Reality Check! I’m an adult!

The summer after my junior year in college, I lived in an apartment in the city where I attended college with two of my best friends. And my third best friend lived across the street. I was 21 and had just returned from a Maymester study abroad in Italy. We spent the summer drinking Mike’s Hard(er) Lemonade at the pool and frequenting the bars downtown approximately...five nights a week! (Despite the fact that we all had full time jobs.) This is the summer where I first met Corey through my very dear friend, who was dating his roommate. It was seriously the best summer. We were old enough to legally get into the bars downtown and had little responsibility. And with no classes, we checked what responsibility we had at 5 pm. Monday – Friday only. My skin was the perfect shade of tan all summer long and my hair was super blonde from the days spent by the pool engrossed in girl talk and gossip.

With one of the besties on one of our most epic weeknight outings 

How things have changed….This past summer I spent eight hours a day in graduate classes and had a very rude awakening when I had real bills to pay and my paycheck was no longer reserved exclusively for dinners with friends and shoes.

Reality check, I’m an adult now! Part of that realization makes me a little sad and disappointed that I’ll never have a summer quite like the one two years ago. However, I have some very exciting grown-up news.

Corey and I put an offer in on a condo! As I was reviewing the paperwork, I felt myself getting a little panicky. Not because I don’t think its the right thing to do but because it was a real reality check – we are adults. How exciting to be moving forward in our lives. We’ve looked at a number of condos and are comfortable that this is the right choice for us. But it will take some serious negotiating for this to work out. The seller purchased the property in 2002 when it was a new construction and paid almost twice what the home is valued in the current housing market.  So…our real estate agent said it might be tough to get him to come down since he owes more than the condo is worth.

Note: This is super spacious for New Jersey.  Really cool bonus?  You can see the top of the Empire State Building from the living room window.

The decision to buy came from a number of factors.  Most importantly, apartments and condo rentals in Hoboken run around $2,000 per MONTH!  And that is for a teeny tiny (like under 600 square feet) apartment with no parking and community washer/dryer. Can you say ridiculous? After doing the math we realized that even if we only stay there for two years while Corey builds up his resume by working for this amazing company, we will have thrown away over $50,000 in rent.  We know it is hard to flip a condo in today’s market in two or three years (which is hopefully the amount of time we will stay up north as I am not a fan of cold weather) however this does seem to be the best financial decision. We can rent the property out if necessary and even if we only break even on this property, we’re saving $50,000 in wasted rent.

So…I feel very grown up today, especially after  discussing the logistics behind our decision in this post. Keep your fingers crossed for us – hopefully we can come to an agreement with the seller, however our realtor thinks we’ll go through several rounds of counteroffers.