After reading some of your comments on the last blog, and appointing KeMari to be the boss of me and immediately being given homework, I realized it would be helpful if you guys had some more information… like why we want to move in the first place, what we’re looking for, and why we picked those cities.

So, basically, here’s a list of stuff you should know, and hopefully I cover all those things somewhere in the list. My writing skillz are minimal at best today.

1. Right now we live in a mid-size town in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not a bad place, by any means. We’ve been in agreement that moving away from here was a common goal since those “getting to know you” conversations we had when we first started dating. We both sort of ended up… stuck here. Jerrad due to coming here for college, snagging a job afterwards, then staying until he met the love of his life. (ahem, that’s me). I moved here because an ex wanted to and because I briefly toyed with the idea of applying to some master’s program. I like to briefly toy with ideas and then never follow through.

2. As far as family goes, my dad and step-mom, and my siblings and their families are in the Pittsburgh “area” where I’m from. I say “area” because I grew up in various parts of northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. My mom lives here. I can’t be all telling her business on my blog, but the plan is for her to be in a position to move close to us within a year. Jerrad’s family lives in the closest major city.

3. Work. I describe my husband’s job as “something about computers” and he describes it as Database Development and Administration. I’m in social work, and past jobs have included case management, mental health, child protection, and working in group homes and psych hospitals. Right now I have a part-time job. I like everything about it, except the fact that it’s an on-call type of situation and my schedule (and subsequently my paycheck) is very irregular. We’re trying to get pregnant, but I don’t feel like talking about that right now.

4. Digging a little deeper, but too much ’cause it’s a post (or two or three) all it’s own, as far as I’m concerned I don’t have a “career” anymore. I’m just earning money to help the family, because our goal is for me to be a stay-at-home-mom. Once the kids come, I want to be home with them. Something else we quickly agreed on when we first started dating.

5. So right about now you might be asking why we aren’t just moving to where  Jerrad’s family is. This is the part where we talk about *whispers* money. I’m whispering because some think it’s rude to talk about money, but it’s important to the conversation so I’m going to do it anyway. Basically, we can’t afford to live on the west coast. Despite the fact that my husband has a good job, I mean he’s not a doctor or engineer or anything, but I definitely did ok for myself in the sugar daddy department, and I seem to average two shifts a week at a pretty nice salary, we cannot afford to buy a house here. And then when you think about what it will be like when I don’t work, and you add children to the equation? Impossible.

6. I guess I should be more specific. For some reason that I have yet to fathom, real estate is ridiculously, insanely expensive on the west coast. It’s not that we can’t afford a house here, we can afford a tiny one. In the ghetto. Or, I can keep working so we can afford something decent, but like I said, we don’t want to be a working mom family. Again, that’s another blog, but to us that is the most important factor. A place that has a reasonable enough housing market and job market where a man with a good job can support his family and afford a decent house. I’ve heard tell of such places, so I know they exist.

7. So, how we narrowed it down to the three cities (Pittsburgh, PA; St. Louis, MO; and Minneapolis, MN) is kind of long and complicated, so I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version. We considered many, many factors in addition to the ones I’ve mentioned. Like climate, for example. We want four seasons, and we actually want weather, too. So that’s why we aren’t deterred by reports of how cold Minneapolis gets and how they get 1,000 feet of snow every year. And that’s also why we aren’t considering places that would otherwise meet our criteria, but are too effing hot, like Atlanta or Phoenix or anywhere in Texas.

8. OK, so in addition to climate, we talked about things like population, proximity to coasts/mountains/deserts and how important those things were to us, were we mostly homebodies or outdoorsy people, exactly how much house is enough for us (3 bedroom? 4 bedroom?), plus a bunch of other things I can’t remember. We read lots of articles about the Most Livable Cities, and the Best Cities to Find a Job in Technology, and Cities with Buyer’s Markets. Alright, I made most of those titles up, but you get the drift. We researched (I’m talking spreadsheets here people) things like the cost of living, salary comparisons, median housing price, property taxes, sales taxes, school systems, and so on.

9. As far as job search goes, we are both using indeed.com to look for openings in our fields in the three cities (and we were before, which was a factor in the initial narrowing down). At this point we are assuming that I will be working at least part time while we keep trying to knock me up. And if I happen to get offered a good full time job with benefits I’ll take it. Getting pregnant without health insurance would suck in ways I can’t even begin to imagine.

10. Taking into consideration the number of openings that are posted in our fields, whether it’s a job we’d be interested in, the salary offered, I seem to be having the most luck with St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh – in that order. Jerrad is having the most luck in Minneapolis, with St. Louis and Pittsburgh being tied.

11. Like I said in the last blog, Pittsburgh is on the list mainly because of the proximity to family. It meets other criteria like the standard of living stuff…but. I’m not sure how to say this, other than to come right out and say that I left Pittsburgh for a reason. Or reasons, rather, but they all were about how it just felt like a dying, depressed city completely devoid of opportunity. Granted, things have changed in the 12 years since I left. There’s been a lot of effort to move the city past its history as a smoky steel town and to bring in jobs, and it does have the nostalgia factor working for it. Pittsburgh has always felt like home.

Another issue is that there’s my husband to consider. He’s visited Pittsburgh with me and he didn’t hate it, but… he didn’t love it either. I don’t ever want my husband to feel like I “made” him move somewhere he wouldn’t be happy. On the other hand, that could happen (to either of us) no matter where we end up.

Well, despite my best efforts, that ended up being long and complicated… and I probably still forgot something. OK, so… what do you think?

PS. Timing. I would like to go rightnow, please. But in all seriousness, it would be way awesome to be in some sort of month to month rental by mid to late fall, find some jobs, and be looking at buying a house well before spring when everyone else is looking and prices go up again.

Tags: outsourcing major life decisions, Relocating

This entry was posted by Cathy on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Marriage, Relocating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.