After living in Connecticut for just over a year, my husband and I decided to buy a home. Hey, interest rates are good and loans are easy so why not? Well, for one thing, the median home price in the area we want is $1 million. Not the average which would be much higher, probably closer to $1.8 million, but the median. We've learned that anything under $2 million is basically a mailbox you're paying for and the house is a perk. Those are the homes that for $700k are...well, let's call them fixer uppers. On a tenth of an acre, little upgrades if any have been done in the 30 years they've exhisted and there is no architecturally interesting features to speak of. One home that we looked at was 900 square feet, built in the seventies and we refer to it as the cat piss house. It was 70's brown inside and out and basically was for sale at that price because it is in 'desireable Darien'. So, as you can probably tell that I'm frustrated.

We've decided to look further into Connecticut for this reason and a few others (town benefits, New England charm, etc.). The fact is that people in these towns like Greenwich and Darien are very transient. The question that keeps popping in my mind is about people who live in these $15 million homes and pay for maintenance workers (thousands of dollars per month) end up moving out of them when they get older. The coordinating of maintenance people requires an assistant (we'll talk about my job later). I don't know, a home should be a home, not a pain in the ass you have to worry about. We don't need a place to impress our friends, just a place they will feel totally comfortable in and want to hang out at as a reprieve from NYC. We just want a home - we'll know it when we see it and in the meantime, we'll keep saving money for the down payment.