What motivated you to get your first apartment?

My mom got remarried and I couldn't stand my stepdad. I knew him before they even started dating and I didn't like him, and he didn't like me. So that's why. I moved out when I was 17, two months before my 18th birthday. I had already graduated three months earlier, though.

Also, I did want my independence. I was ready to move out. So I got a job at a bank and moved my grocery store job to nights. I made enough at the grocery store to just pay my rent and then I lived off of what I made working full-time at the bank.

It was tight, though. I remember I used to manage my money by just withdrawing my entire paycheck and then dividing it up into different envelopes. I budgeted by envelopes. When the money ran out in an envelope, I just did without until I got paid again. My grocery store paycheck filled my rent envelope and was on the opposite weeks as my bank pay paycheck, which I used to fill all my other envelopes, like my car insurance envelope, my gas money envelope, my going to the movies envelope, my food envelope, etc.

I was soooo poor. But I never felt poor. I was stoked. I was 17 and had my own apartment!

Moving away from my parents made getting an apartment absolutely crucial.

Prison. I knew I would be headed there if I continued living at home because I would have murdered my mother.

money and sex.

I turned 18. Wanted to be on my own. Plus back then we didn't expect our parents to support us after we were adults.

I graduated, had a full time job. There comes a time to grow up and move out. Once you are qualified to do something and you have a job, it is time, or if you don't want to further your education and you get a job, then it is time.

I never lived in an apartment. What motivated me to get my first house was looking for my first apartment and seeing the crap that was in my affordability range and realizing that renting was throwing away money. I was staying intermittently with my fiance's family or at my parents' house - they were away for all but the winter months. So we called a real estate office to see if we could buy a house on what we earned at our jobs, and an agent sat down with us and told us what we could afford, and we could afford starter houses in better neighborhoods than what the mortgage payment would buy in monthly rent. So we bought our first house within months of my starting to look at apartments. I lived in for about seven months before we got married.

Freedom from nonsense.

Although I bought my own house. Even better.

I finished the portion of my college that I could do at the community college 10 minutes from my parents house, and enrolled at a university where my options were to get an apartment on or near campus, or keep living at my parents house and drive 2 hours in rush hour traffic each way everyday so that I could pay an arm & a leg for gas and parking and not be available for on-campus study groups.

My mother.

I had younger siblings at home and there would not have been room in my parents' house for my new wife.