Some houses in Sweden are very cheap, indeed.
I bought one of them, a few years ago, and it has been the best purchase of my life. But I was incredibly lucky, because it happened to be in a place with relatively good infrastructure, so I can walk to bus, train, supermarket, car repair garage, dentist, lake, and friends.
That’s unusual, with cheap houses.
In Sweden, the price of a house tells you a lot about the economy and services around it. If it’s crazy cheap, you simply know that there is no work within commuting radius for anyone who doesn’t own an airplane, and that your shopping and medical access is pretty much Australian Outback level.
Make no mistake about it, Sweden is a pretty big country, considering how few people live in it. So you will see plenty of houses that are in the middle of nowhere, usually in areas where local industry may have closed down for good, and where there are plenty of other, empty houses standing around. Some are even just abandoned. It costs money to run a house, after all, and once the owner has died and no relatives want to take over, that’s often the end of it.
Those places can be absolutely idyllic to look at.
But they aren’t worth anything on the market due to the realities of life.
It’s funny because accommodation is one of the hardest things to come by in Swedish cities, while in the countryside, you can have as many houses as you like, and everyone will be happy to see someone moving in. When my wife and I came to my village, the villagers were ecstatic that some “young people” (we were in our mid forties) were coming.
I drive 50 kilometres to work.
I don’t mind it, because I like driving, the roads are empty, the landscape is beautiful, and my car doesn’t consume much, so I can pull that off on a normal salary. It takes me 40 minutes from door to door. Now, that may not sound like much of a challenge, but keep in mind that, for six months of every year, that means conditions like these:
Unless you love to drive in the snow, and in the dark, and see yourself spending a good chunk of your net income on ensuring you have a reliable car with excellent winter tyres in tip top shape to do 2,000–4,000 kilometres a month, don’t even look at these houses. You’ll also need to be in a position to be able to connect your car’s electric engine block heater at night, and ideally cover the car or have it under a carport to avoid having to brush it off every morning, which is a pain, especially the windscreen.
I have colleagues who drive in from locations 100 and more kilometres away. What wears them down, and me, too. It is not so much the above, but the permanent danger of encountering animals on the road. You’re basically barrelling along at 80 km/h, fully expecting sudden, catastrophic impact out of nowhere for the full length of your journey, knowing that you could find yourself pinned to your seat by elk antlers any time in the smouldering wreckage of your car. There are plenty of these crashes here every year - 60,000, in fact, which means 1% of all cars in any given year will crash like that.
It’s like Russian roulette with 100 chambers, basically.
Feel like taking the train instead? No problem. But you won’t find any cheap houses nearby a train station with commuter trains that go somewhere money can be earned.
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