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Planning a relocation

When my wife and I realized that our current location was not where we wanted to stay long term, we had to take the hard step of figuring out where else to go. To do this, we leaned heavily on the core values we had identified for ourselves. We began our relocation pursuit by identifying that we were looking for somewhere that met the following criteria:

1. We could afford to purchase a house on one salary.
2. We could afford to have my wife stay at home with kids.
3. There were mountains and plentiful outdoor spaces to explore.
4. The culture was very family oriented.
5. I could find a job that would provide for our immediate needs and wouldn’t be too limiting of a career step.
6. The tax structure left us with as much in our pocket as possible.
7. Legislation around personal freedoms were unobtrusive.
8. We were far enough from major cities to feel “rural” but not so far from civilization that we had limited access to basic necessities.
9. We could be within four hours of at least some direct family members and could be a potential rallying point in a time of emergency.

Once you have your core values determined, plan on spending considerable time researching where you would like to go. If you have always had somewhere you wanted to move, then this step might be a lot shorter and easier for you.

We set our initial search within the continental U.S., to make the moving process as easy as possible. To meet our family criteria, we limited the scope to somewhere east of the Mississippi River. From there, we looked at tax structures to see which states were most favorable to our current position. After determining the single state with the lowest tax burden, we started examining the major cities to see which one had the most job opportunities around it, and we also looked at the smaller cities that would offer opportunities but also be off the main paths.

After identifying some likely candidates, we spent considerable time researching the housing and job markets in each of the three major cities we identified. Eventually reaching a research wall, we took a week off work and visited each of the cities. We drove around neighborhoods in each of the cities for seven days straight, visiting friends or family that we had lined up prior to the trip. This was not only fun but invaluable for determining the actual feel on the ground.

When we returned, we had settled on two cities we would be happy with, and we started applying to jobs in the surrounding towns of those cities that we had explored and liked. After a few months, I was able to secure an interview at a company in one of the quiet towns outside our second favorite city. My wife and I flew down and fell in love with the area. We accepted the offer, and within two weeks we had both quit our jobs, and we moved into a new apartment 1000 miles away from where we grew up.

We quickly looked for a house and were able to find a modest property on half an acre that fit the low end of our budget. It was not a perfect “prepper” retreat, but it was leaps and bounds better than where we were before. We have a solid community in our neighborhood and are enjoying the new relationships we are forming. In a few years we plan to move to an area with a little more land and space, but we didn’t want to extend ourselves too far with our first house.

So let’s break this down and determine the steps that you should follow when planning your relocation. We are still in the creating a plan stage here, and as you can see this is very important!

Here is a quick recap of where we are now:

1. You have determined your core values individually and as a family, if you are married or have kids.
2. You have identified the gaps between your desired situation and your reality.
3. You have determined that there is no way to meet your goals without relocating to a different area.

Congratulations! You are about to become a migrant. This is a treasured and celebrated lifestyle in America and has been a constant driver of progress from the Pilgrims to Western Expansion. The drive to better one’s situation by relocating has been a central part of the American dream throughout our country’s short history.

Relocation Planning: Location determination

The most important thing to remember when choosing a new location is that you are not picking a bug out location; you are picking a life location. TEOTWAWKI may or may not happen during your lifetime. There are plenty of moldy bomb shelters from the 70’s that thankfully never got used. Do not only plan for the worst case scenario. You want your move to be defined by what you are moving toward and not what you are moving away from. If your entire move is defined by fear, you will bring that negative perception to your new area, and you will make integrating in your new home much more difficult. If it is defined by how much you love the area you are moving to, that story plays out much nicer in your own mind and in the minds of the the people you are moving towards or away from.

Resources

There are several very important considerations for your new area. The reason people (and maybe you) live in large population centers is because they offer many resources within a small geographical area. Sure, there may not be a lot of food production resources, but you have large amounts of human capital, and where there are lots of people there are usually abundant ways to make money (and more problems).

If you are looking to move to somewhere more rural or farther from a city, you need to take a close look at the resources you will have available to you. Key resources to evaluate are:

• Employment,
• Community,
• Family,
• Land, and
• Education.

Below are some thoughts about and a few questions to wrestle through relating to each of these areas.

Employment is probably one of the most, if not the most, important resources to consider. If you mortgage the perfect prepper estate yet lose it all because your job disappears, you are in a worse spot than when you started. Questions to consider:

• Does the area you are evaluating have the economic potential to support you and your family?
• Is all industry tied to one factory that is struggling to get by and may shut down within the next few years?
• If you plan on opening your own business, is there entrenched competition in your market?
• Will you be taking an income hit by moving to this area, or will your maximum income potential be reduced?
• Are the taxes higher or lower?
• Would you need to move to a different area if you lost your job?
• Moving with a family can easily cost ten thousand dollars; do you have the cash on hand for this expense or will an employer pay for it?
• If your trade is in a field that requires a large amount of customers to be successful, would the area offer enough resources to provide for your needs?

Community:

• What do you know about the culture of the place you are evaluating?
• What is crime like in the area?
• What is the education level in the area?
• Is the area friendly or closed towards outsiders?
• Are your hobbies accepted or frowned up?
• Are there opportunities readily available for you to connect with local people?
• If you are religious, is there a church or denomination located close to your target area that lines up with your values?
• If you are non-religious, is the culture heavily religious and would this create a significant barrier to overcome?
• When you look at the area, do you think it should be changed or that you would like to change to be more like it?
• How attached are your children to their current situation? How much emotional distress would they feel detaching from their current social circles?
• Are there opportunities for your children to pursue their passions?

Family:

• Is the area near or far to your immediate family or relatives?
• Would you be in a place where family would retreat to, or would you need to bug out in the case of an emergency?
• How will your immediate family feel, if you move far outside of a range that they can frequently visit?
• If you are looking at moving far from family, will that be okay for you or your spouse/kids emotionally?
• Can you afford the cost of traveling to visit relatives on holidays?
• How far are you from a major airport, in case you need to travel quickly?
• Will your spouse thrive with the new lifestyle, and are they fully on-board with this decision? Don’t lose a marriage you have for the sake of an unknown future.

If you closed your eyes and pictured your ideal bug out location, what would your mind’s eye see? You’d probably see green grass, blue skies, rolling hills, fertile farmland, your family, friendly neighbors, and a basement stocked with a thousand years of food and supplies. Now, open your eyes. Is that what surrounds you now? If not, then why not? Are you stuck in a job, weighed down by family obligations, struggling with debt, or just filled with fear?

Many of us have an idea of what we want in life and what we think would be best for our family, but at the end of the day that picture seems a far cry from reality. Do we have the guts to change this, to actually do something about our current situation? Or, are we content just reading blogs and fantasizing about “some day”?

About four years ago, my wife and I started taking a difficult look at our current situation. Was the life we were living the life we wanted? And if not, could we change it? We had some hard talks about our individual and family values. Through a few months of discussion and learning we decided that:

1. We wanted to live within our means and carry no debt, other than a mortgage.
2. We wanted to get out of our apartment and buy a house.
3. Our ideal location was somewhere rural, with mountains and plenty of outdoor places to explore.
4. My wife wanted to stay home with any future children we had, and potentially home school.
5. I wanted a career where I would work to live and not live to work.

Were these things happening already or were they possible in the future, with our current path?

The answer came back sharply as “no”.

1. We had about 40k worth of debt from school and car loans.
2. On one salary, we could not afford any house in our area, even with no other debt.
3. We lived in one of the most over-priced and congested areas of the country.
4. On one salary, we could not afford a house and kids.
5. Conversations with my boss assured me that “in order to move ahead in this company, I would need to be prepared to miss my kids’ kindergarten graduations”.

So, basically, our current situation was the complete opposite of where we wanted to be, and it conflicted entirely with our personal values.

What to do? At this point there were really two options.

1. Compromise on our core values and keep both of us working and struggling to get by.
2. Make drastic life changes with high risk to get to where we wanted to be.

We chose option #2.

It took four years, but we accomplished our goals. We paid off all our debt, searched the country for a place with a more affordable standard of living and the lifestyle we wanted, applied to jobs in the target area, accepted a job, quit our current ones, and moved 1000 miles away from where we were born and raised. Since arriving at our new “bug in” location in a wonderful small town, we have bought a house, conceived a child, and are preparing for my wife to stay at home full time while I work at my very family-oriented job.

Some people reading this have already walked this path. To others, this sounds like something out of dream that you could never imagine doing. However, you could do it. It just takes a lot of hard work, determination and luck.

This article will share how you can plan your own strategic relocation, follow the American dream, and stop living for other people’s desires instead of your own. In this article, we will cover:

• Creating a plan,
• Executing the plan, and
• Surviving the plan.

Step 1: Creating A Plan

Before you start making any changes in your life, you need to plan. As Benjamin Franklin once wisely said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”

Planning task 1: Identify what you want.

This is the absolute most crucial part of the entire process. If you fail to accurately determine what you actually want to accomplish, you will spend a life time chasing the wrong dreams and suffer a lot of unnecessary hurt, anxiety, and frustration along the way. Sit down by yourself or with your spouse, and list out what you want in life.

Answer questions like:

• If you could live anywhere, where would you live?
• If you could work any job, what would you do?
• How much do you value self-sufficiency over convenience?
• How important is it to have neighbors close by or at a distance?
• What type of work environments do I thrive in?
• What are my financial priorities?
• Would I rather have something I want now and be in debt or wait until it could be bought with cash?
• What are my career aspirations?
• What kind of luxuries could I not live without?
• If I had a $5000 tax return, would I save it for an emergency or spend it on a vacation?
• Do I want other people to educate my children or take that responsibility myself?
• Do I want to run my household off one income or two?
• Do I have hobbies that take a lot of time that I want to prioritize or can only happen in certain areas?
• Does legislation in my current area negatively affect the freedoms I would like to pursue?
• How important is being close to immediate family?
• Would I be comfortable staying in my current residence in the event of societal collapse?

As you answer these questions and the many more you will think up, write them down and then share them with your spouse (or someone you trust, if you are single). Hopefully, your spouse’s and your answers will be pretty complementary. Now look carefully and with an open mind at each other’s lists. These are things they just charted out as life goals and desires. Some may seem odd or trivial to you. They are not! These are your spouse’s passions, dreams, and visions. You need to realize that if they wrote them down, they are important and need to be valued just as highly as your own desires.

I cannot overemphasize how critical it is to get this step right. Take your time. My spouse and I took months hashing this step out. It sets the direction for the rest of your life, so don’t rush it. Find the big things that you most agree on, and use those to determine your path.

Planning task 2: Identify the gaps and prioritize.

Now that you know what you want in life, check it against reality. For some of you, you are already living your dreams. Keep it up and enjoy your life. Others will notice significant gaps between what they desire and what they have.

The odds are you identified quite a few things that you would like to have or do. As best you can, you need to condense, cut, and optimize your goals. Are there any that are related and would fall into place if you hit a bigger goal? Any that really aren’t that important? Any that can be squeezed out for the sake of something better?

Try to come up with five core goals, and then document their current situation. Are they a reality, or does some hard work need to be done to get there? These are your core values and will drive the rest of this process.

Planning task 3: Plan your attack.

Now that you have identified your core values and where your current life deviates from what you want, it is time to start identifying some practical next steps. Merely knowing that things are not where you want them to be will leave you hopeless, if you fail to take the next step.

Once you have identified your core values, you may realize that you can live the life you want in your current location and relocation is not necessary. If your primary goals are career related, then moving to an area far from the city may be out of the cards, and you will need to focus more on doing the best with what you have where you are. Maybe you could develop an extremely solid alternative bug out location and escape plan for if there was an emergency.

Similarly, if you currently live close to family and have an extremely tight set of relationships and community that you are a part of, it might not be worth trading those human resources for a little more land. Groups of survivors will have a huge advantage over even individual family units in a collapse, and you want to make sure you don’t undervalue your current situation.

If you decide to stay where you are, fully commit to that vision. A less than optimal plan that is fully executed is better than a perfect plan that never gets started. There are people that will survive in every area of the world if there is a societal breakdown. Just focus on being the guy that survives and not the guy who dies.

Whether you decide to stay or go, you can still tackle your gaps. Let’s look at how to break down a gap and then accomplish it. I like to explain concepts with math, so I created a formula here to help you understand your next task.

Goal-Reality=Work

The difference between your goal and reality will determine how much work you have to do to get to where your goal is. The farther your reality is from your goal, the more work it will take to get there. If your goal is to be a self sufficient farmer in a Redoubt state, but you currently live on a beach in Maine, you have a very large gap and a lot of work ahead of you. You need to decide now that you will take whatever steps are required to get to your goal. If you don’t, you will never get there.

“A goal without a plan is a wish.” ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For each of your goals, come up with a detailed plan of how to get there and put dates next to each step. Here is an example.

Goal: Be debt free.

Reality: 40k in debt.

Plan:

1. Take an extra job on weekends to help pay down quicker. $200 per month.
2. Divert “fun” expenditure money into loans. $100 per month.
3. Skip $3600 vacation each year until debt is paid off. $300 per month.
4. Don’t attend that cross country wedding for a cousin you haven’t seen in three years. $800 one time.
5. Sell motorized toy that is underutilized. $3000 one time.
6. Continue making normal payments of $500 per month.

After dumping the one time money into the debt, you will have 36200 left. Keeping the current level of monthly debt attack going, it will take you three years to get out of debt. Is this a long time? Yes. However, three years will pass quick, and you need to remember the options that will open up to you after your debt is paid off and you are not obligated to $1000 per month of payments.

Here is another common example that we will spend the rest of our time on.

Goal: Live a reasonably self-sufficient lifestyle in an area off the beaten path from the golden hoards.

Reality: Live in a third floor apartment by a major city.

Identifying that the place you currently live is most likely a death trap in a SHTF event and is not where you want to be long term is one of the most difficult Goal-Reality formulas to solve. Where you live has enormous implications for your lifestyle. Changing your current location without adequate foresight can have catastrophic consequences for yourself, your family, and your career. As a result of these consequences, the plan here needs to be detailed, well thought out,and created with full buy-in from all interested parties.