House Hunting in France: A Once-in-a-Millennium Castle for $3.3M
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[1]https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/more-americans-are-renounci...
It gets even more complicated with capital gains or losses, and different rules for how losses can be moved between financial years.
(And if you live in the UAE that US passport will be really valuable if you need to avoid having you hand chopped off for pissing off the wrong people.)
take someone who makes a million+ dollars in california. Their marginal rate is 50% (37% federal + 13% CA, and with the note that the SALT limits due to Trump, dont really get them 37% back on the state tax anymore).
compare this to most european countries where your income tax rate at the top is 50% or less.
now, they have other taxes they pay (social and the like) outside of income taxes, but so does the US. FICA and ss fees also "taxes" in a way.
I agree with you they're not particularly low, though, especially when factoring in what you get or don't get. E.g. add health insurance into the picture and starts to look very different.
The US is pretty middle of the road in terms of tax.
https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/calcul-de-lif...
Minus 30% if the asset is your regular home.
There are other taxes of course, this is only the "wealth" one.
+ Taxe d’habitation (city tax), 10-20k€ if it is proportional (depends on sqm and salary, and decreasing with children).
+ Taxe foncière (land tax), same amount as previous.
But French people earn about twice as less due to taxes, so you don’t have much competition from French buyers ;) I’m not a lawyer, just a big house owner. Who got rich abroad obviously.
But like everything else in life, castle ownership is temporary. It's such a rare thing to own, preserve, and pass a castle along to the next humans that it could be seen as a great honor. History needs to be nurtured and shared or it dies.
Yeesh.
Sorry if I didn’t express myself clearer.
Castles are very much a leisure expenditure.
But one interesting thing they mentioned was that in France, heritage of old buildings like these is opt-in. If you choose to opt-in the French government will pay you but you then need to abide by all sorts of standards.
This is in stark contrast with, say, English Heritage where they can decide at some point that your building is now listed, you get paid nothing and any alternations or renovations need to be approved (for maintaining the character).
If that's true about France, I prefer the sound of that system. There are literally thousands of castle/chateuas in France. Is it really justifiable to preserve all of them? Especially given that many are falling into disrepair and many of these buildings are already falling into disrepair through lack of demand for buyers.
Worked out handily for me, buying a 200+ year old cottage for less than the cost of the land, but I've been DIY'ing everything but the thatching.
Horrible, awful for the previous owners who saw at _least_ €100,000 knocked off the value of their house.
Edit: to give context, I bought it for far less than €100k, meaning the site lost most of its value.
Which is based on real-life event of the purchase of the Castle of Mey (1952):
(There is also an article on exploding houses in Ireland, but for entirely different reasons): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Irish_country_h...
Most of them section off part of the palace/castle for personal use while putting up the rest as a museum.
I guess making the revenue pay for the investments in art, maintenance of the building, security, etc. and buying you clothing and food is left as an exercise for the reader.
More importantly, make sure this is a passive business of sorts. Works well if you live in or near the same place.
Our opinion
"He who lives without madness is not as wise as he thinks", one of François-de-la-Rochefoucauld’s maxims. His statue adorns the park. This maxim could become that of the future occupants.
By way of comparison, this is what $3.3M buys you in SF: https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/2070-Beach-St-94123/...
The price of repairs are also mind-boggling, but for those you can get state subsidies
Basically it's only pleasant in the summer or if you're being raided by a neighbouring state.
But, yes, I'm sure maintenance is in the $100K+ a year area easily.
This castle is from the 11th century. It might have had the 11th century equivalent, which was feudal burdens, but those have almost certainly been abolished since the revolution.
Scotland has formally abolished the feudal system; England, however, has not, so you may still find yourself liable for the repair of a church built ten centuries ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability
And of course you'll need a retinue to man the walls.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Musketeers#Plot_summ...
I always misread it as Underzo when I was a kid though.
There is nothing supply-and-demand about improved real estate.
Farmland, maybe.
SF as a tech hub needs to die. There are better cities that are far less NIMBY and regressive.
If you don't succeed in launching a startup, you're just participating in a meat market. Your salary goes to rent. It's not sustainable.
My SF coworkers often have roommates. You can't live like that in your 30's. You can't get married or raise kids like that. I've owned multiple concurrent properties in the heart of a city - historic properties with 25' ceilings - and I still pay less than SF rent. It floors me people put up with SF living conditions.
NYC, Boston, Portland, Austin, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Miami have way better adjusted costs of living and aren't so broken politically. You can probably pick two cities and own homes in each for the cost of your SF rent.
Let the land owners have what they deserve. A brain and wealth drain.
"San Francisco is someone else's house."
I can't explain exactly what prompted it, but I got the sense that there exists in SF a deeply embedded property-owning class that owns the city. The city is theirs. If you are not one of them, you are only visiting. The city will never truly be your home. It's possible to buy into this class, but the cost of doing so is intentionally kept so high that it's unreachable to all but the extremely wealthy.
Has the city always been like this? I don't know, but I wonder if maybe it has... if the various waves of hippies, post-hippies, ravers, hackers, and tech bros weren't just visitors permitted to crash on the couch for a little while.
There are many other cities all over this country where you are permitted to become a true resident, often for a very sane price. I don't get this feeling in most other cities.
It was like this during the gold rush of 1849. [0] Maybe the whole time since.
[0] "mining the miners" https://stlukesexpandingwest.weebly.com/mining-the-miners.ht...
That's a baseless and factually incorrect accusation.
> Have you spent much time in these places?
Yes, and I don't see it the same way you do.
> After decades you still can’t take a train from the airport to the main destination (Miami Beach).
That's a problem? There are other forms of public transit and low-cost transportation. The US has by and large opted not to invest in heavy rail - that's not a local issue, that's a federal one.
It's not like California is leading the way on trains anymore.
> Miami is a mess of planning and corruption with none of the modern industries like tech that create quality employment for the middle class with reasonable wages, quality healthcare, and partial ownership of their employers.
Sharing a flat with two roommates isn't quality middle class living, either.
> In fact the governor has banned the use of the term “climate change” to help avoid the issue.
Florida is a purple state. You can point fingers, but the state is at the precipice. The election was incredibly close. You shouldn't diss those living there - they have an outsized impact on the direction of this country. Their electorate matters more than California's, and we should hope more liberal voters move to Florida and similar states.
Why? Seems like a good way to get the worst of both sides with constant gridlock. I prefer states to have a clear political stance so citizens can clearly choose the rules they live under.
Liberal voters staying in liberal states might learn more about how their policies work instead of escaping the consequences they voted in once those policies ruin the city, like they did to SF.
In fact, even if you want to talk about heavy rail, it’s been a local or at least state issue. The voters of the state passed a referendum for a bullet train nearly two decades ago and then the state government went to great lengths to avoid building it anyway. The Obama Administration even offered federal funds for it since it was the project that could be completed most quickly. But the state refused. And yes California is proceeding with a high speed train despite the anti-train hit pieces from the LA Times.
Sure rent is lower but the incomes are so much lower and the minimum wage is so low that the average worker is worse off.
There has not been a Democratic governor in Florida since the 1990s and we have had a member of the Bush family and one of the biggest Medicare fraudsters in history since so I would say it’s been a relatively red state other than occasionally swinging blue in the presidential race.
Thanks for telling me I shouldn’t diss people who live in Florida. I live in Florida so I don’t really need the advice. After several decades here I am well versed in the many issues here including finding any neighborhood larger than two blocks that is walkable. Or finding a public park since the land was all sold to private developers. That’s not how urban planning works in functioning cities like San Francisco.
Maybe you should take your own advice and not diss people in California since you don’t live there.
So far the high speed train has been a boondoggle, not a good example of a success. It will be decades before it goes anywhere useful.
> Or finding a public park since the land was all sold to private developers. That’s not how urban planning works in functioning cities like San Francisco.
Have you ever actually lived in San Francisco? A significant chunk of it (and 95% of the rest of the bay) is not walkable. And there is no functional urban planning in San Francisco. A policy of rejecting every new substantial proposal is not “planning”.
When was the last time they agreed to allow dense housing to replace single/multi-family homes? When was the last new BART line added? When were new commuter rail lines added in?
I lived in the Bay Area for over a decade now and this fantasy you have of a functioning local government doesn’t exist. The only people that make good enough money to be worth it are senior software folks. Everyone else is better at their slightly reduced equivalent wage anywhere else in the US (aside from maybe NYC).
Tax money is absolutely being pissed away at an alarming rate based on what citizens get here. The schools are frequently garbage, the public transit is useful for maybe 5% of the population, and the homeless problem is as bad as ever. All of this for the low price of one of the highest income tax states + sales tax.
I chose the bay because of the tech economy and nice weather in spite of the blisteringly incompetent government. I don’t think any of my friends or coworkers are in SF or the wider bay because they think it’s a good governance model. The thought is likely pretty laughable to most residents.
Many of the schools are great. Sorry if your school district is bad. There are excellent schools in many areas. Cupertino, most of the Peninsula, Berkeley have some really great ones.
My coworkers for a decade took public transit more often than not. You live in the suburbs if you think 5% of the population takes BART or Muni to work. Plus many people walk or bike.
I've walked all over San Francisco so if you don't find it walkable its on you. Grab an electric scooter, a bike share, an electric skateboard, some rollerblades, or one of those uniwheel things and the hills won't be so bad if you can't handle walking them. The Mission has more streets of great walkability with restaurants and small businesses everywhere than almost anywhere in America.
Perhaps the fact that you don't even know about the BART expansion should be the warning sign that you don't really follow Bay Area transit very closely. Ironic that you ask if I have ever actually lived in San Francisco. Yes I have. Trying to act like the government is so incompetent that they can't open a station when they just opened Milpitas and Berryessa/North San Jose stations on June 13 says more about your lack of attention to local issues than it does about their urban planning. They also built 7,000 nearby housing units. Its actual transit-first development as they've been doing in SF for years.
I've met more people in junior roles get rich in the Bay Area from equity than would ever be possible by trying to live in the cheapest possible place with minimal opportunities such that your expenses are a slightly lower percentage of your take-home pay as a new graduate. If you did an entry level job at Twilio you're probably a millionaire now. People get promoted significantly faster in the Bay Area due to the number of fast growing companies and the pay, which started out higher, grows that much more every year due to promotions, larger cost of living increases, etc.
So sure make your money and leave. Don't try to improve things you don't like, just complain about them. Go somewhere new and find out all the issues there that you didn't realize including several of the ones I brought up here. Learn what a truly unwalkable place is like.
So they prioritized nice houses over solving the housing problem. Not to re-assuring if you aren’t rich enough to own one of these houses or compete for the few high rise units there are.
> Many of the schools are great. Sorry if your school district is bad.
Lol, the embodiment of what’s wrong with California politics. That’s almost literally NIMBY.
> My coworkers for a decade took public transit more often than not. You live in the suburbs if you think 5% of the population takes BART or Muni to work. Plus many people walk or bike.
Yes, I live where the majority of the Bay Area lives - outside of San Francisco proper because SF has such hostile housing policies. Nobody would give a shit about the bay bridge if public transportation was decent but instead it’s a parking lot every day (non-covid).
> Perhaps the fact that you don't even know about the BART expansion should be the warning sign that you don't really follow Bay Area transit very closely.
If you’re talking about the track extension to San Jose, that’s pathetic. That’s something that should have been done about 20 years ago and it still doesn’t solve shit for most of the peninsula. It also doesn’t do anything for most of San Jose itself. If people cared about transit there would be multiple lines up and down the peninsula, cross lines, and a way to get to Mountain View from SFO that runs 24/7 and doesn’t require waiting at a bart/Caltrain interchange for up to an hour when it is running. As it’s run now, BART and Caltrain are red-headed step children used as lip service by politicians afraid to do anything serious to address public transportation in a meaningful way.
> I've met more people in junior roles get rich in the Bay Area from equity than would ever be possible by trying to live in the cheapest possible place with minimal opportunities such that your expenses are a slightly lower percentage of your take-home pay as a new graduate. If you did an entry level job at Twilio you're probably a millionaire now.
What a sad distraction from the point about the incompetent government. I already said the business environment is great and operates in spite of the incompetent government. Also, keep in mind that only a couple percent of the population work for tech companies and only maybe 1 percent of that group get to ride a successful exit. For every millionaire junior engineer you met, there are 10,000 people being failed by the current Bay Area government.
> So sure make your money and leave. Don't try to improve things you don't like, just complain about them.
What makes you think I haven’t worked on improving things? You might learn that the ability to identify problems is the only way to actually meaningfully fix anything.
It sounds like you’re just happy with your rich circle of friends in the city, that’s great for you. IMO that “I’ve got mine” attitude is what makes the bay so miserable for the rest of the 99%.
> Learn what a truly unwalkable place is like.
I’ve spent months in Tokyo and over a year in NYC. The Bay Area is a joke when it comes to walkability. Small segments of SF can be suffered through and then everyone else is just fucked without a car or ride sharing.
I suggest the opposite to you. Go spend some time in walkable cities to open your eyes to how mismanaged the governance of the bay is. Try Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Osaka, etc.
Your point of comparison might be some suburb rust belt US city so it might look golden to you, but it’s shockingly bad compared to governments that are truly motivated to support car free lifestyles.
There is far more to a city than employment, like taxes and affordability.
Florida is great if you made money elsewhere and want to come spend it in a low tax state where people move to retire to the suburbs and die. If you’re actually working then you realize there is no major industry outside of things like tourism which leads to a lot of low paying dead end jobs.
Why are you comparing service workers in Florida to software engineers in California? Being in the service industry is worse in CA than FL, even with a higher min wage (which usually increases cost of living just as much). And there's not much of a middle class in CA either regardless of industry, in fact the entire state is known for its vast wealth inequality and disappearance of the middle class.
As far as affordability of housing in SF, it's because of city policies that refuse to let new housing be built, not because people don't make enough to buy a home. Same with extremely high taxes that deliver no value to citizens while the city is overrun with crime and homelessness and deteriorating infrastructure. This is separate from employment, and really needs to be fixed first before you can increase opportunities for people.
Hah! Yep the money just disappears
Your comments throughout this thread make it clear you don’t want to have a discussion on the issues. So we can agree to disagree.
In summary, the point is software engineers in Florida rarely get equity or decent healthcare either, if they can even find a real software job in FL that isn’t just IT for some company that has nothing to do with computers. Most of the Floridian software engineers I know work for companies based in California or NY / MA where there are networks of successful startups and angel investors who help get new companies off the ground. You criticize San Francisco for deteriorating infrastructure when places like Florida haven’t even managed to build comparable infrastructure. It’s easy to critique BART but until you take Tri-Rail you’ll never realize that it’s like BART is from the future in comparison. The machines to buy tickets routinely don’t work to the point that I had to board without a ticket and just pay a fine when they checked tickets so I didn’t have to wait an hour for the next train.
Meanwhile the state is sinking while they deny climate change. Truly an infrastructure disaster.
We are literally having a discussion. Does it only count if we agree? Call it a debate then if you must.
And yes the money does disappear. It's called waste, a very common problem with how governments spend money. The quality of life and govt services in SF and CA are not commensurate with the taxes collected.
The wider point is that ratio of avg income to expenses is worse in CA than FL. This is what "adjusted" cost of living means, and is regardless of various specific niches and industries that you're focusing on.
If you still think FL is worse than fine, just move to CA. You might love it here, but I doubt you will once you realize just how bad the politics are, which was what the original claim was.
You literally chopped off the last three words to try to make it sound like it said something different. Saying that when you pay more taxes it just blanketly disappears is both demonstrably false and clearly an exaggeration to the point of no longer being a discussion on the issues.
I spent over a decade living in California. I'm well aware what its like.
Based on what? Taxes are the highest and constantly increasing, meanwhile every possible metric about livability, govt services and quality of life have dropped drastically. It's absolute fact that tax money is being wasted and the state is insolvent with a severe deficit. [1][2][3][4]
Do you have any actual evidence to the contrary? Is living here for a decade supposed to mean something? Because I've lived here 2.5 decades and millions of other residents agree with my assessment. Please discuss or show something that backs up your claims now.
1) https://www.businessinsider.com/california-worst-quality-of-... 2) https://observer.com/2019/05/california-homeless-crisis-san-... 3) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/30/tax-hike-on-california-milli... 4) https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-fires-damage-cli...
It's obviously an alternative lifestyle and I don't know if I could do it. But saying that having kids, being married and having room-mates is impossible is not a fact, but an opinion.
I wonder if there are people living together in the some home and in a polyamorous relationship and simultaneously have kids, also living in the same home. Basically a whole community living together.
If shape follows function though, I could not tell what this place function is.
Also, an hour away with zero traffic to Manhattan means you need to budget 2 hours during non covid times outside of the dead of night.
4 Bedrooms and a yard within 2km of the financial district and 1 block from the waterfront for only $3.3M?
Try getting that in Sydney!
Edit:
To the doubters, this is between $3M and $3.5M (Australian $): https://www.realestate.com.au/property-terrace-nsw-millers+p...
It's an area that is roughly comparable, but smaller, not great condition and a courtyard.
If we’re not accounting for conversion rates let’s find what kind of house 3.5 million yen will get ;)
https://www.castleist.com/1-795m-california-usa-san-francisc...
(PS many more historical European castles on this site)
This chateau, on the other hand, appears to be in good condition and I reckon that much of the costs would involve hiring gardeners and landscapers to keep the property in good shape.
Edit: I can't imagine what the heating bills are like.
Effective overall property tax rates in US states range from about 0.5% to a little over 2%, IIRC, they absolutely are not a huge burden.
> Most Europeans think Americans pay low taxes, but if you live around NY its normal to pay 40%-50% by the time you include all the extra taxes
I doubt it, though maybe if you are confusing marginal for total rates you would get that.
Marginal is well over 50% in NYC, CA. eg top bracket marginal is 37% federal + 12.3% CA state + 1.45% Medicare is over 50% before property taxes. 40% total tax is very easy to hit.
Like I said before if you're on Social Security or unemployed its really tough, I know someone who's out of work and paying $2.5K a month in property taxes, it eats up your savings super fast.
The top tax rate is actually 13.3% state, but even the 12.3% kicks in at over $590k for a single taxpayer, well above the 99th percentile individual income for the state, which means it's very much not normal for people to pay that much.
On top of this is 25% VAT on all purchases, 32% capital gains tax and 0.85% of net worth (with conplex deductions; 75% for primary home and 40% for stocks) each year.
Employer pays 14% of your salary in tax, as well as 22% on all profits before owners pay capital gains on dividends on the remaining.
Of course that means their property value goes up too, and that should be a good thing in the general case.
Its a strange kind of situation where you make the same money and then a factory opens close to you and you now make less money.
The only reasoning for Prop 13 is to distribute more of the burden for paying the government’s expenses to people who move to California later than those who moved before.
European Castles: Easier to Buy Than You Might Think https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-castles-easier-to-buy-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_of_the_Unicorn
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_and_the_Unicorn
Edit: Fixed link
https://fleetwoodmac-uk.com/wp/fleetwood-macs-christine-mcvi...
2) Everything is hard with an old mansion. For example, often they used lead sheets for roofing. So you need to fly in a lead roof craftsman. Then a stonemason. You get the picture. What owners do when they find a problem is to say budget 25% per year of the roofing problem, etc. and stretch it out, unlike a normal building.
Even if not directly pitched by the agent themselves, you often see these at the lower end where the property arm of a publication (lift-out or sub-site) features interesting/grand properties as a sweetener to whoever is advertising with them.
The historic place of the family was the chateau de la Rochefoucauld, located about 25 miles to the south of Verteuil, and from which the family got her name (la roche à Foucauld: Foucauld's rock).
But nobody actually lived in La Rochefoucauld, they lived in Verteuil most of the time (and in Paris as well).
Some members of my family are from that region and I've been there often. It's a very nice region with lots of nice places, castles, churches, etc. But there isn't much to do.
US property taxes can get really expensive in some areas of the country to where it can be a major portion of a mortgage payment if escrow is used that way. Even my thirty mile outside the metro property tax is over three thousand US and I have a friend in New Jersey who pays four times what I do.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/10/11/realestate/07IHH-...
Note the painting of Francois de La Rochefoucauld to the right - it would be interesting to see the valuation of the artwork unless it doesn't come with the property.
The sticker price is a side-show.
As for the neighbours well, as long as the owner is discreet...
https://www.redfin.com/WA/Renton/4051-Williams-Ave-N-98056/h...
Here’s one with a water view for half that price if your concern is being in the city limits: https://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/2583-Magnolia-Blvd-W-98199...
Bette Davis - What A Dump! (Original)
Imagine the dust.
LA Public Library as an example: https://www.lapl.org/books-emedia/e-media