It’s Never Too Late to Pick Up Your Life and Move to Italy
Holly Herrmann vowed to move to Italy when she was 20. Her dream came true 38 years later.
Sounds like a lovely story until you get to this bit…
In 2016, the couple picked up their lives in Seattle. Unsure of what their future would hold, they first rented their four-bedroom home, then later sold it along with their two cars and possessions too large to take with them.
They owned a four-bedroom home in one of the hottest property markets in the US, where they may well have quadrupled the value (assuming they bought in the 80s and sold in 2016) during their tenure. With savings, retirement plans, the cars and other possessions, they might have had 7 figures to bankroll their move. This is essentially a lottery windfall…hardly a risky move. The only risk is knowing they could never buy back in if it didn’t work out. But the bottomline is they could have made that move on nothing more than the accumulated wealth of their property, wealth created by their neighbors and everyone else who lives in Seattle.
And they probably think of themselves as middle-class, nothing exceptional.