Accepted another position, moving out of Illinois
- Thread starter Angus
- Start date
I did the Chicago > SF move back in 2010 after my company was acquired.
Are you going to live in SF proper? housing can be a real bitch. Let me know if you have any questions on the transition.
I regret moving back to Chicago, if it weren't for family, there's no way I would have left Northern Cali. You'll absolutely love it.
Are you going to live in SF proper? housing can be a real bitch. Let me know if you have any questions on the transition.
I regret moving back to Chicago, if it weren't for family, there's no way I would have left Northern Cali. You'll absolutely love it.
Werd. We love visiting there. We were married in Mill Valley. This is an awesome opportunity.
Fuck, do I want to move back... especially after enduring this past winter.
Homes are super expensive, property taxes are cheaper.. everything else is relatively similar. Salaries are much higher, but not enough to make up for the astronomical home prices.
Shit man me and the wife have been looking for ways to relocate to socal for years. You almost have to apply for jobs with a cali address. I guess companies get tons of out of state resumes for jobs and also people looking for relocation assistance. So in order to get seriously considered you almost have to lie and put a bogus address on your resume close to the company you are applying to. I havent gone this route yet, but I just may.....
When I applied, they first called me to double check that I was indeed willing to move to CA, which I was. I'm in a bit of a specialized industry (not very big in Chicago area) and was expecting to move to CA, TX, or the Southeast. Luckily, my new company is reimbursing for relocation expenses.
I would suggest to not put a bogus address on your resume... any serious employer performs a background check and I feel that is just too big of a white lie to potentially get caught about a few weeks or months later and then terminated after relocating your family...
There are no jobs here. There is more demand for everything than there is supply… Housing, jobs, anything you can think of.
Our houses go above asking price with multiple cash offers, pricing your average buyer out of the market both on price and because your average buyer generally isn't a cash deal.
Right now everything that gets torn down (outside of the hills) gets replaced with a high density replacement. Two houses might be torn down and a 20 unit apartment building goes up in their place. There is construction everywhere and they still can't keep up with demand.
Housing prices have been inflated to the point where most middle class families can only afford to buy in the not so nice areas or in the Valley where even a modest home sells for over $600,000.
Honestly I don't know how anyone with a normal salary makes it out here. You won't live well unless you're making a lot of money and if I had a job I'd be terrified of losing it for fear of not finding another. And San Francisco is supposed to be a lot worse…
Our houses go above asking price with multiple cash offers, pricing your average buyer out of the market both on price and because your average buyer generally isn't a cash deal.
Right now everything that gets torn down (outside of the hills) gets replaced with a high density replacement. Two houses might be torn down and a 20 unit apartment building goes up in their place. There is construction everywhere and they still can't keep up with demand.
Housing prices have been inflated to the point where most middle class families can only afford to buy in the not so nice areas or in the Valley where even a modest home sells for over $600,000.
Honestly I don't know how anyone with a normal salary makes it out here. You won't live well unless you're making a lot of money and if I had a job I'd be terrified of losing it for fear of not finding another. And San Francisco is supposed to be a lot worse…
^ Well that just about sounds awful haha.
I've never seen the huge fascination with California. The only area I'd be remotely interested in would be San Diego and even that is still ridiculously expensive. Everything is out there in Socal though, but I wonder if there's going to come a time when there's just a ton of poverty eventually. Or another massive housing crash.
I've never seen the huge fascination with California. The only area I'd be remotely interested in would be San Diego and even that is still ridiculously expensive. Everything is out there in Socal though, but I wonder if there's going to come a time when there's just a ton of poverty eventually. Or another massive housing crash.
Socal is not all expensive. Go 30 minutes west of LA and the cost of living is nearly identical to us here in CHI suburbs.
lolwut? 30 minutes west of LA is the ocean. I should hope it would be comparable to Chicago if not a little cheaper as you'll be living in water.
But no, you're not even close to being right. In the CHI suburbs 200 - 250k can get you a pretty nice house. Out here? Nothing. Maybe a really low end condo in a really bad area but a house? Not happening.
Thousand Oaks is 30 minutes west in the valley. There are zero homes for under $300,000. I can go out to Calabasas, a good hour west and still nothing for under $300,000. If I go east to Arcadia: nothing. Pasadena, you guessed it: nothing.
You have to go really far out to find something for under $300,000 and it's going to be utter crap whereas in the Chicago burbs (even in the nice parts like Arlington Heights) 300k buys you a pretty nice house.
Not to mention the fact that you're forgetting everything else that's factored into cost of living:
Taxes: Higher
Food prices: Higher
Health insurance: nearly double
Car Insurance: double
I pay $800+ a month for our health insurance, $260 a month for car insurance with no accidents/ tickets, 9.3% of my income goes to the state.
It's just not even close.
LOL yeah Im midwest programmed. I meant east of LA. NOT calabasas but like Corona, Riverside and so on.
I lost a good "engineer" to a company in the valley a couple years ago. They reloc'd him out there and gave him a decent salary for a kid. He worked there about 2 years, and eventually moved back to Chicago because he couldn't stand it out there and the company that hired him wasn't giving him any opportunity to move up. He looked for a job out there for about a year, but came up empty handed.
Ah yeah, but people look at a map and think Riverside is a community of LA when it's really like an hour and a half away. There's just so much sprawl out here that the suburbs never really end. You can drive basically all the way from LA to SanDiego and you just go from LA's suburbs to SanDiego's. It would be like driving from Chicago to Madison and never leaving a densely populated area. It's really odd.
If you're talking about the valley as in LA, most people that move out here with grand plans of living the LA life and then end up in the valley generally want to go back. Unlike Chicago, your view of LA will depend entirely on how and where you live. If you end up in the middle to northern parts of the valley you'll hate this city. You'll view it as a slum. But just 3 or 4 miles south in the Hollywood Hills you'll think it's the best place you've ever been. The disparity between the haves and the have nots is huge and it's not progressive like Chicago. I can go from multi-million dollar houses to a really crappy part of the valley in 10 minutes.
But enough about my diatribes about LA. Congrats Angus. Enjoy the drive. We went through Colorado and Utah and it was amazing.
UPDATE
Accepted a position with a firm downtown Chicago and my family and I are moving back to the suburbs in 2 weeks!
The bay area has been great and we've enjoyed all the new sights, scenery and weather, but the draw of all of our family back in IL made me start to look for jobs back in Chicago. And I'm glad I did because my new position is again, a step up for my career.
Excited to be back for some TCG meets!
Accepted a position with a firm downtown Chicago and my family and I are moving back to the suburbs in 2 weeks!
The bay area has been great and we've enjoyed all the new sights, scenery and weather, but the draw of all of our family back in IL made me start to look for jobs back in Chicago. And I'm glad I did because my new position is again, a step up for my career.
Excited to be back for some TCG meets!
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