12 ms·

Americans Are Moving at the Lowest Rate on Record

78 points by SREinSF 7y ago

combatentropy 7y ago
Someone once said, "A one-way trip to Mars would actually be okay if it had smoking-hot Wi-Fi." Do you think that the Internet has made people feel more content, wherever they are?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Broken_Hippo 7y ago
  I think that is a mixed bag. I think it is really easy to feel objectively worse about your surroundings because if you are poor, you more easily see how much your are missing. You are continually surrounded by images of folks who have enough space, who are lucky enough to own a place, whose place looks clean when they clean (you can't always clean the cockroaches away nor paint away the dingy walls). But on the other hand, you are more likely to be able to keep in touch with people. You are more likely to have some entertainment without leaving the house. You are more likely to be able to fix the loose table leg with the basic, cheap tools that you have or mend your clothes if you need really need to. When I was poorer, I would eat cheaper food to be able to afford internet just because it could distract me from my life. If you are lucky enough to have some weed as well, it makes for a much more comfortable life, even if imperfect. (Weed/hash makes me more OK with what I have and I can generally afford it before I could afford a monthly, steady rise in general household bills). In other words: Only if you have a certain life satisfaction in the beginning. I think the quote about mars is more indicative of the entertainment and communication that the internet brings and its innate ability to help time pass more quickly.
  - sysbin 7y ago
    I’m not sure about that. A lot of friends from poor families that couldn’t get out are turning to suicide or the drugs that will lead them to it eventually. This era is likely the worse one for the poor.
    - Broken_Hippo 7y ago
      I did mention weed/hash, and explained the effects it has on life. Alcoholism is an option, but harder drugs generally are more expensive. A lot of poor folks don't do drugs simply because they can't afford them. IIRC, poor folks do drugs at the same rate as better off folks, though. Sometimes you are more likely to get caught because of the situations you use them in... plus the businessman has more to lose so tends to be more secluded unless you are trusted. As far as worse, I don't know, man. The depression was pretty bad. The 1800's were pretty bad. The US is worse than Norway, just because of the lack of safety net, and both of these places are better than anywhere facing near-famine or actual active war. And so on. It is really hard to say, "worse".
      - sysbin 7y ago
        There will always be people somewhere around the world that are suffering from famine or living in extreme poverty. I’ve noticed in the USA specifically from where I grew up (that wasn’t a huge city), that all friends from families that were not well off have an even harder time leaving parents. Even the lower middle class people seem to nowadays stay with parents until late 20s and even with decent degrees; so they can afford a home. Upper class has parents that are loaning a couple hundred grand to their kids to purchase a home. The poor are aware of their situation more so because of the internet and see no escape contrary to the previous generations. I disagree about access to drugs from affordability. Somehow there is always a way from what I’ve observed.
      - throwaway0x69AF 7y ago
        > Alcoholism is an option, but harder drugs generally are more expensive. Are you sure? In my experience, a tab of acid costs $5-10, and the effects last about 5 hours. That's way cheaper than alcohol. [1] shows a breakdown of cost per hour for a bunch of drugs I've never touched, and most of them look to be pretty cheap under this metric. Compared to movies, sitting around in coffee shops, etc., they're remarkably cheaper than a lot of legal forms of entertainment. [1] https://www.addictionresource.net/blog/cost-of-illegal-drugs/ https://www.addictionresource.net/blog/cost-of-illegal-drugs...
- kryptiskt 7y ago
  The interplanetary internet will not be smoking hot with latencies counted in minutes. I guess we will need another protocol too, at least for the CDNs.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ebelding/courses/595/s04_dtn/papers/TCP-Planet.pdf https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ebelding/courses/595/s04_dtn/pape... and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet
technick 7y ago
As a remote worker, I would move to the cheapest area while still collecting big city money. Sadly I'm sitting on a future gold mine that I won't sell until it triples in value, which it's half way there in under 3 years of ownership.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  As a remote worker, I've done this. Mixed bag. Rural Alberta is far cheaper than, say, Vancouver, but it also means I'm married to the remote gig. Freelancing is an option, but that's very hard remotely -- in-person networking is effective, as is word of mouth, and that's hard to get a timezone away -- and it leaves me beholden to my current job.
xfour 7y ago
In California you have Prop 13 causing people to stay put. If you bought a house anywhere close to the coast more than 6 years ago you’ve likely seen 50-100% in value increase. Therefore if you move you’d pay that same increase proportionally in property tax. In addition you have 6% Realtors fees to sell plus staging and being out of the house for open houses etc. the math just doesn’t add up.
- grandmczeb 7y ago
  Rent control has a similar effect as well.
  - skohan 7y ago
    Yes I live in an European capital with fairly strong rent control, and a competitive housing market, and everyone I know is pretty convinced they will die in their current apartment.
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  This is a rather unique situation that only benefits a small fraction of people in the US. The article is mostly focusing on trends in the American midwest, and the effects of people being priced out of superstar cities and forced to stay where they are where the CoL is still reasonable because they did not get in on the bubbly pyramid scheme soon enough.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > 6% realtors fee I have a feeling that will get automated away in the next 5-10 years something fierce. More than it already is being by Redfin, etc. Realtors don’t deserve more than $25-40/hr in most cases, let alone 6% of my home value.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Wouldn't you want to say "My Zillow prediction is $1.2 million, you get 20% of any more than that if you sell by June but only this low rate otherwise"? Anyone with true ability would take the deal. Aligning the incentives etc. If you flatrate it, they don't have an incentive to find you a big buyer.
dzhiurgis 7y ago
Surely remote working has had at least some impact?
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Probably not as much as needing to stay close to family for childcare. Childcare is hella expensive.
  - leethargo 7y ago
    Or insufficient / unsatisfying. In Berlin, the day care is paid by the city for all children older than 1 year. But I still plan to move away (to the countryside) to be closer to family, regardless of financial benefits.
    - PunchTornado 7y ago
      that may work for some people. I prefer to not pay for other people's childcare costs.
nonford150 7y ago
If you sell your house you have to move farther out from the city to afford something nice.
someguydave 7y ago
The US is an aging nation. Old people don't move. For millennial, they have a tough starting position and a long time to wait until the corporate hierarchies above them clear out from the surplus of boomer management. It makes sense that they must "wait their turn" for a longer time than in the past.
- rchaud 7y ago
  The boomer management you refer to were likely the elite of their time, as they could afford to get an advanced degree when it wasn't common. These days you need a Bachelor's for just about any entry-level office job. There aren't enough jobs for all the degree-holders out there. That's why higher education gets hit with the "scam" allegations. They're selling a vision of higher lifetime incomes that was true 25 years ago.
pontifier 7y ago
Real estate is so overpriced now, and so difficult to purchase that it's no wonder that people want to stay where they are once they find a place that they can actually afford. It almost feels like the choices are stay or be homeless. I recently decided to move to a new state on the other side of the country, purely because of the low cost of real estate there. It feels like the tipping point was recently reached, and having zero opportunity to have the place I wanted in Utah or California, pushed me to look elsewhere. Elsewhere being Arkansas.
- trianglem 7y ago
  You found it hard to find a cheap place in Utah?
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Real estate in Utah is very expensive now by local standards.
  - pontifier 7y ago
    Yes. The difference in price is truly unbelievable. I had to call the agent to make sure they hadn't left a zero off of the asking price. Equivalent places I was looking at in Utah were going to cost several million dollars.
    - drewmate 7y ago
      Your story sounds like those of Californians who moved to Utah a decade ago. Before you know it, people in Little Rock coffee shops will be complaining about the influx of Utahns selling their modest West Jordan homes to buy mansions in Arkansas. Utah has remained a hidden gem for years, but external market pressures are driving up prices, and supply is surprisingly constrained by the local geography (mountains and bodies of water constricting available land in the SLC metro.) Utah doesn't enjoy the same wide open space of many inland states, at least in the developed areas where people want to live.
    - Excel_Wizard 7y ago
freddie_mercury 7y ago
Moving isn't always a good thing. Maybe in the past it simply represented high search costs. The only way an Okie could find out if California was the right home for them was to pack up and actually move there. You get to Sacramento and decide that's not right for you, so a year later you move to Fresno. Nowadays you go online and can research local economies, local hiring, local real estate, local churches, etc. You're more likely to move fewer times.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
drewmate 7y ago
I'm kind of surprised the article didn't mention the role of dual-income households. For generations, a single income was the norm and generally able to provide a better quality of life (by standards like home size, discretionary spending, etc...) than your parents' generation. Over time, two incomes went from providing far more than a family needed to being a practical necessity in many markets. I can't imagine buying the type of home I'd like to live in on even my relatively high (by national standards) Bay Area salary alone, and yet many families still choose to live here. Once a family relies on two incomes just to pay the rent, it becomes harder to pick up and move to a different part of the country unless both partners can do it at the same time. Even intra-county moves are more difficult when two partners are working full-time and don't want to deal with the stresses of moving on top of their regular jobs. Maybe the pendulum will swing back as a result of changing expectations (about where to live, how much home to buy, what kind of job you need to have), or maybe remote work will save us all and let us move out of the expensive areas where our jobs are. But for now, I think the rise of the dual-income household is among the biggest factors keeping us in place.
- sturgill 7y ago
  I saw this play out several times when I lived in NYC. Many friends would hit that point where kids were now a consideration and one of the partner’s was ready to transition to a new job. They’d talk about moving, and usually the spouse in a transition phase was ready to go elsewhere. But rarely were both spouses ready to go at the same time. This isn’t a normative statement, but two income families are inherently less mobile (absent one spouse working remotely). It’s a world of trade offs...
- mdorazio 7y ago
  On top of this, once you're reliant on two incomes to pay the bills and you want to have kids, you're also dependent on your local support network (often parents) to raise your family. I have several friends who can't move because either one of them would have to stop working to take care of the kids or they would have to pay a near equivalent amount for a nanny.
- bko 7y ago
  > I'm kind of surprised the article didn't mention the role of dual-income households The number of single/no earner households has actually increased since 1980. If you look at Table H-12. Household by Number of Earners by Median and Mean Income [0], you'll see in 1980 the percentage of households that have 2+ earners was ~44%, and now its ~40% and has steadily decreased over that time. I made it into a google sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vm8d-XTuGu_ilbK0xn_rlyCN151cMmv9YKzp9dHK8s8/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vm8d-XTuGu_ilbK0xn_r... [0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...
VLM 7y ago
Consider mergers, aside from the very small number of people working in coastal tech jobs, its not like an insurance guy working in Des Moines at an insurance company HQ can consider moving to, perhaps, Milwaukee Wisconsin, because due to endless mergers there is less competition meaning fewer jobs meaning fewer jobs to move to. On the opposite side, if you've got a contractor / gig job, other than the weather during the commute, it doesn't really matter if you move to a new city. You might have to move inside a city for demographic socioeconomic change reasons. Outside very few fields temporarily, the job market is efficient and being a car salesman in kentucky isn't any better than being a car salesman in rhode island, other than very general stuff like weather and quality of life and affordability is somewhat better away from the coasts and similar things probably not worth moving for.
- paulcole 7y ago
  >being a car salesman in kentucky isn't any better than being a car salesman in rhode island Have you worked as a car salesman in either of those places?
PascLeRasc 7y ago
I want to move, so badly. It's been my singular goal for over a year now and I've cut back my spending nearly entirely except for rent+groceries to try to save up enough to do so, and I've sold most of my belongings to save more and make the eventual move easier. Moving is what I think about when I wake up and before I go to sleep. I have severe seasonal affective disorder and pretty bad driving anxiety. I've seen mental health professionals for both of these and everyone's just said I should move. I have cognitive techniques for both of these that help a little, and been recommended medications to help, but really the solution is to move and be car-free. On days where I don't have to drive and it's above 65F outside, I genuinely feel like a totally different person. The only place in the US where you can be a first-class citizen without a car and feel the sun every day is San Francisco. It's a nice bonus that SF is a fantastic place to be a hardware engineer too. I've been on a plan of sending out 10-15 applications every week for about a year and have at least 1 phone interview each week. I've been in the interview pipeline with around 60 companies over the past year, and so far received zero offers. Usually it's "we're looking for someone already local". If it ever happens, getting a job in SF and moving there will have been the hardest thing I've ever done. My bank account is at $13k now, so once it hits $20k I'm just going to risk it and move without a job.
- turk73 7y ago
  You going to live in a closet or what? The amount you have saved up seems insufficient to take on a HCOL area. Any hardware gigs in Austin or RTP? I kind of think your specialty is being globalized out of existence in the US, but I don't follow that area much, so I could be speaking out of turn on that. Also, what is "driving anxiety?" Does that mean you're a bad driver? How about a Skip Barber school?
- rubidium 7y ago
  If you want sun and warmth you should do San Diego, not San Fran.
  - nwvg_7257 7y ago
    Agreed. I am also carless, but I wouldn't want to move to San Fran. as it's much too expensive. You should for sure consider other places in Cali. like San Diego, which has perfectly good public transit, but I would also consider the DC area, Austin, Chapel Hill (free and frequent bus service), etc.
trowawayfornow 7y ago
Oh man, I'm going through a real mental tug-of-war with myself right now about a potential move. In my late 30s, married, newborn. I have an incredible job right now in almost every way. But we live in an area that neither of us love, right at the time we are finally thinking about actually putting down roots (I've moved a lot in the last 15 years). I have an opportunity to move "back home" where my family and my lifelong friends are. The job would be good enough, though certainly not as great as my current one. Wife works remotely so it doesn't matter for her. That's a major bonus as I make this consideration. This is a tough one, moving for personal/family desires vs. a better work environment. I'd actually be downgrading my work life. And we're not unhappy where we live, just not thriving and it isn't long term for us.

78 points by SREinSF 7y ago

Someone once said, "A one-way trip to Mars would actually be okay if it had smoking-hot Wi-Fi." Do you think that the Internet has made people feel more content, wherever they are?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Broken_Hippo 7y ago
I think that is a mixed bag. I think it is really easy to feel objectively worse about your surroundings because if you are poor, you more easily see how much your are missing. You are continually surrounded by images of folks who have enough space, who are lucky enough to own a place, whose place looks clean when they clean (you can't always clean the cockroaches away nor paint away the dingy walls). But on the other hand, you are more likely to be able to keep in touch with people. You are more likely to have some entertainment without leaving the house. You are more likely to be able to fix the loose table leg with the basic, cheap tools that you have or mend your clothes if you need really need to. When I was poorer, I would eat cheaper food to be able to afford internet just because it could distract me from my life. If you are lucky enough to have some weed as well, it makes for a much more comfortable life, even if imperfect. (Weed/hash makes me more OK with what I have and I can generally afford it before I could afford a monthly, steady rise in general household bills). In other words: Only if you have a certain life satisfaction in the beginning. I think the quote about mars is more indicative of the entertainment and communication that the internet brings and its innate ability to help time pass more quickly.
- sysbin 7y ago
  I’m not sure about that. A lot of friends from poor families that couldn’t get out are turning to suicide or the drugs that will lead them to it eventually. This era is likely the worse one for the poor.
  - Broken_Hippo 7y ago
    I did mention weed/hash, and explained the effects it has on life. Alcoholism is an option, but harder drugs generally are more expensive. A lot of poor folks don't do drugs simply because they can't afford them. IIRC, poor folks do drugs at the same rate as better off folks, though. Sometimes you are more likely to get caught because of the situations you use them in... plus the businessman has more to lose so tends to be more secluded unless you are trusted. As far as worse, I don't know, man. The depression was pretty bad. The 1800's were pretty bad. The US is worse than Norway, just because of the lack of safety net, and both of these places are better than anywhere facing near-famine or actual active war. And so on. It is really hard to say, "worse".
    - sysbin 7y ago
      There will always be people somewhere around the world that are suffering from famine or living in extreme poverty. I’ve noticed in the USA specifically from where I grew up (that wasn’t a huge city), that all friends from families that were not well off have an even harder time leaving parents. Even the lower middle class people seem to nowadays stay with parents until late 20s and even with decent degrees; so they can afford a home. Upper class has parents that are loaning a couple hundred grand to their kids to purchase a home. The poor are aware of their situation more so because of the internet and see no escape contrary to the previous generations. I disagree about access to drugs from affordability. Somehow there is always a way from what I’ve observed.
    - throwaway0x69AF 7y ago
      > Alcoholism is an option, but harder drugs generally are more expensive. Are you sure? In my experience, a tab of acid costs $5-10, and the effects last about 5 hours. That's way cheaper than alcohol. [1] shows a breakdown of cost per hour for a bunch of drugs I've never touched, and most of them look to be pretty cheap under this metric. Compared to movies, sitting around in coffee shops, etc., they're remarkably cheaper than a lot of legal forms of entertainment. [1] https://www.addictionresource.net/blog/cost-of-illegal-drugs/ https://www.addictionresource.net/blog/cost-of-illegal-drugs...
kryptiskt 7y ago
The interplanetary internet will not be smoking hot with latencies counted in minutes. I guess we will need another protocol too, at least for the CDNs.
- adrianN 7y ago
  https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ebelding/courses/595/s04_dtn/papers/TCP-Planet.pdf https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ebelding/courses/595/s04_dtn/pape... and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

technick 7y ago

As a remote worker, I would move to the cheapest area while still collecting big city money. Sadly I'm sitting on a future gold mine that I won't sell until it triples in value, which it's half way there in under 3 years of ownership.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
As a remote worker, I've done this. Mixed bag. Rural Alberta is far cheaper than, say, Vancouver, but it also means I'm married to the remote gig. Freelancing is an option, but that's very hard remotely -- in-person networking is effective, as is word of mouth, and that's hard to get a timezone away -- and it leaves me beholden to my current job.

xfour 7y ago

In California you have Prop 13 causing people to stay put. If you bought a house anywhere close to the coast more than 6 years ago you’ve likely seen 50-100% in value increase. Therefore if you move you’d pay that same increase proportionally in property tax. In addition you have 6% Realtors fees to sell plus staging and being out of the house for open houses etc. the math just doesn’t add up.

grandmczeb 7y ago
Rent control has a similar effect as well.
- skohan 7y ago
  Yes I live in an European capital with fairly strong rent control, and a competitive housing market, and everyone I know is pretty convinced they will die in their current apartment.
Hydraulix989 7y ago
This is a rather unique situation that only benefits a small fraction of people in the US. The article is mostly focusing on trends in the American midwest, and the effects of people being priced out of superstar cities and forced to stay where they are where the CoL is still reasonable because they did not get in on the bubbly pyramid scheme soon enough.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> 6% realtors fee I have a feeling that will get automated away in the next 5-10 years something fierce. More than it already is being by Redfin, etc. Realtors don’t deserve more than $25-40/hr in most cases, let alone 6% of my home value.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Wouldn't you want to say "My Zillow prediction is $1.2 million, you get 20% of any more than that if you sell by June but only this low rate otherwise"? Anyone with true ability would take the deal. Aligning the incentives etc. If you flatrate it, they don't have an incentive to find you a big buyer.

dzhiurgis 7y ago

Surely remote working has had at least some impact?

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Probably not as much as needing to stay close to family for childcare. Childcare is hella expensive.
- leethargo 7y ago
  Or insufficient / unsatisfying. In Berlin, the day care is paid by the city for all children older than 1 year. But I still plan to move away (to the countryside) to be closer to family, regardless of financial benefits.
  - PunchTornado 7y ago
    that may work for some people. I prefer to not pay for other people's childcare costs.

nonford150 7y ago

If you sell your house you have to move farther out from the city to afford something nice.

someguydave 7y ago

The US is an aging nation. Old people don't move. For millennial, they have a tough starting position and a long time to wait until the corporate hierarchies above them clear out from the surplus of boomer management. It makes sense that they must "wait their turn" for a longer time than in the past.

rchaud 7y ago
The boomer management you refer to were likely the elite of their time, as they could afford to get an advanced degree when it wasn't common. These days you need a Bachelor's for just about any entry-level office job. There aren't enough jobs for all the degree-holders out there. That's why higher education gets hit with the "scam" allegations. They're selling a vision of higher lifetime incomes that was true 25 years ago.

pontifier 7y ago

Real estate is so overpriced now, and so difficult to purchase that it's no wonder that people want to stay where they are once they find a place that they can actually afford. It almost feels like the choices are stay or be homeless. I recently decided to move to a new state on the other side of the country, purely because of the low cost of real estate there. It feels like the tipping point was recently reached, and having zero opportunity to have the place I wanted in Utah or California, pushed me to look elsewhere. Elsewhere being Arkansas.

trianglem 7y ago
You found it hard to find a cheap place in Utah?
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Real estate in Utah is very expensive now by local standards.
- pontifier 7y ago
  Yes. The difference in price is truly unbelievable. I had to call the agent to make sure they hadn't left a zero off of the asking price. Equivalent places I was looking at in Utah were going to cost several million dollars.
  - drewmate 7y ago
    Your story sounds like those of Californians who moved to Utah a decade ago. Before you know it, people in Little Rock coffee shops will be complaining about the influx of Utahns selling their modest West Jordan homes to buy mansions in Arkansas. Utah has remained a hidden gem for years, but external market pressures are driving up prices, and supply is surprisingly constrained by the local geography (mountains and bodies of water constricting available land in the SLC metro.) Utah doesn't enjoy the same wide open space of many inland states, at least in the developed areas where people want to live.
  - Excel_Wizard 7y ago

freddie_mercury 7y ago

Moving isn't always a good thing. Maybe in the past it simply represented high search costs. The only way an Okie could find out if California was the right home for them was to pack up and actually move there. You get to Sacramento and decide that's not right for you, so a year later you move to Fresno. Nowadays you go online and can research local economies, local hiring, local real estate, local churches, etc. You're more likely to move fewer times.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

drewmate 7y ago

I'm kind of surprised the article didn't mention the role of dual-income households. For generations, a single income was the norm and generally able to provide a better quality of life (by standards like home size, discretionary spending, etc...) than your parents' generation. Over time, two incomes went from providing far more than a family needed to being a practical necessity in many markets. I can't imagine buying the type of home I'd like to live in on even my relatively high (by national standards) Bay Area salary alone, and yet many families still choose to live here. Once a family relies on two incomes just to pay the rent, it becomes harder to pick up and move to a different part of the country unless both partners can do it at the same time. Even intra-county moves are more difficult when two partners are working full-time and don't want to deal with the stresses of moving on top of their regular jobs. Maybe the pendulum will swing back as a result of changing expectations (about where to live, how much home to buy, what kind of job you need to have), or maybe remote work will save us all and let us move out of the expensive areas where our jobs are. But for now, I think the rise of the dual-income household is among the biggest factors keeping us in place.

sturgill 7y ago
I saw this play out several times when I lived in NYC. Many friends would hit that point where kids were now a consideration and one of the partner’s was ready to transition to a new job. They’d talk about moving, and usually the spouse in a transition phase was ready to go elsewhere. But rarely were both spouses ready to go at the same time. This isn’t a normative statement, but two income families are inherently less mobile (absent one spouse working remotely). It’s a world of trade offs...
mdorazio 7y ago
On top of this, once you're reliant on two incomes to pay the bills and you want to have kids, you're also dependent on your local support network (often parents) to raise your family. I have several friends who can't move because either one of them would have to stop working to take care of the kids or they would have to pay a near equivalent amount for a nanny.
bko 7y ago
> I'm kind of surprised the article didn't mention the role of dual-income households The number of single/no earner households has actually increased since 1980. If you look at Table H-12. Household by Number of Earners by Median and Mean Income [0], you'll see in 1980 the percentage of households that have 2+ earners was ~44%, and now its ~40% and has steadily decreased over that time. I made it into a google sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vm8d-XTuGu_ilbK0xn_rlyCN151cMmv9YKzp9dHK8s8/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vm8d-XTuGu_ilbK0xn_r... [0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

VLM 7y ago

Consider mergers, aside from the very small number of people working in coastal tech jobs, its not like an insurance guy working in Des Moines at an insurance company HQ can consider moving to, perhaps, Milwaukee Wisconsin, because due to endless mergers there is less competition meaning fewer jobs meaning fewer jobs to move to. On the opposite side, if you've got a contractor / gig job, other than the weather during the commute, it doesn't really matter if you move to a new city. You might have to move inside a city for demographic socioeconomic change reasons. Outside very few fields temporarily, the job market is efficient and being a car salesman in kentucky isn't any better than being a car salesman in rhode island, other than very general stuff like weather and quality of life and affordability is somewhat better away from the coasts and similar things probably not worth moving for.

paulcole 7y ago
>being a car salesman in kentucky isn't any better than being a car salesman in rhode island Have you worked as a car salesman in either of those places?

PascLeRasc 7y ago

I want to move, so badly. It's been my singular goal for over a year now and I've cut back my spending nearly entirely except for rent+groceries to try to save up enough to do so, and I've sold most of my belongings to save more and make the eventual move easier. Moving is what I think about when I wake up and before I go to sleep. I have severe seasonal affective disorder and pretty bad driving anxiety. I've seen mental health professionals for both of these and everyone's just said I should move. I have cognitive techniques for both of these that help a little, and been recommended medications to help, but really the solution is to move and be car-free. On days where I don't have to drive and it's above 65F outside, I genuinely feel like a totally different person. The only place in the US where you can be a first-class citizen without a car and feel the sun every day is San Francisco. It's a nice bonus that SF is a fantastic place to be a hardware engineer too. I've been on a plan of sending out 10-15 applications every week for about a year and have at least 1 phone interview each week. I've been in the interview pipeline with around 60 companies over the past year, and so far received zero offers. Usually it's "we're looking for someone already local". If it ever happens, getting a job in SF and moving there will have been the hardest thing I've ever done. My bank account is at $13k now, so once it hits $20k I'm just going to risk it and move without a job.

turk73 7y ago
You going to live in a closet or what? The amount you have saved up seems insufficient to take on a HCOL area. Any hardware gigs in Austin or RTP? I kind of think your specialty is being globalized out of existence in the US, but I don't follow that area much, so I could be speaking out of turn on that. Also, what is "driving anxiety?" Does that mean you're a bad driver? How about a Skip Barber school?
rubidium 7y ago
If you want sun and warmth you should do San Diego, not San Fran.
- nwvg_7257 7y ago
  Agreed. I am also carless, but I wouldn't want to move to San Fran. as it's much too expensive. You should for sure consider other places in Cali. like San Diego, which has perfectly good public transit, but I would also consider the DC area, Austin, Chapel Hill (free and frequent bus service), etc.

trowawayfornow 7y ago

Oh man, I'm going through a real mental tug-of-war with myself right now about a potential move. In my late 30s, married, newborn. I have an incredible job right now in almost every way. But we live in an area that neither of us love, right at the time we are finally thinking about actually putting down roots (I've moved a lot in the last 15 years). I have an opportunity to move "back home" where my family and my lifelong friends are. The job would be good enough, though certainly not as great as my current one. Wife works remotely so it doesn't matter for her. That's a major bonus as I make this consideration. This is a tough one, moving for personal/family desires vs. a better work environment. I'd actually be downgrading my work life. And we're not unhappy where we live, just not thriving and it isn't long term for us.