WTH? Couple buys ‘What the Heck’ home
They married in their 20s and immediately bought a small house in the near-in suburbs. Until last month, they lived there still — nearly 50 years later.
Their house has two bedrooms, one and a half baths, a carport large enough to accommodate one car and a patch of grass in front “about as big as a deck of cards,” the wife said.
“We have lived very modestly,” she added — two government salaries, used cars only, no fancy trips to Europe. “Just one foot in front of the other.”
But as the couple neared their 75th birthdays, they did something that has left their friends and family — and the couple themselves — aghast.
In the space of 36 hours, they heard about a lakeside house that was for sale in a neighboring state. It has six bedrooms, six bathrooms, a 1,000-square-foot kitchen, 20 acres of surrounding woods and a big-time dock that can handle as many as three sailboats at once.
The price was big-time also: $2.5 million.
They bought it.
“We just decided, ‘What the heck,’” said the woman who co-signed on the dotted line with a huge grin on her face.
The price tag was not only out of character for the couple. It was utterly out of keeping with the way they have lived.
“We have never been into sailing. We have never birdwatched. We have never been into $500-a-month bills to heat our home,” she said. “We went to work, we came home, we paid our bills.”
And now?
“What the heck,” she repeated.
What the Heck home purchases by baby boomers may become more the norm than the exception, according to three real estate agents I interviewed.
Boomers “may wake up one day and discover that, yes, they really can afford to put down a deposit of a quarter of a million dollars and carry a mortgage of $4,500 a month,” said one agent.
“Remember that they’ve had 50 years to save for this moment, even if they didn’t know they were saving for this moment.”
Another factor, said a second agent, is how to best create a legacy for their family.
“That house in the suburbs might be where they raised their child,” said this agent (in fact, it is). “But whoever buys that 1950s bungalow will probably knock it down and replace it with a McMansion.” The What the Heck house will become the “place for family memories.”
Then there’s the factor that might be weightiest of all: The ticking of the clock.
The What the Heck couple “might be hearing footsteps,” said the third agent. “They get closer to the ends of their lives every day.” So buying a fancy WTH house beside a lake is right out of the older person’s playbook.
“Time to do what we want, when we want, where we want,” the agent told me. “I hear it every day.”
For the WTH couple, the virtues of their new home are many. They hear owls hooting at night. The only things that ever hooted in the suburbs were car alarms.
Then there are the neighbors. They have discovered that all the owners of nearby properties are couples in their 70s.
“We have crash-landed into a bunch of new peers and new friends,” said the woman who co-bought. In their 50-year neighborhood, they had become the oldest residents.
But the biggest benefit is a sense of peace.
“We paid our taxes. We joined the PTA. We yanked our trash cans back inside after the trucks unloaded them,” the woman said.
“We dealt with rush hour twice every weekday for decades. When this house jumped up and said, ‘Buy me,’ we realized how much we needed not to be exhausted any more.”
Of course, buying The Monster—as they have dubbed their new home — is only the beginning of their expenses.
Furniture for all those rooms needs to be bought (“That will be many thousands”). Landscaping will probably be necessary (“More thousands”).
And the couple has decided to spring for an alarm system — not just hardware attached to the house itself, but a company that monitors the property 24/7 via closed-circuit television (“Even more thousands”).
And yet…“It’s only money,” said the woman. “As my husband says, we can’t take it with us.”
Or, as they said to one another after signing the sales contract, “It’s about time we said What the Heck.”
Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.
