Introduction
The internet, damn it, they put the internet! We don't need your internet!
Some grandma from a meme video
If this grandma knew that it's quite legal to earn through the internet 🌐 in a month as much as she receives in pension for a year, her attitude towards the internet would probably change. And it's not just about earning; it's an excellent platform and a bottomless library 📚 for those who want to learn something new. It so happens that my income directly depends on the internet, so without it, I probably wouldn't have my apartment 🤔, this article, or my website as a whole.
According to ancient Babylonian wisdom inscribed on clay tablets, which form the basis of the good book "The Richest Man in Babylon," one of the teachings states that every person (or family, if the person is married) should acquire their own housing 🏡. In our time, this phrase is still highly relevant. Admit it, anyone who doesn't have their own place dreams of it, whatever it may be: whether it's a luxurious villa, a one-bedroom apartment, or a small house.
How I Got Here
I was probably no exception, and such thoughts often visited me as well. And the older I got, the more frequently these thoughts came to my mind (after all, in a year and a half, I will turn 30, which isn't too far away). The situation outside only fueled the fire, as I had problems with the bank 🏛 out of nowhere. There's no guarantee that your hard-earned money won't be seized by the bank or the police from under your mattress based on some report. So, I wanted to get rid of my money 💵 as soon as possible and invest it. Finally, after two long years of diligently saving money, I managed to gather the necessary amount without loans or mortgages to buy a two-bedroom apartment in my favorite city in Belarus - Minsk.
Do you know how I achieved this? It's very simple 🤷♂️:
- I need to go to the store with my own bag (in my case, a backpack) 🎒
- I need to brew tea bags twice 🍵
- Minor factor: I need to earn well 💰
How I Chose
As you already know, I plan 📆 almost everything in advance. I knew the month and even the year of the purchase long before I gathered this amount. After all, I was aware of my income and expenses (by the way, I have been tracking my expenses for over a year, slightly analyzing and adjusting them whenever possible).
Since I'm a techie 💻 to the core, I approached the purchase from a very technical perspective as well. First, I recorded a list of liked apartments in an Excel file 📊, which is quite logical, and I think anyone would do the same. However, while entering the data, I categorized them into 3 levels (green, yellow, and red) 🚥. As you might have guessed, green means go, and red means stop. Seriously, green means I liked the apartment, yellow means it's quite acceptable, and red means not so great.
In addition, I created a list of priorities and sorted them by importance, with the most important ones listed first 📉. The list looked something like this:
- Level (green, yellow, red)
- Year of construction (not old)
- Low floor (for example, living on the 7th floor now, I spend 43 seconds waiting for the elevator)
- Windows facing the road (not the courtyard)
- Eastern part (of the city)
- Public transport access (buses, trams, trolleybuses, electric buses, minibuses, UFOs, teleportation, mole tunnels (wormholes))
- Parking (large/good)
- Metro (close)
- Clean water
- Pizzeria (nearby)
- Stores
- Stadium
- Parks
Next, opposite each priority, I assigned importance numbers in descending order. For example, the level had a score of 12, then the year of construction had 11, and so on until the end of the list.
Then I created a final table where I listed all the priorities next to each apartment (resulting in a full table where the rows were apartments 🏘 and the columns were priorities ❗️). After that, at the intersection of the apartment and the priority (if that priority applied to the apartment), I marked it with a ✅ plus sign in the cell. This way, knowing which priorities each apartment had, as well as the value of those priorities, I was able to calculate a score for each apartment based on the sum of the priorities it possessed. The higher the score 🔟, the more suitable the apartment was for me.
It's worth mentioning that there were no perfect options, but several apartments from the red zone made it to the top, as the other priorities were more than satisfactory. Out of about 30 apartments, three clearly led the pack. Then there were another 3-4 with good ratings, and the rest fell lower and lower.
What I Ended Up With
During the time I was viewing even quite good and expensive apartments, I increasingly found myself thinking that even the beautiful renovations didn't quite appeal to me. There were pink wallpapers 🖼 because the family had little girls 🧸, the type of flooring, the color of the tiles in the bathroom, and so on. Therefore, after viewing all the more or less suitable apartments, I began to prefer those in worse condition and, consequently, cheaper, so that I could later renovate them 🔨 to my taste. Trusting my algorithm, I essentially bought the very first suitable apartment, saving around $10,000 to $15,000 in the process. Perhaps this is the first case where an artificial system 🤖 influenced my choice at such an important and responsible moment 👀, but in any case, the final decision remained with me. And I was more than satisfied with the option provided by the algorithm.
By the time I was turning the rough draft into a full article, the renovation was already in full swing. I also approached it in a technical manner: I had already compiled and sorted a list 📝 of 25-30 tasks that needed to be completed before I moved in. But that's a whole different story.
