Do you remember the 2000 prices? And our desperate reader remembered them for the rest of her life.
“It all started 20 years ago. I lived in a provincial town, my husband and I had a three-room apartment. Our daughter was five years old, and we dreamed of a wonderful future.
It all ended abruptly. It turned out that only I dreamed of a wonderful future. My husband cheated on me. It turned out that everyone had known about this for a long time, but were silent. The husband got a mistress, who worked for him as a freight forwarder. They went on business trips together, and the betrayal continued for months. It did not work to return well-being and trust to the family – we parted. The three-room apartment had to be exchanged for two single rooms. My daughter and I moved to a new home and tried to move on.
Soon after, my grandmother died and left a legacy of a one-room Khrushchev. The loss of a loved one was hard, but six months later I was grateful to my grandmother that she wrote me an apartment. I thought about expanding housing, about how life would get better someday. But, as they say, trouble has come – open the gate. The enterprise where I worked went bankrupt, I was sent out into the street. There was nowhere to earn money for bread, I’m not talking about a sandwich with butter. The daughter had to be collected in the first grade, which means that she had at least some supply of money.
The ex-spouse by that time faded into the near abroad and became unavailable. There was no one to wait for help.
I decided to sell my grandmother’s apartment in order to patch the priority holes in the budget and try to open my own business.
It was 2000. Who remembers the prices of that year? I have remembered them for the rest of my life. As well as the fact that in the same year there was a collapse in housing prices, especially for secondary ones. The dollar cost a little more than 28 rubles, apartments could be bought, by today’s standards, for a penny. I sold my grandmother’s mansions for 5000 dollars (for five thousand dollars!), That is, for 145 rubles. You heard right. A small kopeck piece in our city at that time was sold for 500 thousand, a khrushchev kopeck piece was sold for nothing. Housing prices were falling so fast that forecasts were absolutely horrifying, they spoke of a fall in value to 7 thousand. I monitored the market, so do not twist it at your head. Whoever bought himself an apartment that year was right. I was not lucky – I was acting as a salesperson.
For the sake of fairness, it must be said that 5 thousand dollars was a lot of money for those times. The average salary of a Russian then was 2300 rubles, at that rate it is 80 dollars. In my opinion, even for India, this is not income.
The job was not easy. I rushed around several offices and realized that it was impossible to live on the same salary with a child. I decided to become an individual entrepreneur and invested in a flower business. But the impoverished people had no time for bouquets, and most of the money turned into dead rose petals. Even then, I began to realize that I had profited real estate.
As a result, I found a job – I got a job in a company that was engaged in landscape design. Everything seemed to be getting better, and my daughter and I even went on vacation abroad every year. My girl graduated excellently from school, and then from the university. Everything would be fine, but I did not foresee that the child would grow up and begin to build his personal life. A year and a half ago, my heiress brought the groom to the house. He was originally from a distant village, but moved to the city, where he lived in a hostel. He, as a specialist, was given a bed from the plant where he worked as a design technician.
Their goals were far-reaching, so they decided to save up for their housing in our nice odnushka. I settled on the kitchen couch. On it I remembered how I once sold my grandmother’s apartment. Firstly, they would be a salvation for our growing family and I would not have to huddle in pots. Secondly, I always think that now this apartment would cost 1,5 million rubles, and at today’s exchange rate – about 23 thousand dollars. Not a bad investment, isn’t it? To say I’m sorry about that sale is to say nothing. Out of frustration, I bite not only my elbows, but also my knees.
I blame myself for everything, and I don’t know what to do next. Asking your daughter and son-in-law to rent a house means depriving them of additional savings. But this cannot continue. So weigh the pros and cons when parting with the inheritance from your relatives! “