A combination of depression and inspiration

This weekend was a blast. Actually, the word blast makes it sound incredibly exciting, which it wasn't really.

I'll cut through the bull to the real excitement of the weekend: today. I woke up semi-early for a Sunday and went to a local computer show/sale. It turned out to be pretty much a waste of time. There weren't many vendors there, and hardly any Mac stuff. I didn't expect there to be any Mac stuff, but it was pretty sad regardless. Mike, Eric and I still had a fun time looking at junk and looking at all of the funny people.

We came back home, met up with Lauren and Olivia and proceeded with our plans to ride around Richmond in search of the perfect apartment (or otherwise) for Mike and Lauren. Secretly, I think all four of us wanted to look at nice, new houses, so we did some of that, too. We ended up looking at a number of townhouses out in the far west end, just north of Innsbrook, one of Richmond's technology parks.

Sidebar: When Olivia and were looking at apartments in Richmond, Brian kept mentioning how he thought it would be a good idea for us to look at buying a townhouse instead. At this point, I didn't really understand his reasoning. His reasoning was that when you rent an apartment, you're basically throwing your $800 out the window every month..never to be seen again. However, if you buy a townhouse (or even a house), you're paying $800/month (probably more, realistically), but you'll one day be able to turn around and sell that townhouse and use that money towards a bigger, better house (if you choose).

So to summarize, over the past few months, I've been starting to realize this..which makes me want to consider trying to move into something that I'm not just throwing my money away at.

So, we looked at a few townhouses..all for sale by Ryan Homes. The first community we looked at had townhouses very similar to Eric's house, priced around the 140's. Not bad, except that they don't have any open houses in that neighborhood anymore. So, they referred us to one of their sister properties just north of Innsbrook.

We walked into the second house and all four of our jaws hit the ground. I'm so mad at myself that I didn't take my camera. This place was absolutely BREATHTAKING. It had a beautiful vaulted ceiling in the living room with a second floor balcony that looked over into the living room. It was a three bedroom place with the master bedroom on the first floor. The mast bedroom's bathroom was gigantic with a garden tub and seperate shower and an awesome walk-in closet. Amazing. Oh, and did I forget to mention: it had a garage. This place was everything that any of us could possibly want in a house right now. It was simply amazing. It was also starting in the $180's. Now, for some of you that live in larger metropolitan areas than Richmond might think that's chump change for a nice place, but for me, that's still a lot of money.

The guy there was really nice and helped me understand a few questions I had about how things work when you buy a townhouse (or any house for that matter). The thing is: a mortgage on a townhouse in the 150's or so wouldn't be too far out of our price range (as far as monthly payments are concerned). However, it's the down payment that seemed to concern the four of us more than anything. If 3% is the normal down payment on a place like that, then that would be around $6,000. Where am I gonna come up with $6,000? Yeh, I know: savings.

Well anyway, so today's experience was both depressing and inspiring. We all walked out of that house with stars in our eyes and aspirations of one day owning a place like that. The guy suggested that we look at another Ryan Homes community that's getting ready to sprout up near Staples Mill Rd. and 295. They're not quite as expensive as the 180's, but a little nicer than the place we looked at that was already developed and filled.

If anyone wants to donate money to the Jeff-and-Olivia-want-to-stop-throwing-their-money-away fund, operators are standing by.

Posted by Jeff at January 27, 2002 09:41 PM