Author Archives: Jay Butchko
Are Multigenerational Households the New American Dream?
Homeownership is becoming more unaffordable by the day. Between the high interest rates and the uncertainty about buyers having to pay real estate agents’ commissions instead of sellers taking responsibility for all the commissions, it is no wonder that most Americans who have never owned a house or condominium despair of ever being able… Read More »
Can Affordable Housing Be Affordable for Landlords, Too?
In their worst moments, current landlords and aspiring real estate investors sound like supervillains in a movie where the protagonist’s goal is to stop a run-down New York City tenement building, the only home he has ever known, from being destroyed to make room for a Pilates studio and a dog park. If you… Read More »
Understanding the 5 Ds of Real Estate
Children of the 80s grew up playing a board game called the Game of Life. There is probably a phone app version of this game available somewhere, but the young generation does not experience the slow progress of your tiny plastic car across the game board, as it inches through suburbia while filling up… Read More »
Tenant Owned Buildings Are Getting Closer to Becoming Reality in New York City
The prohibitively high cost of housing in New York is so well known that it has become proverbial. The only difference is that now the rest of the country is starting to feel New York’s pain. It has been the case for as long as anyone can remember that only rich people can afford… Read More »
A Financial First Aid Kit Can Save Your Family Time and Money
Whoever creates clickbait related to estate planning must not know the golden rule of estate planning, namely that estate planning is about planning for life, not planning for death. Content creators can’t seem to resist mentioning the “D” word at every opportunity. For example, Swedish death cleaning is a great idea, but it is… Read More »
Your Plan to Work Until You Are 70 May Backfire
Ensuring financial stability during retirement is becoming more difficult for each successive cohort of retirees. Our income has less purchasing power than our parents’ income did, and employer-provided retirement pensions are getting harder to find. Today’s workers are lucky if their employers contribute to a retirement count for them at all. Even having your… Read More »
Do Boomer Enrichment Centers Count as Aging in Place?
When you are rushing to catch the subway to work and reflecting on how much older you are than when you first started this routine, it is easy to think that there are no satisfactory options for retirement. Conventional wisdom has it that New York retirement can go one of two ways. Either you… Read More »
How to Build Your Estate Plan When Your Health, Not Your Finances, Determines When You Retire
With everything that has happened since you have been in the workforce, it is understandable how you have managed to make it to your 50s without thinking about retirement or estate planning in much detail. The gray hairs began to appear, followed by friendly brochures from the AARP, but you did not give them… Read More »
Revocable Trusts Are Not a Tax Haven
Setting up an irrevocable trust is intimidating for almost everyone except for people who have grown up around them. The word “irrevocable” is scary, even for people who do not think of themselves as commitment phobic. Watching a trust manage your money while you are unable to change your mind about it feels too… Read More »
The “I Would Prefer Not To” Estate Plan
When journalists talk about the Great Resignation, they usually use the term “quiet quitting” in the same article. When young people join the Great Resignation, they are defiantly walking away from the materialistic ambitions that, they have realized, are getting them nowhere. Giving up is only one aspect of resignation, though; resignation is also… Read More »