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We regularly banter back and forth about where our journey will take us next. We very rarely decide on much (decisions are hard!) but we sort of narrow things down in a way to help us aim at a few good options. It’s become a bit of a stickier issue since having X; we’d really like to be closer to family (and I’m sure family would like to be closer to us) but the people I’m related to don’t live anywhere near people who will pay me to work, leaving us with this nasty geographic triangle to contend with:
If you’re wondering where the intersection is, you may have missed the point.
Thing is, there is no perfect place for us, so we’ve been trying to settle on a near-good-enough place that will still make it easy enough to find work, to see family, and to settle down (for a bit anyhow).
We sat down the other day and brainstormed all of the places where we might want to live, if there weren’t really any restrictions, and quickly came up with a list of 14 cities across 7 countries and 4 continents. That got shortlisted quickly, but only down to nine, four and three. Getting beneath that took a lot of chatting, research, and coin flipping.
The biggest decision points ended up being:
- follow the best work opportunities.
- stay put; or move within 3 hours of both folks (by plane).
- a complete lack of interest in learning the nuances of a fourth country.
After restricting things quite a bit the list shrunk to a measly four places. Three of the top four cities were located in western North America, and all three are much more “where the work is” than “where the folks are” but none are anywhere near as far as Paris or Sydney. The surprise fourth option was: “Stay where we are for a bit longer.”
So, now that we have some idea of where to go, I think the ball is back in my court to see what can be done about the work side of things. I think the decision point will be sometime by my birthday, and July or January look like the best time to move for tax reasons. We’ll see what happens.
Allene said:
I gather from talking to Sarah that you guys see Kitchener as pretty low on the list of options, but if I may make a couple points in its favour (besides the obvious “there is a Google office here”), the cost of living is super cheap; it’s within driving distance of a few huge international hub cities (Toronto, Montreal, and NYC); you could easily afford to buy a house here in a short amount of time because real estate prices are still quite comparably low; and Ian and I manage to easily get out West to see family at least twice a year living here, and now that American Airlines has some service leaving from KW airport it might even be easy to get to Reno from here without having to deal with Pearson. Just putting that out there, for mainly selfish reasons.
Good luck with your decision making!!
Dave said:
We talked about Waterloo a lot, mostly for the reasons you mention, and also because originally we’d taken the lower mainland off the table (too wet). But, it ended up getting nixed on account of being quite far away from either grandparent. Also, we have loads of friends/family in the Vancouver region.
That said, you never know. We keep aiming for new cities and missing horribly.
We shot for Toronto, and landed in Waterloo.
London, got us Paris.
Ireland was a huge miss – that’s what brought us to Sydney.