The Mobile Home Buying Conversion Begins

Hello, my name is Brad. I'm a 30-something single man living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Having lived here for most of my life, I learned at an early age about the high cost of living here. Most of this high cost manifests itself in the inflated housing prices. Whether you're looking to buy a condo, townhouse, or single-family residence, you need to be prepared to shell out big bucks (several hundred thousand dollars for even a small condo!). With banks tightening up credit now, you also need to provide a decent down payment (in the tens of thousands of dollars), then pay $2,000-$3,000 a month for your mortgage. Granted, prices here have come down considerably as the real-estate bubble has popped, but they still leave most people looking for alternatives.

Renting an apartment provides such an alternative, as rent rates have not increased as rapidly as housing prices. Nevertheless, it still costs close to $2,000 a month to rent a decent apartment, or $1,200 a month for a studio in a bad neighborhood. For years, I have rented modest apartments in the hopes I could one day afford to buy my own place, but with so much money going down the drain each month for rent, it was very difficult to save anything for a down payment, let alone the tens of thousands of dollars now required. And this is in spite of working in a salaried position at a Fortune 500 company. It was very frustrating, but I didn't think I had any other choice. Then one day not long ago, a friend advised me to look into mobile home buying.

Like most people, I initially brushed off such an idea: mobile home buying? I had heard about mobile homes and trailers, and everything I had heard was negative. They were cheap, poorly constructed, went down in value, and the parks were in bad areas with lots of degenerates ("trailer trash") living there. In short, no self-respecting young man would consider mobile home buying, right? Yet life sure is funny. Sometimes we end up doing something we never imagined we would do, and not only do we not hate it, we actually enjoy it and become thankful!