Isabella Raine

Stuck in your hometown and looking for a fresh start? Or maybe you need to feel like you’re feeling at a standstill where you are and want to feel more like you're moving forward. If you’re anything like me, you think about moving to a different city every day, but where do you start? The amount of things you need to consider can be overwhelming, so let’s go through how to choose your next home together.

What are your priorities? 

Do you want to be close to family and friends? 

Do you want sun year round?

Is the political climate important to you?

What can you afford? 

What does my career path pay in ‘x’ location? 

Questions like whether or not you want to be near family are more straightforward, but there are tools you can use to answer some of the rest. I will share what I’ve discovered in all things moving and choosing between multiple locations.

If you’re at square one and don’t have any places of interest to plug into these tools yet, you can do a few things. One is to google what you’re looking for-- ie “Small artistic towns on the west coast” and scroll through your search results as they give you lists of potential new homes. 

Another way is to get on google maps and scroll. Investigate different regions you’re interested in, and find city names to plug into a search engine to discover if it’s what you’re looking for. If you want to find places within a certain population range, you can google something like, “Lists of cities in Oregon” and Wikipedia will give you a list that you can sort by population.

Arguably the most pressing question for most families is whether or not you can afford the cost of living. I use a website called numbeo.com. One of its features is literally calculating the cost of living in any given place. There’s even a way to compare the costs of two places side by side. In doing this, you can weigh your current place of living to the potential next and see percentages of how much more or less it is. 

Your budget may be the same, so it’s good to see whether somewhere will cost more to live than the last. Seeing what is more affordable can definitely influence your final choice. Numbeo.com also includes other tools like calculating the quality of living and the crime index.

Something I do to find my next home is compare the pay rates of my job in places of interest. As a childcare provider, there are places that are financially better and worse to be one. 

To do this, I use indeed.com. I plug in where I live now with the position and where I want to live next, and seeing the pay rate be higher by several dollars an hour at any job location. Doing this next to the cost of living will hopefully clear up any questions you have about your financial situation. 

Another website with great tools is bestneighborhood.org. They have interactive maps for a vast number of topics. They have political maps, rent prices, “best neighborhoods,” and many other demographics, or lists of local service statistics. So whether you’re looking to see how a city stands politically, or how diverse it is, bestneighborhood.org is a website great for the kind of information you want to know when looking for a new place to live.

Something more obscure that I do is research my hobbies in a place of interest. For example, I love to roller skate. Not every city or town has amazing skating resources or community. The small town I live in has one small skatepark that’s usually filled with smaller kids scootering. Which is fine if you’re in middle school and like to scooter around. 

So in looking for a good place to live as a skater, I’d love there to be many skateparks, local skate shops, and to know the community is large and welcoming. Another great feat would be having different types of parks and locations to skate. Outdoor, indoor, outdoor with overhead covering. That way, there’s options for when it’s wet or cold.

 

If not, I compiled a list of things to do when you cannot skate. 

As for finding weather information– google seems to have the most convenient information. When you search, “Weather in x year round,” It’ll pull up each month’s average highs and lows, as well as the average days of rain. I love rain, but as a skater it’s good to know what to expect when it comes to the amount of days the road will be wet. 

Last but not least, when you want to look into a specific location, I love searching for it in hashtags on TikTok and instagram. 

This pulls up all kinds of fun and beautiful content that will make your daydreaming that much easier as you see people who are already living the life you’re looking for. I love looking at all the fun food and activities that somewhere has to offer. 

From aesthetic nature videos to nightlife, these apps have lots of information to share. 

After going through all of these tools and questions, you can start to make a pros and cons list. Pros can be objective, or more subjective. This can include whether somewhere is more or less expensive, if the weather is preferable, political climates, job opportunities and pay rates, crime rates, and so on. 

After measuring the cost of living, checking the weather and weighing your priorities, hopefully you’ve narrowed it down. If we’re lucky, maybe you found your destination of choice! Even just in writing this article and going through these steps myself, my next home became a lot clearer.