They’ve rendered my Google smart speaker mostly useless except as a glorified hands free on/off switch for lights and tv. I used to be able to add items to my shopping list on Bring via voice command, and then suddenly one day it stopped working because they got rid of the tool that enabled that function (I’m not using their shitty lists app instead). I also found out that a tracking app that I use for noting down baby feeding times and diapers used to have voice command functionality until, you guessed it, Google axed that feature. It worked perfectly well before, I’m guessing they didn’t want to pay people to maintain it.
We bought our 1800 sqft house in Sacramento for almost 600k 2 years ago, when it was worth less than half that the last time it was appraised in 2008. We were at least fortunate enough to get a 30 year loan at 3.3% but we will NEVER see property taxes as low as many of our neighbors who have lived there for 20+ years.
My parents are selling their house in a couple of years in order to move closer to us. They’ll easily get over a million for it and then they’ll turn around and use that money to buy a house for 500k in cash. Yeah, they’ll take a hit in taxes but they will still have plenty left for buying the new house outright (so no mortgage), plus doing some additional renovations that my dad wants to do in order to have his dream kitchen.