Looking for a major lifestyle change

[unix]

Sick to death of living in Wash. DC metro area with a perpetual feeling of going nowhere. I am supposed to be grateful because "I have a job" but somehow I am not, I want something more than that.

First, the RE prices are exorbitant,   I don't see how I will *ever* afford real estate without going into major debt for decades, something that is against my "religion".  I suppose I could but I don't really want to, or have to. I have zero debt at the moment.

Second, the 9-5 thing doesn't really appeal to me for the rest of my life. Many reasons for that, the latest straw is my 2 year old - I am not spending as much time with him as I would like. Daycare, etc. don't appeal to me. I feel like I am being penny wise and pound foolish.

Third, the climate. Having lived in the South for so long  I still cannot adjust to the weather.  Just too hot and humid for me in the summer. And I like real winter with real snow that doesn't melt.

I want to get a few acres, get out of the rental slavery which is bleeding me heavily, build a house to my specs. I found a great contractor who can give me great prices.  I feel that being in my 30's I am ready for this change and ready to build something permanent instead of moving every few years. (Which too has some benefits vs. being owned by a house). Just to reiterate, we are in the middle of a major Depression  with no sign of it ending. So the issue here is building some kind of shelter to withstand a financial hit. Plainly put, if I lose this FTE engagement   I have, I will go down like Titanic or faster. I have no plan B, no alternatives. Just no idea what to do.

After interacting with people living in rural areas I noticed that many of them don't have any 'money' but own property. Maybe it's an illusion but even those who work for min wage have more assets and a higher quality of life than I do. I am on this treadmill, working as hard as I can just to keep my head above the water. I don't even feel like middle class anymore. You need to make way more than 100K in major metro areas to even consider buying a house and that cannot happen even theoretically.

I want to move to some northestern place, rural or semi-rural, maybe Vermont or NH and  telecommute.
The whole project hinges on the ability to bring in 'money' from the outside. I assume the local economy has no jobs. Working at Home Depot for 9 bucks an hour won't make ends meet - anywhere.

I also have a feeling I am setting myself up for a major catastrophy as I have little experience with marketing. It seems the whole thing depends on marketing and the ability to find new projects and I am mediocre at best. I am also painfully aware that a job that can be outsourced to Vermont for 25 tokens/hour can be outsourced to you-know-where for even less.

What's not encouraging is talking to people who have BTDT and they ultimately could not make it work and came back to the cubicle world.  I just cannot believe this is damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. Whatever change happens, it needs to encompass a lot more than the financial bottom line. Time is also a commodity.

[Dennis Nedry]

This post resonates with me because I'm experiencing some of the same ideas around the tradeoffs in career/location.

You are renting, you should now consider buying, and taking advantage of the price benefits you now have.  Washington DC is a place where real estate prices are going to stay high because there is so much Government Tax money sloshing around there.

My thoughts are to create an internet business not dependent on location, and move somewhere where housing is very inexpensive.  And maybe in a small city with a large college campus so you can still enjoy some cultural benefits, and maybe some big time sports venues.  I would do this but the irony in my own situation is my wife insists on living in an area that is in the top 100 most expensive real estate area in the U.S.  Go figure, and divorce is NOT an option.  So I've created multiple streams of income to support this.

Unix, I'd say you are on the right track with your goals.  You should organize your goals, create a life vision, and implement it.  I also read some limiting beliefs in your statment, and you should work on clearing those.  i.e. "You need to make way more than 100K in major metro areas to even consider buying a house and that cannot happen even theoretically".  Making more than 100K can and does happen.  I know many people that make 100K or more per month.  And they are no smarter than you are, they just own businesses.

[I D Shukhov]

Unix, I'm not sure where you live in the D.C. area, but if it's convenient you may want to check out http://www.meetup.com/Older-Software-Engineers/  Forget about the experience requirement.  It will be mostly about career refactoring.

[David Randolph]

Computer work is a "services" business. That means that the income we make is dependent on the income of those whom we service. That means that in a low income area such as a rural location, either we have to be willing to live on that lower income or work to provide services to people outside of that rural area.

 

The other side of that is that being a service, the selling is dependent on personal contacts. That means that we need to have ways for people to contact us and feel as though we are "near enough" for them to give us business. That can be done through virtual contacts, but it takes a lot of work. It may also need physical meetings.

 

This is why that even though I would love to move to northern New Mexico in the mountains, I am living in the Dallas area. That rural area would not have the income base to support me in computer work and I would need to have strong virtual connections to the rest of the country in order to have an income. It also means that I need to be very proactive in making marketing contacts to my prospect base.

[unix]

Unix, I'm not sure where you live in the D.C. area, but if it's convenient you may want to check out http://www.meetup.com/Older-Software-Engineers/ Forget about the experience requirement. It will be   mostly about career refactoring.

I am 30 minutes away...

[jedi]

The job market is pretty good in southern california- I found a nice Oracle Apps DBA job here in Orange County. Unix jobs are in demand here. The weather is perfect sunshine. Traffic is bad but just about every major city has bad traffic. Yes, its expensive here but so is Chicago, New York, DC and SF. I have lived for past 6 years in first San Diego and now Irvine. -jedi PS: plus we have no bad weather that is, no sub-zero arctic winters nor humid summers.

[peligro]

Yes there ARE jobs in so cal, but given the cost of living and supporting a family, you need to have a household income of $200k minimum to have anything resembling a middle class life.  And at $200k you'll still have a hard time saving for retirement.  Really.  I am not exaggerating.

For someone like the OP, who wants to get out from under and is a hands-on techie (not an executive), I'd say avoid so cal like the plague.

[unixwindmill]

Sick to death of living in Wash. DC metro area with a perpetual feeling of going nowhere. I am supposed to be grateful because "I have a job" but   somehow I am not, I want something more than that.  
 
  First, the RE prices are exorbitant, I don't see how I will *ever* afford real estate without going into major debt for decades, something that is   against my "religion". I suppose I could but I don't really want to, or have to. I have zero debt at the moment.  
 
  [...]  
 
  After interacting with people living in rural areas I noticed that many of them don't have any 'money' but own property. Maybe it's an   illusion but even those who work for min wage have more assets and a higher quality of life than I do. I am on this treadmill, working as hard as I can just   to keep my head above the water. I don't even feel like middle class anymore. You need to make way more than 100K in major metro areas to even consider   buying a house and that cannot happen even theoretically.

I see two related issues. 1) Rental slavery. 2) Can I afford to move to the mountains.

The best time to try this is if we were born in the 1940s rather than the 1970s. The postwar economy was subsidized up the yinyang with lots of money going into research, education, and military. We spent on the assumption WW3 would occur within 40 years. You could afford to get married and have kids much earlier and buy a starter house before age 25. It was a different time when high school grads could go to a factory and support an entire family by himself without worrying about being made redundant. Heck, the US government wasted money on sending men to the moon. Now you need a BA to get a living wage at a job that might go to India next month and even a Ph.D isn't a guaranteed meal ticket anymore.

In our generation, the fall of the Berlin Wall ended so all those juicy aerospace and defense jobs vaporized when we left college. Reagan outspent the USSR and put them out of business. Good jobs became quite scarce so the wife has to go work.  There was a jobless recovery until two bubbles came and went.  But the wife still had to work because real estate stopped being affordable.  Or the husband could try to make $200k. Being barely able to support yourself today on $100k doesn't mean you're a loser. Times are very different than they were 30 years ago.

So how to move to the mountains? The short answer is you can't do it unless you can live on minimum wage jobs for reasons others have already stated. You have to cut down your spending, move the family in with your parents, or make more money. Try to get a government job with retiree health benefits and a pension. The pension will help you move to rural mountains at age 55-60 without the need to have a job in the mountains. Even with a small $25k pension, that should be enough in a rural community. I would be wary of relying on virtual connections or telecommute arrangements in the long term because I think anything that's not nailed to the floor will be outsourced to India.  As I said, times are very different today.  Today's job may be in Mumbai tomorrow.

[DarkHumour]

My own theory was that a government or university gig might have more so called job security that working at oppressive corporation #7.  I figured the benefits package might be decent and there would be some extrinsic value with intelligent single people near by.  (I think the only way I'm going to impress/meet women is if I become a rock star or a college professor but I digress).  I only got one call from UDUB while in Seattle.  A lot of positive pump up and then silence (par for the course for information technology).   I've interviewed half a dozen times at different departments at a particular college locally since returning to Chicago in 2007 but I guess I'm the designated runner-up.  I was just shocked they actually were granting me interviews.

I'm working right now but it could all end in March 2010...  (I'd elaborate but the politics of the situation are grunted/whispered around here.)

I've had no faith in working a so called full time white collar job because layoffs are so frequent and rewards are few...  I tend to think that working several crappy jobs may actually have more long term stability in lieu of anything resembling benefits or increase in pay.  Who is going to import someone for $10 an hour scut work? Well, not yet anyway.

These theories and ideas will be in my book Future Shock 2 - electric boogaloo.

As another poster suggested I think moving to a college town might be the way to go.  Just avoid the housing orbit around the university as those rental prices border on extortion.  If you can stand >> colder winters and overwhelming blandness you could look into towns in the center of Illinois-Indiana-Ohio.   Urbana/Springfield, Lafayette / Indianapolis, Dayton/Columbus.

Or maybe the 'armpit town' that is kind of near a Major city (e.g. Joliet to Chicago.  Tacoma to Seattle.)   You live in that area but commute.  Of course the commuting costs can eat up the savings of living so far away.

What I've learned is that Chicago's crap jobs >>> Seattle's crap jobs.  And if you can't get decent work at your education level then you string together several less than desireable ones.  (The lack of public transportation and the geography made Seattle more difficult to pull off.)  Assembly line labor at "famous video game company" wasn't too bad but it was 25 miles out of town and on a weird shift schedule.  Made it hard to take another job to fill in the hours not working there.

Make sure you choose a state with a high minimum wage as well.. because when there is nothing else there is always day labor (Who rarely pay much above that).

Your mileage may vary...

Meanwhile, I just looked into possibly moving into a trailer home/park to "save" money and get out of the hostel.  Someone had a 1969 trailer home for $3000. (Lot fee $460).  

DarkHumour

[Origisaurus]

In addition to the Indiana-Illinois-Ohio axis, there's Michigan.  UofM, Ann Arbor; Eastern Michigan next door in Ypsilanti; State in East Lansing; Wayne State in Detroit (commuting is easy these days because nobody is working); and my favorite, Michigan Tech in Houghton (it doesn't get very cold there due to large bodies of water nearby, but it snows a lot, a whole lot - most 2-story houses have a stairway outside so you can get out when the snow is piled 10 or 15 feet deep over your first floor doors).

The only one of these that comes near "cosmopolitan" is Detroit.  Yes, good locations in college towns are pricey.

The reason they're called "trailer trash" is that they are dirt poor.  And yes, you can get by pretty well by lowering the cost of a roof over your head.