MABB v6.6.6

still not finished moving all of my stuff, but i got enough to be able to live in the new apartment day to day while i finish cleaning out upstairs

space to store my many things

one dog instead of two cats

quiet roommate

new bed

time to have a celebratory bourbon county stout

Let's celebrate the mabb way

there is a pool next door but it is in a rather shocking state

You got till the summer

Awesome!

Is it normal to have a roommate in each appartment? That’s never the case here.

yeah it's fairly normal, at least where i live as rents are generally on the high side. i could get a small apartment on my own, but the tradeoff is i'd wind up having no money leftover to actually do anything. if i get another job that pays substantially more i'll probably move again and get my own place at that point, but i'll worry about that once i actually have the money to do so

Yeah I understand rent can be the reaon to need someone to share the costs with. Are the jobs so underpaid or are the prices of the apartments so high? Would a simple house in the suburbs be cheaper compared to?

Stormy will be able to describe housing costs better than I but just as an example, I live in a town of about 30,000 people and I pay $425 for my one bedroom apartment (though the average around here for similar is around $500). However, I make a lot of money so I'm able to splurge on the things I want. I do pay about $500 in school loans every month though

Minimum wage here is $7.25 and a lot of people don't get full 40 hour schedules which means it's pretty tough for anyone to live in decent apartments alone

iamgoat wrote:Yeah I understand rent can be the reaon to need someone to share the costs with. Are the jobs so underpaid or are the prices of the apartments so high? Would a simple house in the suburbs be cheaper compared to?

i live in the second-largest city in the region, and it has an outsized number of colleges which means there's always demand for rentals. that pushes rents up considerably -- and there are other factors coming into play over the next few years that will only increase the upward pressure, barring some kind of economic catastrophe.

a 1 bedroom apartment in a decent area starts around $900 per month, and that's without any utilities included. certainly within the realm of affordability for me, but it would come at the cost of having a lot of disposable income + a good savings buffer for any emergencies or unforeseen expenses. if rents go the way i think they will, rental costs increases will definitely outpace my annual salary increases.

suburbs in this area are even more expensive, since that's where all of the people with money who don't want to deal with city life and having to encounter minorities or poor people all go (the median home price in the suburb where i grew up is about $500,000 right now). you don't see much of a reduction in cost of living in either city or suburb scenarios until you get out to western massachusetts, largely because there's nothing out there except for shitty low-paying jobs and heroin.

a 1 bedroom apartment in a decent area starts around $900 per month, and that's without any utilities included. certainly within the realm of affordability for me, but it would come at the cost of having a lot of disposable income + a good savings buffer for any emergencies or unforeseen expenses. if rents go the way i think they will, rental costs increases will definitely outpace my annual salary increases.

That's basically the same case where I am, although I've never seen a lease agreement that didn't include heat so I don't even know how much extra that would cost.

I was in the same financial situation for about a two year period, except I opted to get a nice apartment in a nice part of town and pretty much break even. I happened to have a lot of savings from years of having roommates, but like you mentioned that lingering thought of "what if something expensive happens?" wasn't fun. And then when my car died and I suddenly had to get a new one it got a lot worse. I definitely would have needed to either downsize or look for a higher paying job by now if I hadn't gotten a promotion.

Btw, that's strange to hear that an apartment in the suburbs is even more expensive where you are. I'm sure there are some exceptions right outside of the city, but for the most part an apartment here in the suburbs is very inexpensive - which is great if you're on a tight budget - but that also tends to attract a lot of seedy people.

a lot of the suburbs here have pretty tight restrictions on zoning for multifamily units (which i'd chalk up to rampant NIMBYism from residents being reflected in town policy), so apartment stock in those areas tends to be quite low. you can find houses for rent occasionally, but the owners are charging you the mortgage plus a small profit margin and you're on the hook for utilities, so it rarely makes sense unless you have a very specific limited term need for that kind of arrangement.

new apartment stormy

i pay US$258 per month for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom fifth-floor apartment with car park, elevator, air conditioning, utilities included. the building was built in july 2018 and i don't share with anyone.

but i do live in a country where the minimum wage is US$3.60 per day and my street has 10,000 pot holes, rabies street dogs and noisy mosques and monasteries chanting all the time so ...

Damn. Some of those prices are crazy.

I pay 612 a month, extra 120 for utilities, for a two story house with a pretty big yard, attic for storage just outside the city center. But cost of living isn’t cheap and it will get more expensive next year with a tax raise on food.

Hitoshura wrote:a lot of the suburbs here have pretty tight restrictions on zoning for multifamily units (which i'd chalk up to rampant NIMBYism from residents being reflected in town policy), so apartment stock in those areas tends to be quite low. you can find houses for rent occasionally, but the owners are charging you the mortgage plus a small profit margin and you're on the hook for utilities, so it rarely makes sense unless you have a very specific limited term need for that kind of arrangement.

The zoning part of it hadn't occurred to me. Something similar has happened in my immediate area, with the issue being the character of these neighborhoods supposedly coming under attack (it's mostly 100+ year houses with one or two just as old brownstones on most blocks). I don't have a strong opinion since I don't own a house, but I think both sides have a valid point. Being made to feel like a barbarian for driving a car (parking tends to be a problem) is the only part of this whole argument about cramming more people into neighborhoods that has me genuinely pissed me off.

I'm also guessing the suburbs in my area are much more recently developed and generally not as densely populated, so a pocket of four-plexes or a giant row of apartments near a community center is pretty common. Nobody seems to care very much as long as this type of thing happens near a business park or a strip mall. I lived in one of those suburban four-plexes for a year and it was...depressing.

I pay $775 for a one bedroom with heated underground parking included, as well as in unit washer and dryer. building is only 2 years old. its a good deal. if you want a one stall garage thats an extra $75 a month which I use for storage. If I wanted I could find one bedrooms around here for $500 but they are pretty shit. ive also seen one bedrooms here for $1,100 so it varies like it does everywhere.

renting is annoying but i have now rented for 14 years and i only have AUD$20,000 in savings so i don't see the buying of property any time soon in my future

plus i move around all the fucking time anyway