Merry-Go-Round Economy
When I first moved to Southern California and experienced for the first time the difference in the cost of living here compared to, oh say, the REST of the country, I was a non-believer. People were just over-exaggerating, right? Just being whinners, right?A friend tried to explain it to me in such a way, using small words, childhood metaphors and imagery, so that I would feel better about it all. After she was finished, I seriously doubted her sanity. That is until I had lived here six months and then I realized I was the one who was insane. Now nearly four years later, it makes perfect sense to me in that drinking the cool aid kind of way and I am in awe of her ability to put into perspective such a complex environment as easily and as clearly as she had. She took a deep, cleansing breath, scooched to the edge of her chair, closer towards me and began softly.
Living in California is like riding a merry-go-round. When you are standing on the ground, trying to gauge the best time to jump on and it is spinning around and around and around, it looks like it is going too fast to ever be able to make the leap. The rails and people on it are a blur, speeding by at high velocities as they are. You stand there, watching it whirl by, screwing up your courage, flexing your legs over and over in preparation for that one, hopefully well-timed jump.
Then you do. You make the jump. As you land on the platform, the pull of the opposing forces between the ground you just left and the centrifugal force on the platform play at the contents of your stomach. Your inner ear signals that you are not in Kansas anymore. Literally. You are only queasy for the slightest moment, your footing unsure, and then you get your balance. The urge to puke subsides. You adjust to the speed in which you are spinning. You get used to it.
That is what moving to Southern California and living here is like.
Everything is more expensive, including food which I’ve never understood since, with our weather, we should grow a lot of it here. Not just a little more expensive, but much more expensive. After four years of living on the merry-go-round, you’d think that I would be used to it all. However, the queasiness has not subsided. If anything, it is worse, especially recently. After 40+ years of being alive, after thirty of those years living in apartment after apartment, after years of traveling and moving and traveling and jumping from job to job, most recently thanks to the recession and savage cuts of tech jobs, we started looking for a piece of property to call our own. Some people buy a little convertible sports car, preferable red, for their mid-life crisis. Me, I want to buy a house.
I’ve always lived on the wild side.
As a household, we make pretty good money with a good credit rating. Still with interest rates at the lowest in history, we can not afford to purchase any kind of decent property in our county. Thank you, Merry-Go-Round Economy. I’m not talking about pie in the sky, loaded to the hilt homes. I’m talking about basic, bare bones two bedrooms, hopefully three, two bath condos. Yes, condos.
Case in point… our current residence. It’s a VERY nice place, even for an apartment, with lots of “luxury” items such as white ceramic tile countertops, crown moldings, high ceilings, a fireplace (that doesn’t produce heat – another subject altogether) a club house with pool, workout room, lush landscaping, etc. Never mind that we never go to the pool. Never mind that we never use the clubhouse with its 20 seat “theater” where you can watch movies on an indecently big TV. Never mind that no matter how much we say that tomorrow will be the day that we will get back into exercising, we don’t really use the workout room. It is close to the coast, but not so close that it would be considered “on” the coast. We do have the cooler temps of the coast. But it is STILL an apartment.
Several months ago we received word that the whole complex was going condo. We have seen a rash of apartment complexes, not as nice as ours, with far more apartment-esque features, going condo. It seems that that is the *thing* to do now adays. With the real estate market estimated at a 120% growth rate over the last five years, who can blame the rush to cash in.
We welcomed the prospect of the complex going condo. It would be a good way to get our foot in the door of home ownership especially given that ten percent of our rent over the last three years could be used as a down payment. Or so we thought. We were told the asking price of our 1151 square foot, two bedroom, two bath, tandem garage unit in July. The letter that brought this happy news should have included a small vial of smelling salts. The price was a mere $508,000, a bargain I am told for this area and for this property.
I want some of what they are smoking. It might quell the queasiness, the urge to puke that I experienced. I never was good on merry-go-rounds, even as a kid. I get motion sickness sitting in the back of a van.
We are currently packing. While we’ve seen the market slow down a bit in the last couple of months, we expect it to continue, even slightly, in anticipation of the predicted bubble burst to happen. I don’t think it will be in the scale of the tech bubble, but I’d rather be on this side of the adjustment as the other. We have decided to stay on the rental merry-go-round for a few more months and move to a unit at a different complex short term. Then, hopefully during a slow down in the circular motion, we will make the leap and buy sometime next year.
http://www.torreyvillas.com/floorplan_proc.asp?model=Napoli
posted by velvetdagger @ 12:23 PM
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