For my web simulation, my annual gross income was $24,000 with no savings for a down payment. Fortunately, I had no debt; however, this does not widen my choices in any sense, especially looking for a place to live with two apartments in the suburban area of the Hartford County. When I did the mortgage affordability calculator to estimate the purchase of a home I could afford, I calculated that the maximum house price I could afford was $72,827. Being from Connecticut and living in a suburban town of Hartford County, I knew this was impossible to find, so I automatically went to looking at apartments in suburban districts. I can only afford a monthly rent of about $666. Automatically I went to look at the town I grew up in, Farmington, and found that anything with two bedrooms was going to be easily over $800. Even a studio apartment was $875. I also looked at Avon, and Simsbury and found similar things; everything was going to be too expensive. Although I am searching for the best education in these suburban towns, I will unfortunately not be able to afford were mainly New Britain and Bristol. When I looked at the CMT scores of the towns I could afford, I was also surprised by my findings; Bristol for third grade was 83.1% proficient in math, 65% in reading, and 78% in writing. In sixth grade the proficient was even more promising; 86.6% in math, 82.1% in reading, 83.8% in writing. I actually anticipated lower results so finding this out was happy for me to see that my children would receive better education than they would have in Hartford. Unfortunately, in New Britain, the proficiencies were much lower; in the third grade, 48.6% were proficient in math, 43.1% in reading, and 52.8% in writing. For the sixth grade, the results were similar, 44.6% in math, 45.3% in reading, and 43.7% in writing. Luckily though, there were a few choices of places in Bristol with two bedrooms that met my budget. I was very frustrated at first because I could not find much in towns with a great education in the Hartford County, but it shows how difficult it is for those who want a better education for their children to move out of a place such as Hartford. This really opened my eyes to the reality of how much apartments cost, even ones that are a studio. I could not even afford to live in a studio apartment in a town such as Simsbury so I could have a better education.
My data was from: http://www.courant.com/news/education/hc-database-2012-capt-cmt-test-scores-20120719,0,855259.htmlstory?appSession=994214309191532