Still looking...

I know everyone is anxious to hear how the house hunting is going. It's hard to describe how it's going. We knew it was going to be hard, but I think it's more of a chore than we could have imagined. This is our first trip up here, and our main focus is to figure out what area we want to concentrate on. It's only then that we can find the house. For now, we're leaning on 2 different communities. The first is West Windsor. That's a suburb of Princeton. The other is around Red Bank/Middletown/Atlantic Highlands. Those communities are on the eastern coast. If we had to make a call as to which we would choose tonight, it's Middletown.

Now, finding a house in our price range is a whole different ballgame. What we pay in mortgage in AL is less than what we will pay in taxes here-remember, that doesn't include the actual mortgage. YIKES is about all I can say about that. If we moved our exact house in AL to NJ and put it on a lot that was 1/4 of the size, it would be worth $500K. Taxes would be somewhere around $9-12k, and we think that's conservative.

So, we've seen plenty that we can downsize into, but the reality is that it's going to be hard to swallow.

On the upside, all those high taxes go toward excellent parks and school systems. I'm not sure we'll be here long enough to start Lise' in school, but we'll sure use the parks. I'm just hoping we'll be w/in walking distance.

Well, it's been a hard 2 days, and we have several more to go. We're definitely putting the girls through the ringer by keeping them in the cars all day, but they're holding up well.

Maybe tomorrow we'll come across that bargain :-) NJ really is a beautiful place. When we do find our home, please come help us celebrate.