We spent the first seven years we were together trying to settle somewhere.  Eric was in graduate school and then an adjunct philosophy teacher, I worked retail (hated it) and some of the time went to college to try and finish my undergraduate degree.  We were in no financial position to buy a house and didn’t know if where we lived at any given time would be where we’d stay.  In the first ten years that we were together, we moved 12 times.

When we moved to Colorado for the second time, I had my undergraduate degree and had applied for graduate school, and Eric had a full-time, tenure track teaching job that he loved.  It looked like we’d finally be staying, but could we afford a house?  It was a scarier proposition for me since I wasn’t done with school and was unsure of what my eventual career might be or how much money I might be making, but Eric was ready.  Housing in Fort Collins is very expensive, so we ended up buying a brand new condominium (with some help from Eric’s parents and a loan from Eric’s retirement fund), hoping to build some equity so that in a few years we could move up to a “real” house.  We still didn’t have a yard, so we decided to wait to get a dog.

© Salahub 2003