Reply to How are you able to afford the DC area

Forum Index » Real Estate

Reply to "How are you able to afford the DC area - from an out-of-towner?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, are you interested in living in the city itself or a suburb?

Like several of the other posters, I grew up here (in a NoVA suburb), so the crazy COL always seemed normal to me. I moved into DC after college and lived the dirt poor nonprofit worker lifestyle. I love living in the city, and my now-DH and I decided early on that it was worth the trade offs. He makes about $125K. I was only making about $45K (again, nonprofit), and I became a SAHM after we had a child. You really have to know what sort of trade offs you are willing to make? We live in a 2 bedroom, 1,000 SF condo. We don't have a yard, but on the other hand there are tons of kids and parks around us, and with less than a 5 minute walk to the metro (and we only have 1 car), we pretty much consider the whole city to be our backyard. Even without the metro we can walk to the zoo, library, grocery shopping, 5 or 6 playgrounds and parks, and about 200 restaurants. Our condo is not fancy and our local school is average, but we love our fun, walkable neighborhood, and DS spends his days having fun at museums, parks, the zoo, etc. By DC standards we don't make a lot of money, but we love our lifestyle.

[b]What is comes down to, OP, is what sort of lifestyle do you and your family want? What are your non-negotiables? What are you willing to sacrifice?
[/b]
Btw, don't listen to the snarkers who hate living here. No place is perfect of course, but DC is a great place to live if you are looking for that lifestyle.  :) [/quote]

Sounds nice, but still waiting for you to name something we don't have, and for a quarter of the price.  The salary bump is not close to the differential.  I would understand if our HHI were going to quadruple, or even double, but it won't, so I am genuinely trying to understand what makes this worthwhile.  Some of you must be in jobs that simply don't exist, or not in adequate numbers, elsewhere - [b]but if you're not a wonk or a lobbyist, why?[/b]

[/quote]

I ask myself this every damned day.  That said, even some nonprofit jobs are tied to the government and many national organizations are HQ'd here.  So even if you've built a nonprofit career, it's not always that easy to translate that elsewhere - especially outside of another big, expensive city.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics