Baby Boomers are coming upon retirement age. Some of them will have a dream retirement full of world travel, quality time with family members, and great health. Others, however, will be working out of necessity, carrying revolving debt, and depending on their Social Security.
Regarding the latter, there is some benefit to the generations that follow. The benefit is in some of the choices they made, one of which was how they bought a home.
How Baby Boomers' Parents Bought Homes
The CNBC report "Tom Brokaw Reports: Boomer$!" discussed how when the Greatest Generation came home from World War II they typically purchased homes in towns like Levittown, New York, a Long Island suburb that was full of cookie cutter homes.
Living in a house was a means of fulfilling a basic need: shelter. A home with three bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms was adequate, though cramped, for a family of six as the boys could have one bedroom and the girls another.
While there are members of this generation who indulged in finer custom homes, they did not do so at the rate of which their children did.
How Baby Boomers Bought Homes
The typical middle class Baby Boomer in the 1990's could be found upgrading his home. The United States was going through a boom period in both the stock and housing markets, and when Baby Boomers saw that they held a respectable amount of equity in their homes matched with the growth of their tech-centered mutual funds, they believed that upgrading would be a wise decision, and perhaps well deserved.
Baby Boomers treated their homes as investments in both their retirement and current lifestyle. They wanted their children to have their own bedrooms, and, in some cases, their own bathrooms.
There had once been a time when a home with a living room, den, and a dining room was quite luxurious, but many middle class Americans owned such homes because they were willing to believe that it was alright not to own a home outright, and that the value would always go up. In some cases, they borrowed money from their parents to make such purchases.
The Lesson in Boomer Home Buying Methods
The lesson that Baby Boomers can offer to those who follow when it comes to home buying is that a home, especially a first home, should be purchased as a means of providing shelter. And while a home can be a great investment, it won't be if its inhabitants cannot hold onto it as a result of high payments and extended borrowing.
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