What This Blog Will Be About

I have created this blog to document my move from the suburbs of New Jersey to Austin, Texas. The move will be made by myself and my girlfriend and is currently planned to take place in the first half of 2008. The reason for this online diary is, first and foremost, to document the journey for future reflection and secondly, to hopefully help other people who plan a similar relocation in the future.

Why do we want to move from the comfort of our friends, family and everything we know to the total unknown? For the adventure! Well, that's not completely true. The fact is, it costs a ton of money to live in central New Jersey. We live in Hunterdon County and it is one of the most expensive places to live in the country.

According to wikipedia:
Hunterdon County ranks as the 13th among the highest-income counties in the United States with a per capita income of $36,370. It ranks third among U.S. counties for household income according to the most recent U.S. Census. Hunterdon County's median household income was $93,342, behind only Fairfax and Loudoun Counties in Virginia. As of 2005, Hunterdon had the third-highest median property tax of any county in the nation at $6,988, the highest in New Jersey.

Basically, it costs over $300,000 to buy a fixer upper in this area. Even with the recent real estate slump, the deals are few.

Another factor that led to this momentous plan was an article on MSN.com called 'Getting ahead in a starter city.' This article was basically the instigator that started us on this path to Austin. We started finding and taking all the best places to live quizzes online and, of course, they usually led to different answers. We kept at it and started compiling a list of places that sounded good, we wanted somewhere warm (which narrows the field down a TON), we wanted somewhere urban but safe (also narrows things down) and most importantly, we wanted somewhere that was unique and had it's own thing going on. The obvious answer was Austin.