Major Changes for Me

[sanantone]

Welcome to your new home! I hope the townhome works out for you. My nephew just graduated from Texas State and also said the housing was ridiculously priced. Congrats on your new job too!

Thank you. One of my former coworkers went there. She said all of the apartments suck in this town. At least my place is big. It's 950 square feet and has a fenced patio. I wanted to move into a place that was a little cheaper, a little bigger, and had a huge backyard; but they didn't even want to hold the place unoccupied for two weeks with a deposit. But, the place I'm in now is much closer to all of the stores. My concern is the number of undergraduates here. The other place only has graduate students.

They key is finding an area with high wages and low housing costs. We have a bit of that in Colorado Springs because of the Department of Defense contracting jobs. We pay a little over $800 for our 2 bedroom condo including the HOA fees.

It's like that in Austin. People in other parts of Texas disparage Austin for having the highest COL among the major cities in the state, but it is not much higher than the national average. In 2008, Austin PD was named the highest paying police department in the country when factoring in the cost of living.