Brooklynne and I really hate paying rent. The longer I live in an apartment, and the more I understand the history of our cities, I have come to believe that housing is often one of the greatest obstacles to financial security and independence for those not fortunate enough to be wealthy. So today I considered buying a house.

I write this as today was the deadline for us to renew our lease and lock in a "reduced rate" for the next 8 months (still $50 higher per month than the rate we pay now). We don't really like our apartment. It's too small. It's on the wrong side of town for our commute. We haven't made any friends. The apartment staff changes every week and none of them seem to care much about developing relationships with the renters. There is always some problem such as the garbage compactor that wasn't working for much of last week. Still, there is no place better, because we have found exactly 4 complexes in Manassas that allow dogs Kona Bean's size and 3 of them are subsidized so that we do not qualify to live there. So as much as it hurt, Brooklynne and I bit the bullet and told our property manager we would renew our lease here, at our shoebox in Manassas.

Thanks to a complicated set of circumstances, though, we have to wait until the weekend to sign the paperwork. That means that we got a short extension to mull over our options. Then as we drove to our friends' house tonight, we saw a small, pitiful-looking, stinker of a shack for sale that gave me a new hope. Why don't we just buy a house? We could probably be able to afford a mortgage in what we pay for rent. We could have a place of our own. We could start paying rent to ourselves. We could start living the American dream, get out of the passively predatory quagmire of a rental lease, stop throwing money out the window.

We marked the spot and stopped on our way home to pick up a flyer.... $339,000 for a 2 bedroom/1 bath house from the 50's who siding was falling off, had no AC, and whose best assest was its potential to win a home makeover from ABC! As I drove the rest of the way back to our apartment, a.k.a. money vacuum, I caught myself wondering where are the bamboo shoots to stuff under my fingernails?