Where I've Been
It’s been an eventful couple of weeks around here; I’ve gotten settled into my new office, I’ve been hard at work on projects both new and old, and, in my spare time, I’ve begun the process of buying a condo.[1]
Probably needless to say, the last item on that list is absorbing the vast majority of my time of late. This is my first foray into home-ownership, and I’m finding every aspect of it alarming. For instance, did you know that:
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With a 30-year mortgage, it is entirely possible that I will still be paying off the condo when I retire? (This first is purely hypothetical, of course; given the typically delayed entry of a Ph.D. into the job market, the less-than-embarrassing salary drawn by an academic, the state of the economy, and the projected future of Social Security, I expect to work until I die. In fact, I kind of imagine that last event occuring during some protracted committee meeting, but that’s another story.)
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In the Southern California real estate market, it is possible to buy a condo with perhaps 25% of the square footage of my parents’ home for something on the order of 125% of said home’s current appraised value, even despite said home’s coveted address and non-backwater locale?
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When purchasing a new condo, everything you might actually want in it decor-wise constitutes an “upgrade,” despite the already exorbitant cost of the shell?
There are more things I’ve learned over the last few days, but my head is still too spinny to remember them. I’ll post more as things clarify, which I hope will be soon.
I was going to link to the developer’s site here, but have thought the better of it; I’ll wait until after the closing before I start naming names. Regardless of my freaked-out state, I still want this place, and don’t want to screw it up. ↩︎
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