Finances and Housing at Seminary

Image via WikipediaFor my family the two most scary questions in moving to Texas were : "Where would we live?" and "How will we support ourselves financially?". I'll cover our housing in this post and our finances in the next one.

We spent a considerable amount of time online looking at apartments, looking at campus housing and looking at rental houses. Apartments in our price range tended to be dangerous (i.e. the neighborhoods) or too small. DTS has campus housing which are apartments. They were very nice, but a little small for our family of five, plus no pets (a sacrifice for the short term, but we haven't felt we wanted to make that sacrifice). So we ended finding a house to rent. The good houses, like the apartments, were a little more expensive, but for us offered the best option.

But there have been a few gotchas! One big gotcha has been the cost of utilities instead of $200-$250 that we paid at our home in South Carolina (which we considered to be really high) we are paying thus far in Texas around $450. I think mostly because of the age of the home (poor insulation, appliances don't appear to be energy efficient, etc).

The second gotcha were bugs - mostly ants and few roaches. They haven't been a huge deal but we were responsible for this and not the landlord according to the huge multi-page contract that we signed.

There was also a surprise with renting - we both had to be here in person to sign the lease! We thought that was odd but we were told this by several renters. We are still unsure if this was true!

The other scary fear/question for us was about the finances. I'll talk about this one tomorrow, but in the mean time don't let any of what I have said scare you. It's all worth it!! I'll talk more about this in the next two posts!! In the mean time remember God owns it all and is faithful!