If you do decide to stay in the US. You may want to consider moving away from the NE. As you know the cost of living there can be easily 3 to 4 times higher then many other parts of the US. May have to move away from family and some of there support but in the long run it might be the best for your family. Lot of my friends and family(cousins) after high school ended up all over the US(most from Wisconsin). Many of them found good jobs after college in the north east and west coast(Cali). Fast forward 10+ years and almost all of them are back in the midwest or have moved to the south east. All moved really because of the cost of living. In the midwest and southeast a 100K to 200K can buy a very nice home overall. But NE and West Coast you can't even really look at a home. They just realized they'd have to save every penny for ten+ years to even look at the housing market. In the mean time they where paying super high rent compared to most parts of the country. Even going out to eat, groceries, utlities, night on the town, car insurance, car registration, etc. etc. was much higher. Which all made it even harder to save for a house. So in the end they moved to more reasonable economic parts of the country and had a much better lifestyle at much more affordable price and alot sooner in life.
Interesting you should mention that. My good friend is moving from the NE to the SE and it got me to thinking about the cost of living where she's headed. I have family in South Carolina, so it wouldn't be like we're completely alone. I checked out craigslist just out of curiosity and I found apartments in the city of Columbia that are working out around $400-$450 per month. You could never find that here in the NE. I also checked out jobs, especially for my husband, and they're paying around $15 per hour. Although not ideal for a single-income family, it's still not bad! What you're saying is exactly what I was thinking, it would take us FOREVER to be able to afford even a tiny house here. My mom lives in the boonies (and I mean REALLY far away from civilization, although we are relatively close to a city), has a small plot of land and a double-wide trailer and it's worth, I kid you not, close to $150K. It just blows my mind! My brother is renting a small apartment in a bad neighborhood and pays close to $700 a month in rent, plus heat, which we all know works out crazy expensive in the winter months, a.k.a. 6 months out of the year. Looking for jobs in the newspaper or on the internet is so depressing as well; most jobs are either working in fast food for minimum wage or being a truck driver (but of course you have to pay for the training) or working in a coal mine. Our only option is to move, but we're going to exhaust all of our options here in the U.S. before we think about going down to Mexico.
Sperling's best places Here is a website that's a lot of fun to use when you want to compare different cities in the U.S. http://www.bestplaces.net/ Click "compare", at the top; enter the names of the cities, and click "compare", to the right; then, click one of the categories from the menu, on the left. You'll be amazed at all the good detail you can come up with....
