As Gen Xers, we were raised to believe that owning a home was the cornerstone of the American Dream. Work hard, buy a house, pay off the mortgage, and enjoy your golden years in the home you built your life around. But now, we’re realizing something that feels more like a nightmare than a dream—property ownership in this country is a ruse. Even when you’ve paid off the house, the burden of property taxes makes it feel like you’re just leasing it from the government.
Take Illinois, for example—specifically DuPage County, where some homeowners are paying over $20,000 a year in property taxes. That’s an outrageous number for what’s supposed to be your property. In reality, it’s like paying rent to the government. You never really own your home if you have to keep paying, year after year, just to stay in it. And it gets worse when you factor in capital gains taxes when you eventually sell. Any equity you built? You’re going to be sharing that profit with Uncle Sam, too.
But the most insidious part of all this is what happens when you retire. You’ve worked hard, you’ve paid off your house, and now you’re ready to enjoy your retirement—except for one small problem. Property taxes don’t go away just because your mortgage does, and those $20,000 property tax bills? They don’t suddenly become affordable just because you’re on a fixed income. In fact, many retirees in states like Illinois quickly realize that without the full-time job income they once had, they can’t afford to stay in the home they’ve spent decades paying off.
Imagine that—you pay off your house, only to be forced out of it because of property taxes. You can no longer afford to live in the home you worked your whole life to pay for. So, what do you do? You sell it. And where do you go? Most people end up selling their Illinois homes and moving to southern states like Arkansas or Tennessee, where property taxes are more reasonable. But that’s not where they wanted to retire. They didn’t spend 30 years paying off a house just to be pushed out and relocated to a place they don’t really want to be.
It’s heartbreaking, and it’s a reality that many Gen Xers are facing as they approach retirement. We thought we were building something for ourselves, but the system was set up to keep us paying indefinitely. The property you thought you’d live in forever? It turns out you were just borrowing it from the government, paying their “rent” year after year in the form of property taxes.
This isn’t just an Illinois problem, though. It’s happening all over the country, and it’s a slap in the face to those of us who believed that homeownership was the key to financial security. In states with high property taxes, even if you do everything right, you’re still stuck in a system that bleeds you dry long after the mortgage is paid off.
The sad truth is, for many, homeownership—at least in states like Illinois—has become a losing proposition. You work your entire life to pay off a home, only to be forced to sell it and move somewhere else when the property taxes catch up with you in retirement. It’s a bad deal, and it’s one that we, as Gen X, are waking up to.
We need to start having real conversations about how the property tax system is rigged against us. It’s time to face the reality that this system was never built to help us achieve financial independence—it was built to keep us paying. And unless something changes, this is the future that many of us will face: paying off homes we’ll never truly own, only to be forced out when we can’t afford the taxes anymore.
