After being in Minneapolis for 5 years and having our little guy hitting his first birthday my wife and I are feeling maybe it’s time to move closer to home (Chicago/Milwaukee/Madison) where the grandparents, aunts/uncles, and cousins live.
However, we have no idea how or where to begin attempting to make this transition. We currently both work full time for big companies making decent bucks but neither of us are “in love” with our jobs. Minneapolis is okay but our current house is in a neighborhood that has slowly increasing crime rates every year.
If we sold the house and paid off the second mortgage we’d probably pocket $60K. Our only real debt is 3 more years of a $500 car payment.
So where to begin? Find jobs first? A job for one of us? Sell the house and move in with one of our parents till we can find jobs, sell the old house, buy a new house (where do we store all our stuff)? Wait to land a job to see where we want to buy a house?
We have no deadline so we can do this as fast or as slow as we want. I just don’t know how to start the process.
My inexpert advice is to start by both of you seeking jobs, and don’t move or sell anything until one of you has a job that can cover the bulk of your living expenses in the new location.
While this is going on, investigate the housing and cost of living prices where you want to go, so you can determine if a job offer that comes in will fit the bill.
Unless you have a family member or GREAT friend who can put your family up gratis for a year or more, I wouldn’t consider living off savings in the new place until you find jobs.
Another advantage of “find a job first” is that a lot of places will pay for some or all of your moving expenses.
Our situation isn’t quite the same, but we did move across the country a few years ago. We were in Colorado, and wanted to be back in Michigan where my family lives. We had the advantage that Mr. Athena is self-employed, works from home, and it doesn’t matter where he lives, so our living expenses were covered. We would have been screwed if we’d moved here and THEN tried to find a job, because jobs are few and far between. But I assume if you don’t move to the middle of nowhere, the job opportunities are better.
As far as housing, we found it to be pretty hard to find a decent house. We tried flying in for a week and looking at houses, we even put an offer on one but it fell through. Then I flew up for another week to try to find a rental. That was a no-go as well - we needed a yard for dogs and a garage, and there was nothing available with that.
We ended up buying a modest house that wasn’t our dream house, but would do for a few years. During that time, we casually looked for our dream house and eventually found it. It sucked to move twice within a couple years, but unless you get lucky, it’s hard to find a “forever” house if you only have a week or so to look.