Day 18: When Life Gives you Lemons. Move!
by Edward Smith
23 Jul 2020
If you read my last article entitled: 🤠How to Survive the Nightmare Scenario of a Home-aggedon! You would have read about my story where I bought a tiny house, in an expensive town, that was too expensive for our family. You also would have learned how I was working in a job that had a high fatality rate and didn't look like it would last.
Seven years after I started working at my job, the company changed managers, the new managers began replacing the current employees with people that they knew from outside, and I didn't fit in with the program anymore.
I began getting negative reviews, out of no where, I was put on probation, but before the probation period could finish, things escalated overnight, and I was walked out the door.
I was told the company couldn't wait any longer, and that I was too expensive to fix. The company had no choice but to move things along quicker then they would have liked.
Two months later there would be a major company-wide layoff, where thousands of employees would be let go. I was just the preamble. After the larger layoff happened, everyone that I had known was basically gone, and everybody that now worked there was a stranger.
The owner hadn't been getting results, so he cleared the whole place out and started things over with fresh blood. It had happened before when I first started, but I was spared the first time. I wasn't spared the second time. Since I had seen it before, it wasn't a surprise when it happened to me.
Luckily, We Had a Plan
I had a good idea that something was up, so my wife and I spent a lot of time outside of work looking into things ahead of time, so that we would have an exit plan in place in case things went the wrong way. I knew that people typically received a severance package when they were let go, so we were counting on that as a possibility.
We also thought about whether living in California with one job was doable, and for how long. We looked at what else could be done in case California didn't work out.
That was how my wife ended up finding out about the East Coast, and how her company had a second office there, that was short on people. The company was begging people in California to move, but nobody wanted to do it.
Zig When Others Zag
Other people liked the beach, the sun, and the sand so much, that leaving wasn't even a possibility. The East Coast was unknown, and it snowed there. For Californians, moving to a place with snow is like sentencing them to life in prison.
To make people want to move to a colder climate, the company had to get creative. Several lucrative and generous incentive packages were created to encourage people to take the plunge. It was like how the government in the 1800's convinced people to move out West. They gave you an offer you didn't want to refuse.
In this scenario, my wife's company agreed to pay for the entire move. They agreed to pay for our lodging while we found a house. They covered all of our meals and incidentals. They paid us a bonus for selling our house, and they helped pay many of the fees and contracts associated with the transition.
From our perspective, it was a deal of a lifetime and it was very very attractive.
Cost of Living Analysis
Having lived in California, we knew the cost of living for a place can make or break a dream. We looked into it and discovered that the housing prices for a 1,000 sq foot home, could be as low as $350,000.
The new house would be the same size as we had now, but $185,000 in debt would be eliminated instantly. This miracle was made possible, because the house was now located in a normal housing market instead of in an over inflated one.
We also looked into our other expenses and discovered that many of our other bills were cheaper in this new location as well. The savings were substantial across the board. After we ran the numbers, we found out we could live on my wife's single job, pull our kids out of daycare, and I could be a full time stay at home dad.
This meant that if I got another job, I could do whatever I wanted, and it would just be extra on top of whatever we needed. We never had that in California.
Want to know what you can do when you take a chance, and someone hands you a serving of freedom?
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