali, you would pay 33% of the profiit above the original price of the house and the 500,000 exemption. So on a house you bought for 100,000 and sold for 1,000,000, you'd pay the awful, awful price of... 133,000, leaving you with a paltry $867,000.
Ah; but did you forget you pay income tax on top of capital gains taxes?
You literally don't for long-term capital gains.
nor does the capital gains affect your 'regular' tax bracket.
Lol holy shit I can't believe u said something this fucking stupid....hahaha
Have you tried learning how something works before forming an opinion on it?
Capital gains are capital gains not income (earned wages), so no they aren't taxed as income which is why they're called "capital gains taxes" and not "income taxes."
capital gains tax rates are a lot lower than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax#United_States
these people are mostly greedy fucks that don't want to pay their very reasonable share of taxes on their investment return.