9 Things You Must Consider Before Making That Move

At some point in your life, you will likely contemplate moving to another city or state to start a new job opportunity.

You will wonder if you’re making the right choice–the right move–so to speak. While it’s true that you can never truly know what a job is like until you do it for a while, you can do your due diligence and find out as much as you can about the position. More importantly, you should find out as much as you can about the new city you will soon call home.

Here are nine (9) things I learned on my own journey of having moved some 10 times in last 15 years. For the purposes of this article, we shall assume you found out as much as you can about the new position and have accepted it based on that research. The focus of this article is whether you want to move to the city where the job is located.

Facebook Groups Are Good

But only to a certain extent because of the way admins in some groups tend to manipulate and censor information to paint their town as idyllic. I’ll use an example from my own life.

In 2008, I moved to Ridgecrest, CA, to start work as a research and development engineer for the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station.

I’ve since moved to Silicon Valley but maintain my connection and ties with Ridgecrest through the Facebook community group.

Recently, someone had asked why engineers keep leaving the base. Most of the people in the Ridgecrest Facebook Page claim that the city of 24,000 in the middle of the high desert is a wonderful place to raise children because the crime is low. Children can ride their bikes and play outside without worrying about traffic as it is non-existent.

Concerns about crime naturally came up as people started responding. Likewise, I did the same.

While it is true that Ridgecrest has less cars on the roads, which means children can more safely ride their bikes or play, it is not true that crime is low. I pointed out that the crime index in Ridgecrest is 26, according to NeighborhoodScout.com. By comparison, other cities like Thousand Oaks, CA, has a crime index of 45. The higher the index, the safer that city is.

The level of poverty in the City of Ridgecrest is shocking. The Ridgecrest City Leaders juke the stats by hiding a lot of the grit from its citizens as it wants to paint Ridgecrest as an idyllic place. You need only drive on Church St. from Downs to China Lake Blvd to see parts of the town are quite run down and sketchy.

I also pointed out that people being too scared to move out of the city for worry of crime are making the wrong conclusion, as I did when I moved to the Bay Area to start a job.

Additionally, I pointed out that I had hit a glass ceiling working at the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station. The leadership tends to promote people who look like them (white).

This lack of equal opportunity became a sore point, and the leadership soon started an Asian American activism group so as to help Asian Americans network and increase their chances of getting promoted to the SES level.

You can guess what happened to my opinion when I posted this to the Ridgecrest Facebook page. It was deleted within minutes! I protested and the admins say that if I didn’t like how they ran the group then I could leave. Needless to say, I haven’t posted anything since then.

The point I am making is simple. You cannot trust community pages to tell the truth. This was the case with the Ridgecrest Facebook page. It’s run by people not affiliated with the base or the city. Yet, they censor the truth behind what life is truly like, both in the city and working for the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station.

When I challenged them about the censorship, you can imagine they didn’t like it.

Even the people who maintain the community page want to paint the City of Ridgecrest as an idyllic, safe little city in the middle of the high desert. They refuse to face the truth, that the poverty level is high. Meth is a major problem. There is only one major employer, and it’s the government.

Spouses of engineers who have moved to Ridgecrest have remarked time and again the difficulty of finding a job outside of the Base. Some husbands I know who work on the Base have left after a year of gainful employment simply because their wives cannot find jobs in the city.

All these warts do not show up in the Ridgecrest Facebook page.

So be wary of Facebook groups. You should always be looking at multiple sources of information instead of relying of a sole source upon which to base your decision. Be wary of people who paint a pretty pictures. Every city is fucked up to some extent. It’s up to us to decide how we want to deal with the fuck-ups, not some do-gooder, admin in a Facebook group.

Even then, you have no guarantee that the same group of people who censor information and silent dissenters on the Facebook group is not doing the same on Reddit and other websites.

The best thing to do is visit the city if you can. Driving through the city will tell you a lot:

The physical appearance of its citizens will tell you how active the city is and how happy they are. If you can, talk to many different types of people to get their take on living there.

Chat up business owners to get their opinions of life in the city. While you’re in the shops, you might even find other locals frequenting that place of business with which you can talk.

Of course, it’s not the end of the world. You can always just move after a year or two anyway. So, it may not really matter if you end up disliking the new city.

Cost-of-Living

Cost of living is another prime concern. You want to make sure you can afford housing and food, along with entertainment and living while you work. After all, you work to live, not live to work.

As a general rule of thumb, you should spend less than 30% of your income on housing. Any more and you should seriously reconsider moving unless the benefits far outweigh the negativity. Likewise, if your plan is to gain some experience and leave within several years, then spending 30% or more on housing may be of little concern to you.

The easiest way to find out how expensive rent is in your target city is to use CraigsList.org and check out the prices. You can also use apartment rental sites to figure out the asking price for rent. Realtors not only want to sell you houses, they have clients who are looking to rent out property, too. Ask them to get an idea on rental prices. This helps you in negotiating a salary, too.

You might even have to get roommates in order to make the rent. Is this something you want to do? It may be hard, especially if you come from living in a house.

Find out about other things, like gas prices and tax rates. You might be used to paying x-dollars for food, only to find the same item to be much more expensive in the new city. If you need massages because of back problems, you may find it to be more expensive in the new place. Factor the cost of food and amenities into your budget.

Likewise, you’d like the ability to save money and build up an emergency fund for life’s unexpected emergencies.

Climate

Can you live in a city where the summer highs are 107 F for 45 days straight, then 95 F for the next 60 days? Where the winter lows are -20 F?

Climate matters, even if you plan to spend the majority of time indoors. You still want to enjoy nature or go out and do things. A harsh climate will make it less likely for you to enjoy life.

For me, living in the harsh, high desert of Ridgecrest (elevation: 2230 feet) meant it felt hotter in the summer time because of less UV protection from the sun. This also mean burning myself on my car’s interior after it’s been baking in the sun all day long when I leave work to go home.

But the worst was the non-stop, incessant wind. Even though it had the benefit of keeping the desert “cooler” in the summer time (it would still be 85 F at 11:30 in the evening), the wind was tiresome. You had to be careful when opening your car door, or the wind could tear door off its hinges.

Would you be able to deal with nuisances like this? How would you feel if you had to shovel snow from your sidewalk after every major storm because it was a city ordinance? Have you ever lived with hurricanes? Even though people fear earthquakes, they are infrequent events. Hurricanes, on the other hand, occur with higher frequency and can wipe out everything you own in a heartbeat.

How about long periods of cold or nine months of almost daily rain? Take the climate into consideration before you make the move.

Healthcare

Having access to good healthcare is another point of consideration as you think about moving for a new job. Outside of general physicians (and I would argue they have much room for improvement), Ridgecrest has little access to quality healthcare. I had to drive 2+ hours, one-way, to Loma Linda Medical University or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles so that I can have access to specialists. Ridgecrest had very little specialists or they would only come to the office once a week, which meant huge backlogs in wait times, like waiting for 3 months before you could be seen. It was oftentimes quicker to just drive down south those 2+ hours so as to see them in a week or two.

Depending on your health situation, this may or may not matter to you. But life rarely happens as we planned. I certainly didn’t plan on needing specialists, but I did. Driving 2+ hours, one-way, by myself while in pain, discomfort, or just sick certainly was not part of the plan. But such is life.

This is easy to research. Just type “doctors” and “hospitals” into Google Maps and see what turns up. My general rule of thumb is if the city only has a hospital and very few specialists, it means the doctors will not be able to practice medicine competently. This would make me very leery about moving to the place.

Likewise, you can look on forums and Facebook group to see what people are asking when they talk about medical care. Do they openly disparage the city for having lack of access to medical health care? Do they ask where they can find a specialist, only to have the majority of people responding suggesting going out of town?

Food

If you’re a foodie, then having access to many types of food will matter to you. You might be a boba fan, love Japanese food, a connoisseur of Korean cuisine, enjoy pizzas and hamburgers, like Mexican, or just want Chinese food regularly.

Again, Google Maps is your friend. Typing “food” into Google Maps, I saw mainly fast food places appearing in the City of Ridgecrest. There are only two Thai restaurants, two Chinese restaurants, two Japanese restaurants, and zero Korean joints, and six Mexican places.

If the quality and quantity matters to you, then you might not want to move to that city. After all, a big part of life is the enjoyment of life itself.

Commute

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey, the average American spent 26.9 minutes in traffic. Over 14 million people spent over an hour traveling to work in 2017.

Personally, I hate traffic with a passion. I think it’s the greatest time drain in the world. Before you move, research how long it would take you to commute to and from work during rush hour. Again, this is easily done with Google Maps driving directions. On the Desktop version, you can pick what day and time you want to travel and Google will give you its best guess based on historical data.

The commute to work in Ridgecrest took just 7 minutes. It was and still is the shortest commute I’ve ever had. Nowadays, working in the Silicon Valley it takes me anywhere from 18 to 40 minutes to get home from work, depending on when I leave. As a result, I’ve had to shift when I got to work and when I leave work. You may not always have the option of choosing when you start work.

Crime

Crime is a strong consideration when you uproot yourself from a place of relative comfort to new surroundings. This is where sites like Neighborhood Scout are really useful.

Asking folks local to the area in which you want to move could also work. But again, be aware that if you go on Facebook groups, as in the example of the Ridgecrest Facebook group, that some people will manipulate and censor the information to make their town look better than it actually is.

This comes in part from desperation as they need more people to move to the town in order to justify certain city expenses, like improving parks or bringing more chain stores in to town.

It may also be that they are drinking the Kool-Aid, believing what the city leaders tell them.

Culture

In general, denizens in small towns tend to be more xenophobic and culturally ignorant of other races while large cities more open to different cultures and races of people. A homogeneous population means you’ll see less variation in, well, everything.

Going back to the food factor, you can tell just how diverse a city’s population is by the diversity in restaurants. Of course, you can also pull up this information with the U.S. Census Bureau.

The “danger” in moving to a city with a large homogeneous population is that majority tends to favor its own. This bias is unconscious and they may not even be aware they are doing this. They just have too little exposure to people outside of who they are used to interacting with.

As a result, they experience a type of unconscious cognitive bias, meaning they have certain stereotypes about certain people. This is reinforced because of how they look at things in turn color how things look back at them. For example, you first meet someone and talk about a particular topic. Later, when you see this person again, the two of you tend to talk about the same thing. You have effectively set the tone of future interactions with that first contact.

This bias will affect your ability to move around laterally within the company or find new jobs with another company.

Activities for Children

If you have children, then you’ll want to make sure the city has plenty of things for them to do. In Ridgecrest, people have the mistaken belief that it’s a wonderful place to raise children. Yet, when you ask them what exactly they mean, all they can say is that they can play outside without getting run over by a car.

Yet, there is more than traffic that makes a city a good place to raise a family. What kinds of opportunities are out there for them? Are there museums for them to visit and pique their interests in various topics? How about clubs you can take them to so that they can experience different things? This will spark ideas in your younguns on what they want to be when they grow up.

Are there after-school activities to keep them out of trouble? How about the culture and diversity? One day, they’ll have to join the workforce and learn how to deal and work with people from all sorts of backgrounds. Living in a small city like Ridgecrest will only provide a narrow view in the long run.

Conclusion

To recap, these are the nine (9) things you should consider or do before taking the plunge and moving to a new city:

• Check social media to get a feel for the city.
• Cost-of-living
• Climate
• Access to quality healthcare
• Diversity of food
• How long is the commute
• Crime statistics
• Cultural diversity
• Activities for children

This is but of course a short list in a long list of other factors that aren’t covered here but may also be important to you. For starters, they are good to take into consideration as you contemplate a move.

You can also use this list to help you decide moves in retirement or for any other reasons.