For many adults who have worked for decades, retirement is the biggest semblance of freedom they can have, and living off-grid during retirement has always been an idyllic prospect. For one Tennessee man who achieved this retirement, however, the dream turned into a nightmare because he eventually faced crushing property taxes imposed by the US government and was forced to go back to work to pay them off.
This particularly harrowing retirement story came from TikTok user genchad, or simply Chad from Tennessee. Chad took to TikTok in mid-November to post about his current situation, where he sold everything he had, basically “cashed in on my retirement” to live off-grid in a wild Tennessee land, only to realize that “there was going to be no retirement for me.” He now has to pay for permission to live in the land he bought, on top of paying other taxes.
It’s not clear how exactly Chad makes ends meet to pay the government, just so he can continue his existence, but apparently, his problem as a Gen X individual is not isolated, and many people his age in the US are also experiencing similar predicaments. “In this land of the free, you can never escape the system that they built for us. There’s no end to it. It goes on forever until you die,” adds Chad.
There have been many incidents in the past where retirees, even older than Gen X, are being priced out of their homes through property taxes if they don’t find ways to pay. Experts believe that this could be a long-term problem exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, where the cost of living has somehow skyrocketed.
People Online Are Pointing Out the Irony
TikTok user genchad’s video has since become viral on many social media platforms, including X, where it gained more than 3 million views and thousands of commenters echoing his sentiments. Some have suggested that property taxes in the US must end, while others have referred to that kind of taxation as “theft.”
Another commenter has even pointed out that “It’s free to live on the sidewalk. In a strange twist of irony, the less you do for the system the more it does for you,” while one of the most well-liked commenters in the thread reiterated the following disillusioned statement, “Best quote I heard was, we are free-range citizens living on a tax farm.”
It’s also worth noting that while COVID was one of the factors for this new hurdle for retirees and property owners, current President Donald Trump might have had a hand in making it worse earlier, as his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has affected more than tens of millions of Americans, most of whom are home and land owners. That was way before COVID-19 inflated everything.
