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I'm from Passaic County and I've been searching for an apartment in towns such as Bloomfield, Belleville, Nutley, Montclair, and Wayne. I've been using craigslist.org, apartments.com, and hotpads.com to search for places that are $900 (with utilities) or less. I know that it's difficult to find a decent apartment in NJ at that price, but I feel that I don't have much of a choice. My current job pays about $31,000 a year. While I'm more on the frugal side and don't have any debt, I do want to have enough disposable income to try new things every now and then. I don't want my first years of independence to be years of barely scraping by and being stranded at home.
Ideally, I would like to find a studio apartment (in a safe area) with a private kitchen and bathroom. In terms of commute, I want to be within a 20-30-minute drive of Caldwell. I would be the only person moving and I don't have any pets. In addition, I don't smoke.
What else could I be doing to improve my search besides using the websites I've mentioned? What pitfalls should I look out for? Are there other cities which I should be considering?
If you're working in Caldwell, did you try looking west of Caldwell for an apartment? It seems you're looking in towns that are east of Caldwell which will be more expensive since they are closer to the city etc
From what I've seen online, the closest available apartments which are west of Caldwell tend to be in Hackettstown. They seem to be a 40-minute drive from my job. I'll look into them if there are no other alternatives, but I just want to make sure there aren't closer apartments which I'm missing out on due to not using the best resources.
Sorry if I'm coming across as ignorant. This is my first time looking for an apartment, so I'll be the first to admit that there is probably a lot that I need to improve upon or am unaware of. I agree with your perspective on this, Bookspage. Looking at cities west of the ones I've checked thus far would likely raise the number of options I have. My only concern is that the commute to and from my job might get to me after a while as the only city which seems to list vacancies online is about 40-50 minutes away. I know that beggars can't be choosers, but I don't want to have to inconvenience myself if it can be avoided.
Are there any other sources of information which I could check to find apartments which would be in my price range and not as distant as Hackettstown? What strategies have you used to find an apartment?
Butler Ridge is close, but just a bit too pricey. I've bumped my maximum price up to about $950 so long as heat and hot water are included. I don't think I can raise the cost much higher than that, though.
I have come across a new problem, though. Since good apartments which I can afford are rarely posted online, I've decided to try calling apartment complexes to see if I can get advanced notice on vacancies. However, I'm having a tough time finding contact information for many of these places. The strange thing is that apartments.com does list phone numbers for a handful of them, but they have the same area code (which is different than the one which is normally used at the locations) and it seems like all of them are bogus. Sometimes the phone just rings endlessly, sometimes it seems like someone picks up, but no one says anything, and sometimes an automated message tells me to press "5" to continue, then gives a 4/5-digit number before hanging up. If I search for the apartment name or address in a search engine, I almost always just get a number of sites which give statistics for the apartment.
Is there some type of directory which I can use to find legitimate contact information or am I going to have to drive to these places?
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