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Comment by sbjustin | Hacker News Reader

I imagine you probably live somewhere where the cost of living is significantly higher than the rest of the country. I left the Washington DC Metro area which is exactly as you describe and moved to Greenville, SC. My wife has been able to be a stay at home mom here and we get access to a decent education for our daughter. Any difference in quality of education can be made up by the parents imo.

Leaving an area which required 2 parents to work has been one of the greatest things I've ever done and I won't go back. We are significantly happier without that pressure.

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My wife and I have been looking at cost of living options in a few areas such as the northern part of Virginia. Here in SC, we both work (no kids) and are able to save up. In Virginia we would be barely scraping by at the same income level. My house in SC is worth <$150k. That would literally purchase a double-wide trailer outside of Charlottesville.

Hey Skiningham!

It doesn't have to be the entire cost of living, just the cost of housing.

In Upstate NY there are farms everywhere so food is cheap. The upside to everything being gray and snowy all the time is that water is basically free. And as for other services like telcos and electricity, we pay around the same as the rest of the country.

But then comes rent.

It is ridiculous to think that unless you live waaaaaayyy out in the sticks there's no chance you are gonna afford a mortgage down payment anytime soon after graduating college (forget high school), and even as a professional with a professional partner the idea of buying a house is still years away. If we can't own a house we can't build equity. We can't use the property as collateral if we need a loan. It all goes back to housing, and right here, it sucks.

What upstate NY are you talking about?

I've looked into buying a house up there and it looks incredibly cheap.

Ithaca, where income-to-housing costs rival San Francisco.

Like I said, it's fine if you want to live in the boonies, but that also means you're an hour away from anything resembling civilization.

Ithaca is also a college town (Cornell) so it's not quite a fair comparison to most rural areas.

One major difference in the North East is that many areas have very high property taxes. It isn't uncommon to find similar property taxes to be a tenth of those values in the South.

Bingo. Absolutely. Couldn't be stated enough.

My brother goes to college in North Carolina. Demographically it is very similar: medium sized cities with rural stretched in between. Only real difference is weather and taxes. Can't do anything about the weather...

I agree strongly with this. The opportunities the above scenario provides & the reduction in stress is worth more than most average income jobs provide.

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