Atlanta Apartments | Keeping a Balanced Budget when your Rent Increases

Apartment hunting is a sport and a business. Just like anything else that is worthwhile, it takes hard work, determination and a fair share of luck to secure the apartment of your dreams. For many businesses, the recent economic collapse has been a wake up call. Too many people overextended their resources and have now fallen into debt. Be sure to consider these pitfalls when searching for your new apartments. It could be the difference between feeling settled and feeling scared.

Earlier this year, 26-year-old photographer Andy Cook drove away from his home in suburban Baltimore on a quest to match faces to the big story of the day: our economic meltdown. Having lost his own job at a media company the previous fall, he’d begun close to home, taking pictures of metropolitan Baltimore residents in similar straits.

Reading the newspapers daily, he said, “I was hearing about unemployment numbers, so many thousands of people losing their jobs, so many thousands of people on unemployment. … My goal was to try to find personal stories about it — to put a face on the numbers we’re hearing.”

He drew up a list of cities to hit and developed a strategy of putting notices on Craigslist and Facebook several days before arriving, setting up shop with friends or at an Internet café; he’d typically get a half-dozen responses and winnow down to three or four people to shoot.

Leaving in February in his 1991 Toyota Camry, he came to see the crisis taking on a different character in each place along his 6,000 mile route. In Florida, the story was the collapse of real estate; it was “sort of the epicenter of the housing crash.” New Orleans, with post-Katrina federal money coming in, was nowhere as dire as he expected. In Texas, service industries were the problem. Madison, Wis., with its still-booming health care sector, was relatively unscathed.

His couple of March days in Detroit, he said, “probably left the deepest impression on me of any place I visited on my trip.”

So there you have it, Atlanta is not the only city to be hit hard by the recession. If you are planning to move to the Atlanta area, be sure to secure your apartments by using a professional rental company. That way you are sure to avoid the pitfalls of a downward economic time.