If you find yourself feeling unhappy or unsettled in your current home and desiring a place where you can really settle down and plant some roots but you have NO IDEA where to begin, then you are in exactly the right place. I have put together all my favorite moving resources in one place to help you with that decision.
To start off, in this video, I am walking you through the exact process we used to narrow down our potential home from every state in the US, to eventually just one. You should know this took weeks to work through in real time, so be sure to give yourself grace and time to make this big decision.
In the video, I also mention a State Comparison Resource guide, which I created simply because, to the best of my knowledge, nothing like this exists right now! Even though I didn’t think it was necessary at the time, I did out of love for my over-analytical husband. But as it turns out – it was 100% helpful towards making a confident decision on our next place to live!
If you are someone looking to make a change and plant some roots and you don’t know where to begin, this is such a great first step towards making that decision. And I have made this resource available in one simple PDF, just for you!
After you make your way through that, you probably will have narrowed down your search quite a bit. At this point in the process, we had a front runner for sure! But we also had a handful of other places that we were considering. So we found a couple other resources to cross reference that helped us narrow it down even further.
As I mentioned in this video, having a print out of the United States right in front of us was very helpful. Obviously it would be great to help you identify the locations of each state (if you didn’t ace geography in high school), but we also used a marker to black out the states that we ended up crossing off our list. This PRINTABLE MAP was our favorite of all the ones I found.
We also took in consideration the Cost of Living in each state, and THIS WEBSITE did a great job of breaking down not only the COLI (cost of living index) for each state, but how it compared to the national average AND rated the best and worst ten states.
If you have school aged children, I’m sure school ratings are on your radar as well. But take it from a mom who has had kids in school for 9 years and at 6 different schools — take those ratings with a grain of salt. Why? Because ratings won’t tell you everything you need to know. I talk more about this in my video, but I found THIS WEBSITE great for rating each state from best to worst and also breaking it down by category.
Last but not least, I highly recommend you look into the political standing of each state you are considering. Regardless of where your political alliance stands, I personally prefer to avoid either extreme. For that purpose, I found it helpful to have the Electoral College Map available while doing my research.
It’s my hope that these resources will equip you to make a confident decision on your family’s next move. If you want to hear me break it down further, I highly recommend watching this video that I put together on it.
Regardless of where you are on this journey, just know you are not alone. Now you got a friend in it with you, ok?
