This week’s cover story in the New York Times real estate section is about people who’ve scrimped and sacrificed— sometimes for years— to save up enough money for the down payment on their first home. One guy survived for an entire year on a daily diet of a $2.95 chicken special and a 99-cent coke; another woman started drinking only at happy hours. It’s notoriously hard to save from paycheck to paycheck in New York City; we were lucky that a real estate deal we worked on back in 1999 paid off well enough a few years later to enable us to come up with the downpayment on our house. (That, and we had the good fortune to flip a couple of one-bedrooms in Manhattan between 1997 and 2000, when we cashed out thinking the market had peaked! Got that one wrong, huh?) There must be lots of tales of self-deprivation in the name of nest-egg building. Anyone care to share?
Every Penny Counts [NY Times]