My Weekend
I had a good, productive weekend! On Saturday since it was in the high 70s I did a bunch of things outside--repotted some plants, washed some rugs and let them air dry, washed my car and cleaned the inside of it. The bugs were able to feast on my flip-flop clad feet. Yesterday I went with my family to a local orchard because they were having a festival. I got my Jack O' Lantern pumpkin and got some Christmas shopping done. Then we went to some open houses.
The houses we looked at were about half a million dollars, and the real estate agent told us that in Maryland the same homes would go for 800K-900K. They were incredible, although none of them would be my dream home. They all had a little something that I wouldn't want. Granted, if you gave me one of those houses tomorrow, I certainly wouldn't complain, but if I had that much money I think I'd want to build my own home to my own specifications. I could also do a better job at decorating than their decorators did if I had an unlimited budget :-). Here's a link if you like to ogle rich people's stuff as much as I do. None of the single-family homes we looked at are on that site, but we did look at the attached villas.
posted by Jenny G @ 8:54 AM
7 Comments:
And in CA they would have cost 9.6 billion dollars. Heehee. I love looking at model homes.
Yes, but you Californians don't make a paltry sum like we do here in PA.
You would think, wouldn't you? Not true. I made more money in AZ where the cost of living is about 2/3 what it is here. Everything in CA is expensive but the cost of labor. Prices have risen dramatically across the board but salaries haven't. The only people who are making it here are the wealthy, the people who live 3 and 4 to an apartment, and people who's parents bought property back when it was affordable.
That sucks! How can anyone besides celebrities afford to live there then?
They pile up in apartments or they live in houses that were purchased back when the cost of living was affordable.
Case in point: One of the poorest communities in San Diego county is Imperial Beach. The average house there cost $500,000. So how is it the poorest community? Because most of those houses sold several decades ago for a few thousand dollars. Now the average income there is about $10/hr and yet they're living in a house that they wouldn't be able to afford if they bought it today.
Hardly anyone lives alone out here. It's too expensive.
Oh, and there is another category of Californians - folks who just live way beyond their means. Almost everything they earn goes to rent/mortgage and their gas tank.
I didn't realize that's what things were like out there. I just figured everyone either had millions and millions of dollas of lived in slums. We're pretty much solidly middle class where I live.
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