The Doom Room: ILF Edition

[Iommic Pope]

So we have like 2 weeks left in the year (give or take).

What doom records should I have been listening to that I missed -- outside of the really great DR releases from ILFriends that landed around us this year? Both Nadja records were phenomenal, and I really dug the Church of Misery record, but I am super awful at keeping up with the jams of the bevested.

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all that matters:
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[Kacey Y]

We just sold our house, escrow closed yesterday. Our mortgage was way cheaper than rent here, the new owner's mortgage is twice what ours was, but it's gotten too expensive to live here now that we're having kids. Plus the schools suck and crime is nuts. In about a month we're moving out of state and buying a house outright with some savings left over.

that's rad.

my sister in law lives in the bay area and i cannot fathom the cost of living out there. it's just nuts, man.

did you guys figure out where you're moving to already?

Thanks, it was kind of a nerve wracking process and went really fast. We went into escrow 2 weeks after listing the house. It's almost as expensive here as the bay area and this area is a shit hole. We're in driving distance of Monterey, Carmel, Big Sur and all that, but our city is a wasteland culturally (no live music venues, no live music allowed in bars, no book stores, no record stores). Vice wrote an article called it the Youth Murder Capital of California. We had 8 murders on our block at work the 2 months before we moved to a new location.

We're heading to Ohio, looking around the northeast part of the state. We looked at houses online in about 10 different states, looking at all the ratings, statistics, etc. and seeing what we could find in our budget where we could get the most house in the best school district. We're going to rent and just start house hunting immediately (we've got a short list of like 20 houses that are listed right now). My wife and I decided if we didn't like the area we could just take weekend trips to other areas and if we find one good house, we'll just have our stuff in storage moved there.

[D.o.S.]

Obligatory:

[Kacey Y]

I'm fine with it, my part of California is nothing like anyone thinks of California. Apart from no snow and yes earthquakes.

[D.o.S.]

Yeah for such a large state it does seem to get reduced to 3 or 4 cities pretty often.

I only know of Salinas through Steinbeck.

[odontophobia]

Gonna just put in some love for Grand Rapids, Michigan. Definitely reasonably happening. Up and coming. Some nice schools. Still very affordable, especially coming from CA.

good luck with the move though.
You guys have family in the Midwest?

[Kacey Y]

Gonna just put in some love for Grand Rapids, Michigan. Definitely reasonably happening. Up and coming. Some nice schools. Still very affordable, especially coming from CA.

good luck with the move though.
You guys have family in the Midwest?

Not in Ohio. We've got family in Oregon, Utah, Connecticut, North Carolina and a few other places, but we didn't find anything we really liked in the budget we wanted near good schools. It was kind of a brain scrambling process, going through tons of statistics, best of lists, housing listings and figuring out detailed budgets for everything. We limited our options the way we're doing it, but we're trying to buy a house outright, with a good solid chunk of savings left over, in a place with a lower cost of living and better schools that has decent jobs and is within driving distance of some larger cities. I also had to figure in a budget for living expenses while I look for work. If I was finding a job in another area first, relocating, renting for an extended period of time and then getting another mortgage, we'd probably have a lot more options. The prospect of owning without ANY debt is very attractive though and in order to get the same pay or a higher paying job in my current career I'd essentially have to drive most of the month around several states as a sales rep and I don't want to do that. I want to have the option of going back to school or changing my career path. I haven't been able to do that, because I've been the sole earner since our son was born and made pretty much our exact living expenses (if we lived VERY frugally, which we have). So yeah, fewer options, but more financial freedom overall was the goal.

[sergiomunoz74]

Definitely don't think of coming to anywhere in Illinois, I can tell you that right now. Expensive pretty much anywhere on the east side of the state, and a lot of the suburbs/rural areas are just dying from people moving into the city or out of the state. Plus violence although that isn't as crazy outside of Chicago. You should look south/southwest. Georgia you can really cheap living, and really nice as far as music and culture although I know nothing of the school system. Im sure Ohio is decent, but honestly EWWWWWWW ohio

[D.o.S.]

Georgia you can really cheap living, and really nice as far as music and culture although I know nothing of the school system.

Must...resist...low hanging fruit...

[sergiomunoz74]

Georgia you can really cheap living, and really nice as far as music and culture although I know nothing of the school system.

Must...resist...low hanging fruit...

Haha does it suck that much? I really liked it while I was there, but hey what do I know. I live in an expensive city with a piss poor education system and high violence. I do like the culture and the food we got and our train system is top notch.

[samzadgan]

Not dismissing any of the US affordability of housing...but in my small isolated research a few years ago, I found the US to be extremely affordable compared to London and like 100 times more affordable than Sydney.

At the time we were looking at moving from London to either San Francisco or New York...I am assuming these two cities are among the most expensive as far as housing goes. I talked to our HR department over in the US and they were giving me figures if I was transferring over for work...not even getting a promotion, just moving to the same level role. They also had a consultant who calculated cost of living, basically trying replicate our life in london to those 2 cities...we worked out that would have saved double what were saving, but also adding that we would have a car in the US, where as we didn't have one in London.

We didn't end up going through with it, because we ended up having kids.

But now living in Australia...we are finding it so much more expensive than London...it's not just housing, which is not that much more...but cost of living...like groceries shopping...or eating out...the little things add up like crazy. By the end of the month the money is gone and you can't even account for where the hell it went!

Also...another anecdotal story...a friend at work is moving back to Canada (her and he husband and 2 kids). They are almost power couple level, but in Sydney they couldn't afford to buy a house...heading back to Canada (Toronto) they have bought a 3 bed house with a basement...off a street that is about 15 mins walk to a cool part of town...and it's basically 3/4 of the price of the house we bought which has no basement, no parking and on a main road.

[D.o.S.]

That's bonkers. London is expensive but as far as cost of living goes it's not substantially more expensive than New York or SF, in my experience (I would classify all three of those places as "not the cheapest living you can find")

[odontophobia]

That's bonkers. London is expensive but as far as cost of living goes it's not substantially more expensive than New York or SF, in my experience (I would classify all three of those places as "not the cheapest living you can find")

All three are some of the most expensive, I would guess.

[Kacey Y]

For the price we just sold our 3 bed, 1.5 bath ranch house here, you could buy a mansion in most of the midwest and southeast. Not that that's what we actual MADE on the sale, although our profit is certainly enough to buy a similar or nicer house outright in other states. I looked really hard around our area and the rest of California and it wasn't feasible to buy anything. The only houses we could afford to buy with cash were in the middle of nowhere or areas with worse schools and more unemployment than here.

We looked at Illinois briefly, but a lot of people warned me off it just culturally. On the premise that there's a lot of nothing in every place that's not Chicago, because everyone can just drive or hop on a train to there to go do stuff. We looked at Iowa, which was very affordable and has a better economy overall, but we liked what we've seen of what's in driving distance and the general landscape more in Ohio. Maryland and northern Virginia were early contenders, as we've been there before and liked it, but we couldn't find many houses in our budget where the schools were good in the areas we liked.

But yeah, we may not end up staying in Ohio if we don't like it. We're going there to rent, but most of our stuff is going to be in storage until we buy a house. We have our money set aside and everything really meticulously budgeted out. If we decide we want to move a few states in any direction, it's not going to be a big deal if we find one house we really like in an area we like. Part of the reason why our budget for a house is a little low is because I wanted a good amount of savings and living expenses for 3 months of not having a job lined up too. So worse case scenario, we could burn through savings for probably a year and still buy a house with cash. That's not my plan, but we've got options. This area just sucks, we don't want to raise our kids here and we want to live somewhere where the money we've made from selling our house gets us ahead financially.

[sergiomunoz74]

I definitely commend you for the pretty open look you got to moving around the country. I feel like you will find "home" soon enough and I love the landscape in Maryland and Virginia but I've only driven through never actually stopped and enjoyed anything.

Yeah Illinois is a cultural wasteland but with Chicago being the anchor. I've been here all my life for the most part and once I started traveling outside of Chicago to the nearby suburbs and farther, I started realizing that it was pretty much just as dead as many rural American places. As much as I have come to identify myself with this City, I know very little of what's surrounding it. Nevermind the divide between the north/south/west side being like almost unwritten law with some people literally never going 2 miles outside their neighborhood.