Remote work is becoming more "real" by the day, so it's certainly possible in the age of the internet to work remotely in a low cost location while making a salary competitive with a higher cost of living city like SF/NY/LA.
Plenty of machinists, auto mechanics, health care professionals and welders aren't gonna have much luck working from home.
I'm putting together a list of the best places to live for remote workers with families, hoping to turn it into a little website that you can filter by schools, available internet speeds, median house price, that sort of thing.
Hopefully it will help someone out there when there's more data.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X2JihFpA97EEAMz8kD-j...
So I can direct people away from where I live, so the prices don't skyrocket.
And then we all saw what happened to Portland, Seattle, and Austin once the word got out and everyone knew about these "secret" cool cities. So now we keep our mouths shut and enjoy our beer and beaches without all the tourists and transplants.
That's the goal anyway, and then from there I could open source or just do weighted average input for people to rate their favorites w/ no login required.
It's early days.
But that's really only available for a small subset of the population.
But I work to live, not live to work. My job is a means to an end, that end being to have a fulfilling life that doesn't revolve around what I do for a living.
Because of that, I find the quest to climb the corporate ladder has lost it's appeal. I'm cool staying at my current, well-paying, work from home job until I retire. I don't want to be running a company, I want to be running my life.
Corporate ladder does seem a bit... sad? But maybe some people like it! More power to them!
Cool thing about a small business is you can create a long term sustainable lifestyle that suits you. I like the philosophy of TJ Holowaychuk with Apex (created expressjs and a million other amazing things), super cool. At one point it was referred to as a “non startup”. Love that dude :-D
Nothing wrong with building a company up to an ipo either, that could be a blast depending on the people and context.
I know a guy that has done this for a few companies and then moved onto consulting for them. Makes SV money in the midwest. Works whenever he wants, 99% of time remotely, and companies will sometimes wait if he has too much going on to do work for them.
The guy is living the life. So, I want to do the same.
I never saw any sense in that. Would they start paying you more if you later moved to a more expensive location?
I work freelance remotely for no country in particular and my current location is never a factor for prices.