Reply to Leaving DC for a lower COL area

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Perhaps upstate NY truly is cheaper, but be careful about assuming YOUR costs will be cheaper.  I come from a western state that ostensibly is cheaper, but when I look at houses (neighborhoods) I would want to live in, the home cost is the same as here.  Restaurants (decent, nothing fancy) are more expensive.  Property taxes are less.  Etc.  We will probably retire out there, but not counting on it being cheaper.

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Very valid point.  I romanticized about moving out west, to Bozeman, MT, [b]and when I looked at real estate prices, I realized it's really not that much cheaper.  [/b]But where I'm from in upstate NY, I could get a nice house in a great school district for less than $200,000.  I know that plenty of places are more expensive, but....200k!  That's a downpayment around here.

There is also something to be said about a slower pace of life and not dealing with all of the BS that comes with our super Type A community in DC.  I don't know if I can put a price on that.[/quote]

+1.  A lot of people on this forum seem to not realize that real estate prices have climbed in many other parts of the country.  It’s like they think real estate is what it was when they were growing up.  Even looking at my childhood home I was shocked how much it costs now.

You can probably find a less expensive house but for real estate to truly be MUCH cheaper means the job market in that area is limited and there is limited money to push up real estate prices.  Also don’t discount moving from an area with public transportation to one where people have multiple cars per family.  When driving around MCOL areas I’m always shocked at how most of the cars are new and fancy.  It’s like instead of spending more on real estate they spend it on cars.

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All, well, most areas have seen prices go up. It's called inflation. House prices probably doubled, on average, between 1999 and 2019. But they also did the same thing between 1979 and 1999. Actually, even more. My parents bought their house in a provincial city that's not one of the "hot" cities for 52k in 1976, sold it for 208k in 1994, bought another house for 300k and just sold that house for 650k. It's inflation. It's an upper middle class suburb with good schools.

Some cities (not all, but some) have seen higher than average real estate price increases. But the vast majority of the country remains much more affordable than DC. [/quote]

^ totally this! I find it so weird how fatalistic people seem about living in DC - like they may as well not even explore other options because surely every place will have the same downsides and so why even bother.

there's a lot of nice places to live. lots cheaper than DC. DC is nice too but expensive.[/quote]

Because JOBS[/quote]

There are JOBS in other places. We have a sub 4% unemployment and a booming upper middle class across most American cities.

I think a lot of people get trapped into DC because of the artificially higher salaries paying 25-40% more for the same role than in, say, Atlanta or Minneapolis and are afraid to take bite the bullet and readjust to a lower salary even with a lower cost of living offsetting it. [/quote]

In our case, and I know there are a lot of other people in the same situation, it's not that the same job would pay less in another place; it's that our types of jobs don't even exist anywhere else. I would love to move to Minneapolis or Omaha but I'm not really qualified to do anything there. It would take a lot of reworking of my resume to even attempt it, and with both my DH and I trying to do that, the job security just isn't there.[/quote]

If you can't leave you can't leave. But I hear a lot of people who seem to act as if there's no possibility of ANYONE leaving DC because DC is where the jobs are, and it's just not the case.

People in Minneapolis are working. In Tampa they're working. In Providence. Why I bet you'd even find that out in other cities as well.[/quote]

I think it's more complicated than those two extremes for many people.  I know that in my field, there are plenty of places with one or two potential employers, but only a handful (maybe 6ish) of large cities with numerous potential employers.  Unless you're happy to pack up and relocate every time you switch employers (or you're committed to a career with one), there are only a few places you really want to be. And, most of those major cities are either at least as expensive as DC (e.g. NYC, SF, Boston, LA), or their somewhat lower costs of living are offset by other quality of life considerations (e.g. weather, lack of public transit, etc.).

Also, few people seem to realize this, but prices in the DC metro are actually rising more slowly than the national average. In other words, many of those other less expensive cities are actually converging toward us, not the other way around.
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This.  [/quote]

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