House: New blog: buying a house with no money

Hi all,
Well, this is the start of a new blog. You will note that this blog is at the same place as my Germany blog. Unless things change, it will probably stay that way. You will not that next to the blog heading there is an icon. For the Germany blog it is a German flag, and for this blog it is a little house.

So, what's this all about? Well, as you may know, Nadja and I are planning to go to the US in the fall of 2006. So, I started thinking about what I like about America. One thing that I like is that there are some places that aren't as freakin' cold as Germany. But I didn't grow up in one of those places. I grew up in Berlin, CT, which is pretty freakin' cold in winter. So that means that that can't be the real thing that I like. Hmmm. Maybe it's the food. But now I've found almost all the critical American ingredients here (big exceptions: root beer and cheddar cheese). Hmmm, what else? It's not the highways... I realized that the thing I like the most is the freedom. On the one hand there is the political freedom. America is a country of fewer rules (or rather, of fewer enforced rules. Exception: alcohol. Germany will pretty much sell anyone alcohol at any age). But then there is the freedom that comes from owning your own property.

Yeah... I think that's the thing I like. You can do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it. Want to play drums at midnight? Sure... Want to mix dangerous chemicals resulting in cool explosions? Sure. Want to build a huge thingimajigger? Sure. There just aren't the restrictions that you have when you live in an apartment. If you don't own your own property, you are always playing by someone else's rules, because the owner of the property has the right to set the rules.

So that's the thing... In Germany there are cities and there is rural land. There are no suburbs. So, owning a house means either being isolated, which I don't want, or buying a house in a major city, which starts at around $300,000 for a tiny house and quickly climbs up to $1,000,000. This is more than I can afford. This is also the case in certain parts of America (e.g. Cape Cod or San Francisco), but this is certainly not the case in all of America.

One example of where this is not the case is the Raleigh/Durham area, home of 3 good universities in mathematics. For example, in Raleigh, there are currently 188 homes for sale in the MLS (Realtor database) for under $100,000, in Durham there are 229.

So, that said, I think if it turns out that I won't be able to buy a house, I may stay in Germany a little bit longer and postpone my graduate studies. Life in an apartment in Germany is probably even better than life in an apartment in America, since normal people live in an apartment in Germany, but only weirdos live in apartments in America (the type of people who choose any apartment over a house aren't my type of people).

So what's the problem? The problem is I have no money, no income, and no credit (well, that's a little bit exagerated, but that's going to be the challenge to overcome). So, in the future postings I will talk about how I am planning to overcome this.