In the 90s I was constantly responding to their mail offers to get install diskettes for personal use. Much cheaper than buying them for a poor student. Those AOL signup ads were in every print media. And they apparently didn't check how many they sent to the same address. I was sad when they upgraded to CDs because I lost my supply of free floppy discs.

You can afford a home period. I live inward of Anna, TX. When I bought my house in McKinney 20 years ago it was out in the boonies and therefore affordable. Now you can't get a house for less than $400k. So you look 10 more miles out of town. Remote work is not required. People drive from Anna to Dallas to work all the time. And the main traffic artery is jammed for hours because of it.

I got my copy of "The AWK Programming Language" at Half Price Books. It's got code to implement a relational database in AWK if you need joins. And AWK code should run in perl with minimal fuss.