RL Achievements and ToW

[Jazzy]

your relationships are so confusing! The kid wouldn't legally be a stepchild of either of you unless your fiance can marry the other girl as well...and Australia's not quite that progressive

I think that was phoebemittens. I wonder how she's doing now - she quit after the whole customisation shebang.

[Madge]

Hey, we recently had a senator step down after comparing gay marriage to bestiality and polygamy, so it turns out we're just as bad as the dog fuckers! (Not that there's anything wrong with that as long as the dog is respected and consenting, I guess, but I digress).

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned future marriages I may or may not be a part of and partners I may or may not be married to will be a legal thing. Like the college students in America with lesbian mothers who get scholarships for having a single parent. If the law's gonna discriminate against me, I'm gonna take advantage of the parts where it doesn't.

[Huggles]

I am envious of your house and your country. I follow quite a few design blogs and you folks seem to have the most amazing cottage-modern houses. I mean, they rarely list the price because they are exorbitant to someone like me who debates whether or not I really need to buy that muffin or $3 coffee. I just want a place of my own where I can paint everything in an obnoxious shade of pink and alphabetize the fridge.

[Madge]

If it helps, I'm jealous that you guys have big houses for $120,000. It's mind-boggling how cheap that is. Me and Paul could scrape together that much cash if we needed to!

[Huggles]

MOVE TO 'MURICA! Actually, when I first moved from Ohio to Illinois, my mom was livid at our realtor because she keep showing houses that were $100,000. Three bedrooms, 2 baths, and my mom thought the prices were outrageous. There's an old church here made of brick with stained glass windows, that has been renovated into a house. It's only selling for $46,000 and probably has at least 3000 square feet of space. I want it so bad. Blah blah relative cost of living blah blah.

[Madge]

Yeah. Apparently a two bedroom apartment for $300 a week is quite expensive in the USA, and $60,000 is a huge wage? Whereas engineers around here can make six figures straight out of uni working for mining companies (unfortunately, I'm not one of them; my $63,000 (pre-tax; gross is more like $46,000) is a pittance for someone with my qualification).

Went out for dinner; we had two appetisers, two mains, a cocktail and a pint of beer and it cost $106. This was at a slightly classy pub. I see American restaurant menus and my mind boggles at the cheapness.

I totally want to live in that church. That sounds awesome! $46,000!? Don't some people spend that on cars? (A fancy 4WD/SUV can cost $50,000 here; my fiance's brand-new tiny suzuki alto cost about $14,000).

If you can't tell I'm all of a sudden super fascinated by all this economics.

[Fjorab_Teke]

It depends entirely on where you live. Central California about half an hour from the coast, $900 a month is the going rate for cheaper apartments. I paid $400 a month for a comparable one (nicer but fewer amenities due to fewer tenants) in my hometown in northeast Tennessee.

Mini-achievement: new bed. We had the aluminum-frame firm-mattress futon as our bed for 11 years, so we bought a firm memory foam bed with a new frame for $1000 - and as much as i loved the futon, i already sleep better on this new bed. I'm still lazy, but i do wake more refreshed. And it's not squeaky. We have a bed-worth of space taken up in other parts of the apartment, which is a lot for this little space, and the futon has been relocated to replace the poor old (comfy but collapsing) tub chairs.

In the next few days, i'll have to make a decision on who to vote for (mail-in absentee ballot) and plan when and how to do my November cross-country drive.

[Jamie]

Since finishing uni all of this cost-of-living stuff has been of interest to me as well, America sounds so cheap! I live in a three bedroom townhouse about 15minutes from the city (Brisbane) and it's $450 a week (I share, so it's really quite cheap after being split three ways)... To buy what I live in would be about $480-500k. The thought of a decent house in a city being ~100k is mind-boggling. Congratulations on the house purchase Madge! I really want to buy a place in the next couple of years but to go it alone would take a while to save up a deposit and then account for way too much of my income. I need to get partnered up asap, haha!

[Madge]

America's cheap but I hear $40,000 is a good wage, which explains a lot.

The purchase hasn't gone through yet. Waiting for the loan to be approved, pest inspections, all that sort of thing. Turns out buying a house takes six weeks? Who knew.

And yes, having a partner is the greatest. Makes things like that so convenient.

But bloody hell, being in the dating scene again is making me really realise how hard it is to find a good partner. From people who aren't quite what you want, don't do bedroom things quite the way you like it, and don't have the same attitude towards money that you do. I am the luckiest person ever for that.

My only advice to people wanting to find love is to, uh, hit on attractive people at parties?

[Marah]

But what to do if there aren't any parties? Or you're at the age where your friends won't go because BABIES!

[Wingsrising]

It depends very much on where you live. I don't think you're going to get a nice house in a city for $100k anywhere in the US. I live in a smallish college town (about 50k people) and back when I was contemplating a house, I figured $150k would be the minimum I'd be looking at to get something I'd want, and I'd consider the cost of living low here. On the flip side, I have some friends in Santa Barbara who paid $750k for their decent but not spectacular house, and that was AFTER the housing crash... it had been going for $1 million before the crash.

Most rents in the US are given by the month, not by the week... but again, it depends on the part of the country. Right now I pay $780 a month for a nice though not spectacular 2-bedroom 1-bath apartment with a garage, washer/drier, and dishwasher, which is pretty normal here. However, where I went to grad school in NJ, $1200 a month for a 2-bedroom apartment that you'd *want* to live in was a very good deal. (My housemate and I had an apartment at that rate for 2 years and considered ourselves very luck to have found it. No garage, washer, or dishwasher. Two baths, though.)

The median wage in the US is about $50k a year. So I wouldn't consider $40k an especially good wage.

Congrats on the house! I haven't taken the plunge yet.

(And yeah, I know all about the "Can't find a partner because everyone else is already coupled off" thing. It sucks.)

[Wingsrising]

(And I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up on this thread! Congratulations to everyone whose important events I missed. )

[Madge]

You'd better keep up with the thread because THIS IS GOING TO BE SOCIAL COMMENTARY THREAD FROM NOW ON.

I've been having some success with online dating? My ex and I met on OKCupid. Especially if you're a straight female you've got a plethora of options in online dating. People are always wary to try it because it seems desperate, but dude, you have so many options and can weed out a lot of the crazy. When I moved down to Bunbury I met a guy on OKCupid and ended up making best friends with his girlfriend (who now lives in Newcastle! Boo)

As far as babies - I'm making the transition from "uni student crowd" to "adult crowd" which also includes a lot of roller derby girls who have babies, and older uni friends of ours who are having babies. You just need to tell your friends that not going places because baby is lame and they should be awesome instead and leave the baby with their husband/wife/spousal equivalent/polyamorous family unit. Because I'm sure people love being told how to live their lives! Right?

As far as where you live - yeah, I'm living in company housing and my work pays for my rent. Turns out the rent is $430/pw, but it's a four bedroom house that is fully furnished (from beds and couches down to knives and forks and LINEN). But this is an industrial town (farming, mining, timber) of 70,000 people.

I kind of want to make a thread called "giant chat thread" where we all just post whatever and talk about our lives, or turn this thread into that. I love the little conversations that come out of this thread.

[Wingsrising]

If I were queen of the universe, I'd have us go back to the old format where people made new threads for most achievements/woes (both RL and Neo/Subeta/other game related). I feel like we used to have more conversation that way.

I'm not queen of the universe, though. Which while I do think some things would be better if I were, overall is probably just as well.

[Jessi]

Oh my goodness yes, it definitely depends on where you live! Townhouses in my neighborhood, north of Seattle, would cost around $180k to start - again, for a townhouse/condo. The closer we get to Seattle, the more expensive it gets, sigh! We're currently saving up for a down payment on a condo closer to the city (not in the heart of downtown) and I can't believe how much we're going to spend on a condo - compared to what would buy a house in Kansas where we lived!

Our apartment here is $905 a month, which is actually quite cheap for the area, so I'm pretty happy. Of course, our townhouse in Kansas was twice as big and $800 a month, haha, so it definitely depends on location!