Apartment Searching

Sometimes you just have to suck it up and admit, your living in a home that is draining your wallet. My husband and I are renters, we won’t buy until we know where we want to raise our kids. Sew our oats for 5-10 years. Right now we pay $950.00 in rent for a 3 bedroom single home on about 5 acres of property. We have a beautiful backyard, quiet and safe neighborhood and an excellent landlord. During the winter we also spend $600.00 a month in oil, deal with the sewage backing up about once a month in the basement, a leak underneath the sink, windows that don’t stay up (or down), bug problems, poor installation, old (OLD) bathroom, just a poorly remodled situation. It’s more everything was covered up, rather than fixed.

From the months of November to March we spent roughly $2400.00 in heating our home. Four months. That was when the harshest of chill hit. October and April we probably spent about $400 those months but as I’m not going to pull out our oil bills, I’m only estimating.

Based off of the winter months, we spent $6200.00 on this house. Obsurd. Oil should not be costing this much. It’s not the cost of the oil, it is the fact that the house cannot retain heat. We knew we should have put plastic on the windows, etc. we should have prepared but when we moved in we were told that the previous renters spent about $200 a month, so we budgetted for anywhere between $300 – $400, thinking that we were high balling it. Boy were we wrong.

We decided that unless our landlord can lower our rent by $300.00 we wont beable to stay here throughout the winter. Which begins the great search for a place to live. I’m sad at the thought. As a lot of our options are mainly townhomes and apartments. We won’t rent an apartment as we are a decently sized family with a dog and a cat. We’d much rather a town home or a single family house. I’m sad about the idea of losing our backyard, our privacy, etc. depresses me.

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