ISO a Condo

Hi. Look, we need to talk. As per our agreement, I’m doing our shopping for us. I’m out there everyday looking at condos and spending my evenings combing zillow.com and trulia.com, and all of this is for us.

But I have to admit—the $300,000 we’d originally agreed to is a paltry sum, in spite of the economic collapse, etc. So I’m telling you now: We need more cash.

I hope it’s okay that I unilaterally decided to nudge the lever a bit to the right for us, for you and me. Because although we’d originally agreed to keep things, well, under control, I can assure you that searching in Brookline, Allston, and Cambridge for a lovely 2-bedroom for under $400K can seem a little like trying to find a Prada bag at a yard sale.

I mean, I’m sure it happens, but not all the time, unless you run into a fakes sell-off in Everett just ahead of the police, but anyway, who wants a fake condo?

Oh, I agree with you—we want to come out of this looking like a couple of smarty-pants. We want our friends and family to be deeply envious of our hard-bargaining tactics and savvy scouting. But trust me, all of this sounds fine until you walk into a prospective Allston unit that smells like five unwashed college boys, and lo, there they are, using our prospective kid’s room as long-term storage for French fries and petrified socks.

I just can’t do that again. So here’s a proposal: I keep looking, but let’s just remember that renting isn’t the worst thing in the world. Sure I’d love to be a hotshot like the guy across the street—all homeowner-y and married, but I’ve gotten used to looking at our assets in the plus column. Does that work for you?