(no subject)

[garote]

So for the past few days I've been worrying about future plans - trying to decide where and how we can improve our position - and I've had to come to terms with something: My wife and I are essentially alone in this.

We've both come from extended families of people who, when the time came to own property, have had help from relatives on one side or the other, husband or wife, or even both. In some extreme scenarios that property already existed, or was even purchased outright for them out of a family trust. For La and I, whatever money may have been available has either dried up or been applied elsewhere. Whether we choose to moan about it (and we don't) is irrelevant: It's just the way things turned out, and we have to accept that we both basically start from nothing.

The problem is, we live in an area where it is completely impossible to start from nothing. On a salary that would make both of us very comfortable elsewhere, we are simply treading water here. Any meager savings we accumulate gets crushed by unforseen costs. For example: Three days ago a driver made an illegal U-turn into the Accord, smashing the front headlight assembly. The repair estimate is almost three thousand dollars, and the other driver - who was clearly at fault - is uninsured because he was lax in his payments. It will be months before we see anything from him, whether we work out a payment plan or have to take him to court, and in the meantime we can't drive the Accord. So I walk to work every day and La takes the van to school.

I see houses proudly labeled "STARTER HOME" - run-down shacks on postage-stamp lots - listed for half a million dollars. I see the median rent, whether for a house, a room, or simply a loft, going up year over year. Not even holding still. The more I think about it, the more trapped I feel, and the more I return to the same conclusion: We cannot make it here, or even anywhere around here. We have to leave.

In San Jose last year, the MEDIAN home price was over seven hundred thousand dollars.
Compare this to:

• Portland, OR, where the median was $240,000.
• Sacramento, CA, where it was $225,000. (Ten years ago it was half that.)
• Houston, TX, where it was $150,000.

In considering future moves, I've narrowed it down to those four choices. I can find a job in any of the four cities above and move there, and purchase property ASAP. The job market is the best for me in San Jose, but due to the astronomical property cost, if I were to buy there it would have to be part of some group deal with a friend or friends. Two houses or a duplex on a single lot, for example.

Or there's always Alaska, where for a half-million you can buy this house in Seward, on - yes, you read that right - a 53,000-square-foot lot. Six bedrooms, five bathrooms, nine-foot ceilings.

La finishes school here in December. If it weren't for that we would be planning to leave in a matter of months or even weeks, but it looks like we're waiting until years' end.

Comments

[garote]

Location: Personally, I could live almost anywhere, with the possible exception of the LA basin. Ideally I'd want a place that's got trees around it to settle down in, but for the next five years or so that doesn't matter. I can take heat so long as it isn't overwhelming, like say weeks and weeks of 100 degree weather, and I can take cold just fine though the detrimental effects of snow on cars and driving worry me. What I'm really interested in, though, is finding a place to live that is close to friends and/or family. I haven't really had that since High School ended and my parents sold their house, and I miss it. Right at the top of the list is my pal Andy - I think it would be great to live near him and his kids - but I haven't found a way to make that happen. (I got close at the beginning of the decade when Andy and Amber almost moved to Santa Cruz to share an apartment with me and Carolyn. He even got a job here, working at the same company I did. But one day while we were apartment-hunting, Andy got a surprise phone call: Amber was pregnant! That put the idea of moving on the back burner.)

Size of home: It needs a good kitchen with a GAS stove and adequate pantry space, a good-sized closet, a room we can turn into a study, room enough for five or six bookshelves, and space to park two cars. A bit of garden space would make us happy but isn't essential. Same with a bathtub. The price for that around here? Seven hundred thousand dollars, in the city. 30 minutes out of town: Five hundred thousand.

Job: Brother, if it paid the bills and the mortgage, I'd dig ditches for a living. Sometimes I think that would be preferable to IT work. I've also considered teaching as a desired profession, but that pays - as my acquaintances in LA put it - "double-shit pay". My current focus is in learning Cocoa and OpenGL on the side, in pursuit of a job at Apple or some other OS X-friendly company ... but this may just be the equivalent of shooting myself in the foot because Objective-C isn't a relatively popular language, and probably never will be. In OS X application development you usually pair programmers with an app and they remain stuck together for the life of the app. Why is this so? Because for OS X you have two classes of applications: The "upper-class" and the "lower-class". The upper-class apps are the big cross-platform clunkers maintained by big clunky companies, like Adobe, Blizzard, Microsoft, and the late Macromedia. The lower-class apps are the ones written by individual authors or loosely incorporated cabals, and are usually shareware. They'd no sooner "hire" an external developer to work on their app than they'd "hire" a professional bowler to play a few rounds with them down at the arcade. In this landscape an unattached programmer is likely to starve. Not so in the Windows universe, where there is also a large and lucrative community of "middle-class" apps to develop. E.g. "We need a tool that our field-workers can use to send survey data from their CE handhelds to our proprietary GPS-aware landscape resource mapping tool", and, "We need someone to help develop a particle physics simulator for our kick-George-Bush-in-the-Nuts game", and the like. :)

Anyway, I digress. In the line of being a real-estate mogul: What's stopping you from doing this, in a way that spreads the risk a bit? What if you formed a "real estate speculation" group with your friends; checking out places together, pooling the mortgage payments, only buying what you all can agree on, et cetera?

[robocowboy.livejournal.com]

In the line of being a real-estate mogul: What's stopping you from doing this, in a way that spreads the risk a bit? What if you formed a "real estate speculation" group with your friends; checking out places together, pooling the mortgage payments, only buying what you all can agree on, et cetera?

...uh, nothing, I suppose. Not a bad idea, but I'm not sure if it's what I want to spend my time doing. Then again, it might be better to be walking around through houses than to be sitting in a cubicle listening to the air conditioner hum and waiting for go-home-time.