Buying a house in Italy!

The Fantasia Family is happy to announce a new saga on the AYFKM blog: we are finally buying a house in Italy!

No, we are not leaving Switzerland. But in this age of slow interest rates, keeping cash in the bank is suicide. It’s not that we have SO MUCH cash to invest anyway, and, sure, we could invest in ETFs instead, but it just so happens that a… hideout in Italy would be pretty useful to us right now. In fact, recently we had troubles whenever we went to Spelunca to visit my parents: their house is not large enough to accommodate all of us and a work-from-home environment for myself comfortably. So, we said, since buying even just a BRICK in Switzerland is impossible, why not to buy a small house in Spelunca near my parents’ house? Housing near where my parents live is pretty cheap, and we could rent it out as an AirBnB whenever we are not there – in fact, I checked and there are not many AirBnB options around, and the few ones available are incredibly overpriced, so it looks like a good market to jump in.

Anyway, the AirBnB project is something for the future, for now we just want to buy a house, furnish it, keep it empty, and use it whenever we go there. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out the economics of the idea: maintaining a house is not cheap, plus taxation, etc. But it looks like, in our case, we can make it work at a negligible cost. To put it differently, if we had to pay accommodation out of our pockets whenever we go to visit my parents in Italy (because, as I wrote, we cannot stay there anymore for longer than a couple of days) we would have to pay more, on average per year, than what it would cost us to keep a (small/cheap) empty house if we account for taxes, utilities, etc.

So the feasibility of the idea all boils down to the buy price of the house itself, plus one-time expenses like notary etc. But most of this money we can recover if needs be by selling the house, housing price in Spelunca is steadily going up, and we have enough cash (albeit barely) to afford a small apartment without having to take loans. Even if it feels like a “waste” buying a house and keeping it empty except for a few weeks per year, the math is already OK given that otherwise we would have anyway to pay accommodation every time, and then in the future anything that comes as AirBnB income is welcome extra.

After a few months of searching, we finally found a good opportunity, very close to my parents’: a modest, old but well renovated, large apartment in a 2-flats house. The apartment will be ready end of October, in the meantime we have done the “compromesso” (an advance deposit) with the real estate agency, and we have found a relatively cheap notary through family connections to seal the deal.

So now what is missing is… THE BUREAUCRACY.

Stay tuned.