Moving two hours north to country/rural area temporarily to save $50k+ for a couple years

I guess the other aspect that matters, especially with an infant-soon-to-be-toddler, is what will the access to medical care look like?

How far will you or your wife need to go to get to a decent pediatrician?

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Unsure on “decent” but we did a quick google maps search and found some stuff nearby. The hospital is 24 minutes away (15 miles). Certainly was one of our biggest concerns. I think a hospital within 20-30 minutes is doable. Right now, the hospital is 1/2 mile from us.

I think this is something to be considerate of but not a huge deal. We live in the city and while there are probably 50 peds within 1 mile of us we go 10 miles to see our ped because we specifically chose her.

That said we haven’t seen her in 9 months because…kids are resilient and a healthy kid is usually healthy. I’m sure ER visits are possible, but they’re extremely unlikely.

i can’t believe it took 31 replies to get to this comment. rent it for your 2-5 year timeframe, or at least start off renting it to see if it’s going to work as a full time home. the con is maybe the auntie raises rent, but hopefully she will give you a family hookup and keep it steady. maybe you can negotiate the rent to be PITI for the full time you’re there or maybe start at PITI and 1% increase annually?

my overall opinion is DO IT! you have portable jobs and a little kid that’s not in school yet. get her outdoors. having raised a kid in a congested area of a big city, i wish i had the flexibility to just walk out the door with her, breathe the air and watch the wildlife run around.

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Unfortunately, that’s not possible.

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welp i guess you’re buying it then.

Sure, healthy kids can be resilient but accidents can happen at anytime that no one can control. Depending on the nature of the accident is when people become aware of how important it is to have quick access to emergency services when it’s needed.

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Sorry if it was covered, but does this rural home have good high speed internet? and/or do your jobs not rely on internet?

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My job relies 110% on internet. And that is literally the first thing I thought of, as well as reliable electricity. But then I remember back to 2010-2011 when we lived in an apartment building, downtown, in a city closer to NYC than we are now, and how we got six months of Cablevision service fees back and cancelled the service, because it was so unreliable and the TV service was not usable. So typically, city/suburban services are reliable, but not always.

Just like services in the boonies are sometimes not reliable, but sometimes are.

I have been told by two people who have lived there that the internet service is very reliable with hardly any outages. Also, unsure what T-Mobile’s coverage is, but the coverage map is totally white–signifying no coverage. We do have wifi calling, but I was more interested in possibly using it as a backup hotspot.

I wasn’t defensive, sorry if you took it that way. I had nothing to do with the decision made and was telling the story.

Anyway, like I said it was a reply meant for @Honkinggoose’s response and not meant for you. Let’s drop it at this point.

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OK but do they actually have high speed coverage? I know many rural areas where there is really no high speed options other than satellite and satellite has bandwidth limits and high latency.
Sure the phone may work fine but that doesn’t mean there any LTE.

Sorry to belabor the point, but a friend of mine recently ran into this reality.

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Up to 60 download, yes.

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I’ve already moved on, trust me. Thanks for the insight though.

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You are right that I was assuming a lot. For some reason, I had it in my head that you were in a condo and would have to acquire “outdoor” tools. My mistake. I also didn’t mean to imply that you were moving off grid in Montana. I thought you implied that you’d be in the mountains when you said you’d be in a ski town. I presumed you meant snow skiing.

I did have it in my head, wrongly, that you were a “city boy” and had no clue what you’d be in for, somewhat akin to a young Oliver Douglas moving to Green Acres. As long as you think your wife can handle it, I say go for it. You may even decide to home school and your kid will be forever grateful for a more rural upbringing, except for the teenage years. They aren’t grateful for anything at that age. :slight_smile:

Finally, I wasn’t trying to be dramatic about the snow tires. If so, I would have said something to the effect of you valuing the lives of your wife and child. :scream: Kidding aside, I found services such as snow plowing to be worse in frequency and quality in less urban areas. On the bright side, mail service was significantly better.

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Are there other houses you could rent in the area? Or rather, I can any similar rural area?

Jay, I came from the lower east side of NY. Moving to Dutchess was great for my family ,BUT you have to consider these points. Most newer condos/homes are all electric. My heating bill in the winter months (Oct-May) is about 800.00 and that is with keeping bedroom and a den closed. The ice and snow will keep you indoors days at a time and the refreezing after dark is very dangerous.The refreezing can go on for weeks. hard to MS lots of days. Manhattan will be dry and cold, but here it is icy and wet. Many days each winter I cant make it to the Metro North Station due to icy and very hilly roads. But the scenery is beautiful. The colors are just like a picture book.this past week. But the taxes here are not too high. CT taxes, just over the border from me (new MiIlford/Sherman etc) are higher. gas prices are lower here too compared to lower westchester. 2.47-2.49 now.

Just throwing this out there as something to shoot down. If both you and your wife WFH and can do it anywhere, why stay in NYS and instead move to a much lower COL area? I’m assuming you don’t have to commute in for meetings or stay local. You mentioned having family nearby within two hours and that’s definitely something of value if you visit them more than a couple times a year. Travel expenses could go way up if you have to visit frequently, but there are a lot of rural areas of the country with very cheap COL where you could save a lot of money if your job doesn’t depend on you living in NYS. Plus you can save a lot on state taxes.

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A bit of an update from this thread, many personal conversations, etc…

We have decided to stay put. Here’s the breakdown of the numbers for both situations until Dec 2019 (2 years roughly):

Equity in condo: $40-50k~
Additional cash savings from now to Dec 2019: $103k~

Equity in mountain house: $40k~
Additional cash savings from now to Dec 2019: $120k~

For $17k, is it really worthwhile to up my whole family, live in isolation for 2-3 years? Probably not. And we came to that conclusion based on many perspectives, possible plan failures, etc. On the surface, it’s a great idea from a financial perspective. However, once you realize we basically lose most/all equity we have in our condo just to sell it, the first year of “savings” is cancelled out by recouping that money from the transaction cost of selling the condo. Sure, we would instantly have $30k~ of equity in the mountain house via our down payment, but that is so subjective that it’s hard to quantify. Being conservative me, I view that equity as a junk number that can’t be relied upon.

If in the end (just two years), we only end up with an extra $17k in savings (without doing renovations to the mountain house), how is it worthwhile?

Thank you all.

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Seems weird that the difference is only $17k unless some of your earlier numbers were not accurate. You will “lose” the equity to transaction fees either way once you decide to sell the condo whether it is this now, 2 years or many years from now so that really is a sunk cost unless you decide to stay in the condo forever.

That said it is good you found a solution that works for you and moving a family is definitely no fun.

I guess that’s the only quantifiable number, right? I can’t predict what the house will be valued at 2-3 years from now. We have to sink $30k into that as a down payment for a conventional 20% down on $150k price, right? So, while I can use a HELOC to get access to that equity, all I can quantify is that I’ll have about $20k in transaction costs on the sale of our condo (give or take). So I wipe out the equity in the condo and walk with nothing (let’s assume), then I dump $30k into the house. If we wanted to keep the house after we moved out, we wouldn’t have recouped that $30k cash.

So the way I see it is, after we purchase and move (twice-in/out), we have nowhere near $48k savings over two years. Here’s my math (very rough):

Down payment: (30000)
Moving costs: (2500)
Year 1 savings: 24000
Year 2 savings: 24000
Net: 15500

Appliances: (4000)
New flooring upstairs: (2000)
New bathroom: (3000)
Net: 6500

So either we don’t do any renovations, and end up with about $16,000 extra saved over two years (cash), or we do renovations and end up with an extra $6500 saved over two years, but with a bit nicer of a home to rent out eventually.

None of the above accounts for a possible decrease in auto insurance for two years, an increase in HVAC, etc.

ETA: the real savings here would be after year two. If we stayed for years three and four, we’d probably have much closer (or even more than) the original $50k number I was eyeballing.