2. My father was convinced when we bought our house that the $99K it cost was ridiculous, that we were stupid fools for paying that much, and that our bank must be staffed by idiots to agree to a mortgage because and I quote, "No normal house is worth $99K. Sure, a mansion maybe. But a regular house? NO regular house costs more than $25K." When my mother then showed hiim the Sunday paper listings for houses, he blustered and flustered and insisted that the listed prices were "inflated" and "any fool" could dicker ANY house down to no more than $25K. Because that is what they'd paid for their house when they'd bought it 20 years before.
Sounds much like my grandfather-in-law.
He bought a 650sqft house on an acre for $7000 about 45 years ago. This is his entire basis for his opinion on home prices.
When we bought our first house, home prices in the area looked like this:
$25-40k for a house that requires significant rehab (I'm talking months of work and $20k+ to rehab)
$50-80k for an older house that needed some work
$80-130k for a house in decent shape, possibly older and/or ugly, but usually move-in ready
$130-200k for a nice, new, move-in-ready house
Our house was only 5 years old, budget-built (no walk-in closets, only about 900sqft) but had the garage of my dreams and a nice kitchen, a big yard, basically everything that was important to us. It was also move-in ready; we both work full time and had neither the time nor the skills for renovation projects. Our house cost $101k and we were perfectly happy with that figure.
We refused to talk about how much we paid, but somehow GFIL got wind of the purchase price. He came to our open house and spent the ENTIRE TIME muttering under his breath about "can't believe anyone would pay 100k, my entire house only cost $7000, ridiculous amount of money, can't believe it, absurd amount of money, blah blah blah..."