Has anbody else from the Boston Area considered moving south?

[Rondo9dunx]

"North Carolina - First in flight, last in education"


lol saw a random interwebz picture that said that one time.

[Kane3387]

This post is definitely timely for me as well. Lately, my wife and I have been tinkering with relocation. I run my own business so we are free to move anywhere at the moment. We currently reside in Northern California in Wine Country(1 hour north of SF). The cost of living here though is extreme and when I look at prices of homes in places like Austin, TX, Portland, OR or NC or even the far suburbs of Boston, the prices seem so much cheaper. We own our house and will take a huge loss if we sell but with the prices in other areas, it all balances itself out. 300K-400K appears to get you a nice home in many of those other areas and here it will get you a tent with a generator!

Things I love about where I live are

1. Time Zone- All of the Celtic/Sox games go on at 4pm so with tivo, you are good to go watching games early. Even football on Sunday is at 10am so breakfast and football and still the rest of the day ahead of you. No staying up until 1230am to watch monday night football either.
2. Very Scenic with 25 minutes to the ocean, 3 hours to the mountains, 1 hour to SF. Wineries and amazing food places everywhere. Where every you point your car, you are good to go
3. 3 Big airports within 1.5 hours is decent
4. Did I mention the food in this area is amazing!

Things I am not crazy about.
1. Cost of living for us is crazy..way to high.
2. Cost to hire people is crazy high as well. As a result, we have never expanded like we would in a cheaper area.
My business would make the same money anywhere we live so I am definitely missing out on that benefit
3. The people are a bit strange and it is hard to make really close friends and by that I mean people who actually care about you, not what you can do for them. We have lived in both S. California and N. California and we find this to be a hard state to meet the right kinds of people. This has been a very dissappointing finding. We have had incidents where an emergency happened, we called our “friends” for help, and they would say stuff like, we are getting ready to eat dinner..sorry! Can you imagine?


My wife and I have lived in the suburbs of NYC(Westchester), she lived in Texas for a time but she is from Europe(she hated the heat of the summer and the people did not seem to welcoming to “outsiders” but this was Dallas/Fort Worth Area and she said there was no culture like North East) and have lived in California for almost ten years. At the end of the day, I think the people are very important to where you call home. I am not sure she would ever move back to TX though although we do hear great things about Austin. How do you survive summers where your ass gets burned sitting on your car seat due to the extreme heat?

Does anyone have experience with Austin Texas? If so, what was it like? Would you think it was good for an Online Marketing Business? What about the other areas that have been mentioned? anyone have experience with Portland? What about the towns 30-1 hour south of Boston? Are there any nice places there- It seems the prices are more reasonable down that way then I would have imagined but I guess coming from the suburbs of NYC, Santa Monica and now Wine Country, almost everywhere in the US seems more affordable to me.

I wonder if it is a sign of the times that so many of us are thinking of making big moves. It makes me think that we still have a very long way to go before we all get out of this bad economy.

Grandparents live in Austin, so I go there annually twice a year. As for the business part I don't know. It is hot in the summer but it is reasonable the rest if the year. It is a better place to live then in the Dallas area. People are much friendlier. Also the mindset is different. It is very cultural. Lots of Live music and the people are very laid back in a hippish kind of way. There not flower children but they are all content with where they are. I am talking the majority. I would definitely visit before moving because while it is not as big as Houston or Dallas/FW it is expanding. Go to sixth street and you will get a good feel for how things are.

[snowball]

as someone who really does not like the hot weather,
i know i could not handle Texas or Florida, or South
Carolina. I don't feel that the ocean or big cities are
important enough to have to live within short driving distance of. Open land and privacy is important to me, but I'm not
ready yet to move out into the deep midwest or official west.

The land/housing prices in upstate New York and Eastern
Pennsylvania do look attractive to me, as does the quality
of life, and it's fairly close enough, 4-6 hours drive.

[Eja117]

Isn't everyone in florida just a retired new englander?

Don't forget retired New Yorkers and New Jerseyans and I'll be Edited.  Profanity and masked profanity are against forum rules and may result in discipline.ned if I have to share a state with a Yankee fan