Woman, 32, who couldn’t afford to buy a home in her native New York reveals how

• Amy Beihl, 32, is a digital consultant who calls New York City her home
• She’s long known however that she can’t afford to buy real estate in the city
• READ MORE: Home prices are red-hot in these nine major US cities

A woman has spoken out about acquiring five stunning vacation properties across Europe instead of blowing all of her savings on a tiny apartment in New York City.

Amy Beihl, 32, is a digital consultant, who insisted that she loves her life in New York, and will remain living there ‘for the foreseeable future,’ as she declared in an essay for Business Insider.

However, she was quick to concede that, barring an unbelievable stroke of luck, such as ‘a lottery win or a giant financial windfall,’ the price range for buying a residence in NYC was ‘cost-prohibitive’ for her, particularly amid the soaring cost of living in the US. 

For now, she’s been renting a one-bedroom, 650-square-foot apartment for $2,850 per month – which is ‘pretty great by New York standards,’ she admitted.

But buying anything in her neighborhood of a similar size would set her back close to $1 million.

Back in 2020 and 2021, while quarantining amid the pandemic, Jen was going ‘stir-crazy’ and began obsessively googling real estate in quaint towns across Europe, noticing the many listings going for absurdly cheap.

‘There were hundreds of articles about one-euro houses in tiny villages in Italy, or France, or Spain – and all of these people who jumped at that opportunity and were able to build a house for $10,000 or something,’ Amy recalled.

‘I was like, “Wow, maybe I could do that.”‘

It was through her online research that she discovered August, a ‘vertically integrated real estate group’ that connects those looking for vacation homes to a wide array of options in some of the most beautiful locales in Europe – from Mallorca in Spain to the French Alps to the English countryside. 

In essence, August allows would-be buyers to acquire a percentage of a ‘portfolio’ of five different properties in desirable locations – with other buyers also owning shares of each listing.

Each owner is given ample flexibility to choose what weeks out of the year they wish to spend at the given property.

‘The shorthand I used when explaining it to my friends and family is, “It’s a non-scammy timeshare, because you actually have an equity stake and you have access to the properties that you want,”‘ Amy conveyed. 

Amy continued: ‘The collection I chose is five houses that are in Tuscany, the South of France, the French Alps, the Cotswolds in England, and Mallorca.’

She added that, while she is in the smallest of the three tiers of house size, that still gives her ‘three to four bedrooms per house.’

For her share of all five houses, the buy in was a ‘flat one-time fee’ of €360,000 – which is a little under $390,000. Maintenance and taxes further cost roughly $10,000 annually.

Amy elaborated of her motivations to buy in to the five houses that she had ‘always toyed or flirted with the idea of living abroad.’

In college at Colgate University, she spent a semester abroad in Stockholm, and had loved the experience.

While she’d had peers who would try and visit as many places as possible while abroad, she recalled that she ‘loved feeling settled and familiar’ in Stockholm, so she’d mostly ‘stayed put.’

‘I really loved that sense of place and home that I felt after being there for just five months,’ she added.

Though she’d looked at job opportunities abroad after graduating, she never came across the right opportunity.

But, during the pandemic, she began reconsidering what was in fact in the realm of…