In-laws own 16 properties, including a $1.7 million abandoned lake house, make it clear nothing gets inherited, while their son-in-law tenant works two jobs just to pay off student debt

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• The in-laws own sixteen properties. Not a modest investment portfolio built quietly over the years. Sixteen, including a 1.7 million dollar abandoned lake house that just sits there being worth 1.7 million dollars and doing nothing about it. Also a second lake property with an abandoned cottage. Also the father-in-law's childhood home preserved as a private 1950s museum that nobody lives in and nobody visits, just a time capsule of a decade that ended before their tenants were born. The word abandoned appears multiple times across this property list and nobody seems bothered by that.

• My in‑laws own 16 properties but told us none will ever be passed down. Meanwhile I’m 30, paid off $60k, tackling $117k more, and still won’t own a home until 40….and this Job market is roasted.

  Earl_the_Greatmuffin 

• I’m 30 years old, and at this point I’ve accepted that I probably won’t own a home until I’m 40. I already paid off $60k of my own student loans by working my 9 to 5 and flipping stuff on eBay at night. Now I’m working on my wife’s debt. She has about $117k, and we’ve managed to knock her biggest federal loan from $20k down to $12k in five months. That’s from both of us working full time and me hustling on eBay every spare minute.

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• I’m averaging about an extra thousand a month reselling. And honestly, it’s ridiculous that I even had to turn to reselling because my job hasn’t given me a raise in almost five years. I’ve been applying everywhere, but the job market is a disaster. I work fully remote, so since they don’t pay me enough, I literally do both jobs at the same time.

• Meanwhile, we’re renting from my in‑laws, who own sixteen properties. One is an abandoned lake house worth around $1.7 million. Another is a lake property with an abandoned cottage. And then there’s my father‑in‑law’s childhood home down the road, which they keep as a weird boomer time capsule with stuff from the 50s and 60s still sitting inside. And the kicker is they’ve made it very clear that none of these properties will ever go to anyone. Everything will be liquidated when they retire. No help, no passing anything down, nothing.

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• So here we are, grinding overtime, juggling two full‑time jobs, reselling on eBay, and looking for a third part‑time gig because this market is beyond cooked. My wife and I did everything we were told to do. We followed the path that was supposed to lead to stability. Instead, we’re drowning in debt, stuck in a broken job market, watching AI replace people, and fighting for scraps just to stay afloat.

• Still, paying off $60k and knocking out almost another $20k feels good. But I’m exhausted. This is what “doing everything right” looks like in America.

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• The official family policy on all of this is liquidation. Everything gets sold at retirement, nothing passes down, no help, no discussions. Which is entirely their right as the owners of sixteen properties and also a perfectly efficient way to ensure that generational wealth stops accumulating exactly one generation before it could have mattered. The kids renting from them can find out what the lake house sold for in the newspaper like everyone else.

• Meanwhile the eBay operation running in the background of a full time remote position is what filling the gap between salary and reality actually looks like in practice. Not a fun hustle, not a passion project. A structural fix for a job that has not moved in five years while everything around it has. Running two jobs from the same desk while applying for a third is the current definition of getting ahead, and these two are genuinely doing it while sitting next door to abandoned real estate worth more than most people will earn in a lifetime.

• Sixty thousand dollars paid off, twenty thousand more knocked out in five months, and a homeownership timeline that lands somewhere around forty. The discipline is real, the results are real, and the sixteen properties next door will be someone else's in a few years. That is just the math.

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