My fiance and I were paying $3600 a month for a brownstone garden unit in Washington Heights. We never had that money before COVID but we made it work. I was maintaining the entire property and it was great to have all that extra room. We started asking our landlord about our lease renewal and she just wasn’t responding. Eventually she served us papers saying we have 60 days to leave the property because she’s selling the building to developers, at least it wasn’t an eviction notice but we had to go.
After looking at places online and reaching out to some real estate agents we crunched the numbers. Rents just weren’t going down. Moving in New York, you have to do a security deposit, first and last month’s rent and then a truck rental. It was going to be around ten thousand dollars. We also talked about moving upstate; we wanted a quality life. We let it sink in; we took it slow. We would be staying in New York just for me. So we said let’s go be near your parents in California, which we had talked about doing for a couple of years anyway. Let’s save a $1000 a month on rent and the move across country, looks like it will only cost $5000.