This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Katarina Polonska, a relationship scientist and coach who will be inheriting her childhood home in Slovakia. Vancouver-based Polonska, 36, said the home needs a lot of work, and it may not be worth managing renovations from abroad. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m going to be inheriting my childhood home where I was born. I love it, and it’s very precious to me. But I don’t have any right to it yet.
It’s mostly used as a family holiday home, but ultimately when my mother passes, it’s going to be given to me.
My mother owns it, and there’s no plan to sell it — the value of the home isn’t very high, in fairness. It’s a two-bedroom, one-bathroom. It’s not worth much at all; maybe $80,000 CAD. I don’t think the money would go very far in Canada.
Also, selling it would require a lot of renovations. It’s very old school and needs a lot of TLC, and my mother doesn’t live in Slovakia, she lives in England. So from her perspective, she’s thinking, “Why would I invest 30,000 or 50,000 euros (about $35,245 or $58,742) in a property that I go to a few times a year max? What’s the point?”
She also knows it would to be really complicated to sell it from abroad, having to navigate viewings and trusting realtors and all of this stuff.
The reality is, I’m going to own this foreign property when she passes.
My husband is in a similar situation with a Barbados property
My husband is also waiting to inherit. His mother inherited a property in Barbados from her parents, though she never lived in Barbados.
His mother had to wait to take over the Barbados property, and by the time she took it over, it had declined a little bit and there are always complications with it.
Courtesy of Katarina Polonska
I’ve actually never seen it myself, but I know that there’s a lot of work to be done with the house. But his mother has been holding onto it saying, “You can inherit it and you and Kat can enjoy it.”
But he’s like, “We don’t go to Barbados enough.” It’s just more hassle having to manage and protect a property when you’re not physically in the country.
I think from my perspective, because I’m naive about it, I’m like, keep it, it’d be really nice to have it. But his argument is that the place isn’t in the area of Barbados that I would necessarily want to go to.
He’s really wary. He doesn’t want to be managing the property and he would rather sell it and then distribute the money within his family.
So we both know that there’s going to be this new responsibility on our heads and, candidly, I think life is difficult enough as it is.
The home in Slovakia needs so much work that I probably can’t rent it out as-is
I’m not going to rent the Slovakia home out because it’s from, like, the 1980s. It’s not been renovated. It’s ancient; the wallpaper’s faded.
While Slovakia is kind of an up-and-coming country from a tourism perspective, I don’t think anyone would want to stay in this place as an Airbnb unless it was literally advertised as a historical relic: “Come stay in this ancient old-school apartment!”
Courtesy of Katarina Polonska
My husband and I have talked about how we’re probably going to have to renovate it. We know that at some point, we’re probably going to have to take a couple of months to be there physically to renovate it. But when is that going to happen? We both work, and getting to Slovakia is like a 20-hour journey from here.
I think, more realistically, we could just keep the place and treat it as a little getaway to escape to. There is really lovely nature nearby and I don’t have any other properties, so there is merit psychologically to knowing that there is a place that’s home, even if it is halfway across the world.
There needs to be more dialogue between parents and children about inheritances
When it comes to inheriting property, I think there needs to be more dialogue between the parent and the child of, “What do you actually want to do?”
I think a lot of parents have this assumption that leaving a kid the property is the ultimate goal; we’ve made it, we’ve paid off the mortgage, we have this home, and now the kid gets it. Those days are kind of gone.
We don’t live in a world where everyone grows up and lives in the same town or city as their parents. We live in a really global economy. People are moving, people are more transient, and the world has become smaller. It’s also become a lot more expensive, and home ownership isn’t what it used to be.
Parents need to recognize that the world we’re in is very different, and Millennials are not an anxious generation for no reason. We have a lot of stresses. It makes more sense to have a dialogue with your kid around what they want.
I wish parents would ask, “What do you want? Where are you at with your life, and what kind of inheritance makes sense?”
Is it, in fact, a lump sum of cash, because maybe you’re a busy entrepreneur and you don’t have time to sell? Maybe you actually would prefer the parent to sell, which is annoying for the parents, but maybe the kid would prefer that.
Thank you for the inheritance — that’s very generous. But I think quite a lot of kids would probably say it’s not worth it. Either enjoy the money, mom and dad, or cash out, downsize, and just give us a down payment or something.
