The apartment hunt has begun.
The place I live now is nice enough, but the landlords have gotten more and more to be jerks, and a good portion of my rent payment is for the proximity of the apartment to a lot of things that I don’t need to be… proximate… to. Like, the job that I got laid off from and the other job that moved and the restaurants that I don’t eat at any more. I also want to move into a nicer class of apartment — no more of these student apartments without decent kitchens, loud neighbors, dirty laundry rooms, etc… I’ll end up paying a bit more in rent, but I think it’ll be worth it, and since I’ve pretty much resigned myself to having to drive to work from now on, I can get a place farther away from downtown, which should mitigate the cost somewhat.
So I’m looking through those free rental property magazines, my friend has set up a program that automatically searches the online classified for houses for rent. It’s pretty fun, actually — I enjoy doing all the comparison, looking at pros and cons, estimating costs, etc. If the actual act of moving wasn’t such a pain in the butt, I would do this every 6 months. Well, if I could afford to. 