Bought a house in Italy for $62,200 to move there permanently. Real estate prices are so low that I bought another house and will probably buy more.

Lorra Minton, 53, has decided to fully immerse herself in a foreign culture by buying a property in Italy. She plans to move into a house in Sicily, which has managed to be restored due to its low cost. This installment on the involvement is based on a conversation with Lorra Minton, 53, about her experience buying inexpensive real estate in Mussomeli, Italy, a city in Sicily with a population of 10,000, as an American citizen. The text has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I travel a lot.

I've been to China, Amsterdam, Paris, Germany - everywhere, but Italy just felt like home to me. I visited Italy with my nephew a year before the pandemic started, and we were walking the streets thinking, "We need to find a way to live here." We were looking for ideas, like saying, "They don't know what a caramel corn cob is here, let's open a store with caramel corn for tourists and live here."

A few years ago, I started hearing about the 1 euro program.

on which towns sold houses for 1 euro. I have read a lot about Mussomeli. They do offer houses for 1 euro, but there are also many premium houses that cost more. My property in Moussomeli cost 60,000 euros ($65,481). We haggled and I bought it for 57,000 euros. I applied in October 2022 and the deal closed in March this year.

The house I bought is almost 3000 square feet. The kitchens are still being installed, but I will have a full kitchen as well as a kitchenette, two living rooms, and a laundry room.

I have a main house in Mussomeli and also together with my brother we have bought a second house.

When I met a large number of foreigners who wanted to move here and get a residence permit, my brother and I thought, "Let's buy some houses and rent them out." That's why we bought a second house, and now I'm looking at a third house with my sister. The main goal is an 18-month short-term rental, but it's not Airbnb.

We bought it for 25,000 euros, but after paying all the fees and tax payment it came to 31,000 euros. It is a three bedroom house with a plot, which is great.

There were quite a few small fees that confused me. I'm often asked how much I spent on renovations, but it's hard for me to answer because there are wants and there are needs. I want a kitchen. I need the walls without the old paneling.

Kitchens are much more affordable here. The total cost of my two kitchens was only 5500 euros.

For the purchase of my primary home at closing, I had to pay a deposit of 10% of the price and an agent fee, which is usually 4% of the purchase price. It surprised me that I had to deposit the deposit into their bank account and not into a trust account. This was strange to me, but very common.

Another surprising moment is that I bought a house for 57,000 euros, but some official in the office decided that my house is worth 80,000 euros, and I had to pay taxes of 9% on that amount - if you don't have a residence permit, the tax is 2% of the value of your primary home.

I assumed that property taxes were included, but that's not the case. Only the tax upon sale is paid. Usually, property tax ranges from 300 to 600 euros per year, but due to the large size of my house, I had to pay 946 euros.

After all the expenses, the total amount came to 69,182 euros. But if someone told you that you could buy a 3,000-square-foot house with six bedrooms, two kitchens, and a beautiful interior for 70,000 euros, you would say, "Done." It's just all those little details that threw me off.

I wanted to travel abroad while I still can.

I try to take one big international trip each year. I've always dreamed of spending every summer in different countries because I love not only traveling but also immersing myself in the culture. A couple of weeks is sometimes not enough to really feel it.

I'm 53 years old, which is wonderful and young, but I have many things I want to do. I probably have another 20 years to travel with good hips and knees and all that.

At some point, you won't be able to visit everywhere you want. You'll have to start excluding places from your list because they won't be around for the next 20 years. If it were up to me, I would spend all my time here, but because of visas, I have to move back and forth. My home in California is a three-bedroom, 1500 square foot house worth $504,000. I probably have another two years before I can retire, but I will spend most of my time here in Italy, and then I'll return to the States. I will just rent out my house in California for the next 15-20 years. And when I want to come back, I will still have my house in California, which will already be fully paid off because someone will have been renting it.