Yeesh. I'm starting to get anxiety already. That's probably a bad thing. As published in my previous post, Robert and I will spend 2012 finding us a nice house to live in. And as you know, we live in Houston.. filled with long commute times and thousands of places to live as well as thousands of school districts.
It's not like back home where you know the school districts are good, where all the roads take you, and how long it takes you to get from point A to point B.
Houston doesn't have zoning laws, either. Meaning, there can be something fantastic next to something not so fantastic. You can find really cool townhomes next to the "ghetto." Additionally, no one goes to school is Houston ISD. If you live in the city you pay to go to private schools. It's just a given. Well, that's like $15K a year per child. Uh... no thank you!
Now, I don't want all this school talk to sound like we're planning on having babies really soon or anything.. but it does help resale value to make sure that you are living in a sought after school district. Plus, I guess, you never know what will happen.
Robert and I have been driving around Katy, TX which is west and found some really nice neighborhoods that we like. However, Katy is AT LEAST 25 miles one way for each of us to get to to work. Katy ISD also has a really great school district. We started doing toll calculations and time calculations and kind of gone blown out of the water. If we live in Katy and both take toll roads its going to cost about $6,250 a year in toll expense. That's like an additional $500 a month. That's a lot! Not to mention that tolls don't guarantee a faster commute time. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won't.
So, we realized that every time we were researching neighborhoods we were having to look at a map and run the amount of miles to/from work. So, being the anal-retentive person I am, I created this map. (Don't judge me)
Now, this map has where I work, where Robert works and various routes to work. The routes are color coded down below. In the boxes below lists out roundtrip mileage, roundtrip toll expense, and approximate amount of time it will take each way. I'm not done with the map because I hope to incorporate school districts into it as well as ideal neighborhoods, but I'm getting there. One only has so much time during the day, you know.
On the map, Katy is out west (left), Sugar Land is South West. These areas are our ideal location areas. The black lines are highways that I refuse to live off of because traffic is AWFUL. It's not even worth it. You won't convince me of it.
The yellow star is where we are currently renting our apartment. Now you can see why we chose our apartment where we did. Rather central location. The first loop you see around downtown is known as 610 or the inner loop. The second loop that you see is known as the Beltway or the Sam Houston Tollway. This entire loop is a toll road. No getting around not paying the toll, there. You also see the Westpark Tollway which runs almost parallel to I-10 and also costs money every time you drive on it. This is where all the great neighborhoods are in the purple bubble.
Sugar Land is also another great option that we didn't really count on. I thought it would be too far away, but it is actually closer than living in Katy. DECISIONS, DECISIONS, DECISIONS. I think what we are starting to realize is that while we thought our rent was high, living in a house isn't going to be any cheaper. Robert has yet to grasp this concept and as of now refuses to drive on a toll road and pay money. This means he'll be driving like 2 hours to/from work. He can't accept it that paying money to drive on a road here is a way of life. Having a house in Houston is not always cheaper than renting. It's the price you pay to have a place to call home.
So, I'm still working on him. You can probably tell we tend to get in a few arguments over this (all in good fun I assure you). Again, we're in no major rush... we won't have the money we need until AT LEAST May, but we'd like to kind of focus on an area and monitor the houses that go up for sale there.
Alas, that's where we are now. Today we're going to head to Sugar Land and drive around and see what we think. I'll keep you posted. :-) It always promises to be interesting.
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