Should I stay or should i go?

Bjazzman · #1 08-04-2009, 09:20 PM

I've been on the fence about moving to chicago from minneapolis. Right now i love my job and minneapolis is a nice city but we don't have friends or family up here. I got a job offer in chicago that pays only slightly less but with overtime i could make more. My wife is working as a medical assistant and wants to go to nursing school full time. It's kinda late to be looking at fall acceptance to schools anyway but we're trying. She hates her job and wants to get school out of the way but most schools have weird prerequisites that are going to take longer to get done.

if we move, we'd have to find her a job or school. the job would be just until she gets into nursing school.

then there's the financial thing where we hope we can get by either with her having a job or off the extra from the school loans to pay whats necessary.

she wants to raise our family down there since we have more family there. so it sounds like we're going to have to do this eventually anyway and i'd like to get it done sooner than later

its so hard to just say goodbye to a great job just to be closer to family but if thats what it takes...

what should i do?

hbarcat · #2 08-04-2009, 09:29 PM

Take a weekend trip to the area where you'd be living for your new job and check it out. See the sights, and look at all of your potential new neighborhoods.

Personally, I don't much like anything about this entire Chicagoland region except for the rich music scene which is pretty special by itself.

Selta · #3 08-04-2009, 09:34 PM

This sounds a little bit similar to what I recently went through

.
About 4 months ago, I was living across the country in PA. I had a decent job in which I wasn't thrilled over, but I wasn't exactly hating either. My girlfriend was going to graduate school in Oregon, so that was a bit rough.
Long story cut short... we decided that we wanted toe end up on the west coast. I started to make some sort of plan to move myself out here in august '09 (about now). I casually start browsing jobs, and the next thing I know, I think it was a week or two later, I had landed an interview, and then a job offer. This happened in feburary. So, I accept the new position, and begin moving. Needless to say, I didn't have near the time to plan for this in either a logistics or financial manner. Both ended up hurting more than I anticipated, but I'm doing great.
In the end, my girlfriend finished her grad studies and has since moved up here to Seattle with me. We're both glad I got out here when I did, as I was able to secure a place to live, have a steady income etc. No mad rush for anything, so it made the transition smoother for both of us.

Now, I'm pretty young (23) and have no family outside of my girlfriend and cat. This made things a ton easier.

Looking back, I'm very glad I did when I did it. Heck, I probably should have done it sooner even. But that's neither here or there.
Make sure to do a VERY thorogh check into your finances. There's the paycheckcity.com website that you can use to guess what you'll "bring home" for a paycheck. If you can, maybe even talk to a professional accountant of some sort to help in that manner. I did, and it proved VERY worthwhile to do so. It helped free my mind of a lot of un-needed worry.

Otherwise, just make sure it's the step that you both want to take, when you want to take it, and enjoy it!

Rocker949 · #4 08-04-2009, 10:37 PM

Based on the info you have provided here, I would stay.

MJ5150 · #5 08-05-2009, 07:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rocker949

Based on the info you have provided here, I would stay.

I would stay too. There are too many variables going against you right now to make it successful.

Hoping to survive off overtime pay, and hoping to get into school are the two big ones that threw up the red flags for me.

-Mike

Din Of Win · #6 08-05-2009, 07:33 AM

+1 to spending some time there.

But i highly encourage you to spend more than a weekend there.

My girlfriend and i were planning on moving to Gainesville Florida from Maryland. We stayed a week and a half to really look into what it had to offer(other than the school of course). While we were stoaked on the first few days... by the end of our time we decided to stay put. Had we only been there a weekend or so we would have ended up moving there and would have ended up being miserable.

XtreO · #7 08-05-2009, 07:42 AM

TLDR

But from the lines I did read, I'd say stay until your wife gets into a school there or gets a job there.

MakiSupaStar · #8 08-05-2009, 10:14 AM

Looks like there's no rush. Get the wifey enrolled for school then move after that.

Bjazzman · #9 08-05-2009, 10:23 AM

i've come to the realization that she might be able to get into a school this fall to do some prereq before going to nursing school so we'd have to find her a job there.

she has said that she wants to raise our kids there so I think I'd rather do it now than 3 years from now when she would be done with nursing. who knows if I could even get a job then

also for the first year I won't get vacation. if we did this when she's done and wants to have kids right away what happens when I have a newborn without vacation? do you just not get paid for that day?

bottom line.. shouldn't we do this if we're going to eventually anyway?