GrayGhost81 Relocation Thread. "You all may go to Hell, I will go to Texas."

[GrayGhost81]

Just to update, we're putting together a package for the bank that they require to approve a short sale of our house, which we're trying to sell to my neighbor. In my heart I feel like this isn't going to happen, and that in the end we'll end up walking away from the house. My wife and I have accepted that, but we're doing our best to make the sale go through. My lawyer says this can take a long time and they're not likely to approve it anyway. We'll see I guess. Either way, we're outta here.

Better yet, I finally made an actual connection with someone who lives in Austin. He's the cousin of a friend of mine and it turns out I knew him in high school, so not only can he give me info about the area, but it's coming from the perspective of someone who grew up in the same town as me. In addition to that he works in animal care, which is a field my wife and I both have a lot of experience in. This is exactly the kind of hookup I was hoping for, and although ironically the guy is on vacation on the east coast right now, I'm super excited to get on the phone with him to start picking his brain.

Meanwhile I continue every day to empty my house. We always have garbage bags and donation bags and I've always got stuff on ebay or going out to my friends on this site.

Only 81 days until we set flight. It'll be here in a flash, I know it. Gotta keep getting those ducks lined up.

[singlebanana]

Best of luck man! Sounds like everything is moving forward nicely.

[Fleach]

You and your wife are going about this very well. You're sticking to your plan and that seems to be motivating you to make the most of this big move.

[GrayGhost81]

Haven't updated the thread in a while here. The latest is that we're leaving tomorrow morning. Holy shit, this is really happening.

Cruising along with selling my house to my neighbor.

Told the company I work for of my plans, and they were gracious enough to refer me to similar company down there. I pestered that company for about month and finally got the call today which set up an interview for Tuesday.

My wife is more "winging it" as far as a job, but she does have a few leads.

I'm taking my laptop so I'll be sure to share pics and whatnot from the trip. Maybe even some scores.

This is it. Don't get scared now.

[Boshamp]

Best of luck!

[Sega2099]

Good luck with everything buddy!

[techwizard]

exciting! good luck, i hope everything goes well!

[singlebanana]

Good luck man! Rooting for you to make the best of it.

[GrayGhost81]

Hey everyone, we're back!

First of all, thank you all very much for the words of encouragement. It means a lot. Our trip to Austin was amazing! Anyone here who is friends with me on facebook (facebook.com/mrshawngray) knows that we had an action packed nine days in this beautiful town. I wrote two long emails to my coworkers while I was away, so I pasted them below for anyone who wants a rundown of the fun stuff we did. I'll also put a bunch of pics down there. But the point of this thread is to chronicle our efforts to relocate to Austin Texas and we took a few small steps towards doing that.

In reality, it's a short story. The job interview I went on went very well, and I'm almost certain they will offer me a position. Now it's just a matter of when they would want me to start.

My wife went for a more spontaneous boots on the ground type approach to her job search and met a lot of good people and spent a lot of time in the various animal shelters and clinics in the city. A few seemed promising to her and she's going to follow up with them this week. Although it would be ideal for both of us to have jobs we'll be able to get down there even if only I do at first.

We were able to look at a handful of rental properties while we were there but because we don't officially have jobs or an accurate move in date the Realtor we were working kind of cut us off, but I don't blame him. The market there moves extremely fast. There are two houses we looked at that we both liked that are still available. I check on them every day. The plan is if I get the job, I will call on one of them. If they're not available by the time I officially have a job offer we'll be in the unfortunate position of either having to rent an apartment sight unseen or incur the expense of at least one of us flying back down there to find a place to live.

Meanwhile the slow gears continue to turn on short-selling our house to my neighbor.

The strange thing is that despite having told my current company that I'm leaving (as did my wife), trying to sell our house, interviewing for jobs, telling some of our friends that we're moving etc, etc, etc, still nothing concrete has happened. By that I mean we still have not crossed any points of no return. The difference now though is we've been to Austin and are both 100% on board for moving. The fear I was experiencing before the trip is all but gone. I know we can and will do this. Now it's just a matter of when.

Towards the end of our trip I had the following conversation with my wife:

"So do you like it here? Like, this is it, you want to move here, we're going to do this?"

"Yeah, it's a really cool town, reminds me a lot of Charleston." [SC, where she went to college] 

"So let's say somehow all of our possessions and our cats could be magically transported to Austin right this second and we would never have to go back to New Jersey again, would you do it?"

"In a heartbeat."

"Me too."

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Greetings from Austin Texas!

Hey everyone! So far our trip has been awesome. We spent Friday exploring the city and went to lunch at a restaurant called Frank downtown. Some confusion with metered parking and I had to pull a dangerous and illegal maneuver to get in the parking spot which stopped traffic both ways but not one horn was honked!

On Saturday I went garage saling starting in a bad part of town and ending in a nicer area. In South Austin I met a very nice family at a garage sale and we went with them to a really cool swimming spot in San Marcos on Sunday.

I have hit every video game store in town already and between them and the garage sales the hunting is pretty decent here.

Last night we went to a free outdoor concert of the string section of the Austin Symphony. It was so cool. They did everything from Mozart to Lady Gaga. The view of the city from there was awesome. Check out the picture. After the concert we grabbed some gluten free pizza at Austin's Pizza. Almost as good as Mama's.

This morning I got up early and went for a long run along the trails of Lady Bird Lake. It was beautiful and awesome. In a few hours we're going to see a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse. Tomorrow night we're going to that baseball game with my friend Dave and his girlfriend.

My only complaint is that our hotel is a roachy dump in a bad part of town but that's what we get for just going as cheap as possible. Not spending much time here as you can see so no big deal.

The weather is awesome though unseasonably cool but it's supposed to warm up as the week goes on.

I'll send more updates as the week goes on. Don't miss me too much!

Greetings from Austin Texas Part II

So the last time I checked in we were about to go to the Alamo Drafthouse for a movie. Well we did, and it was awesome! It's the original place that serves food and drink while you watch the movie and they have a strict no talking and no phones policy. That is my kind of place. Plus they have a pre movie show where they show old trailers and promo stuff that is themed to the movie you are about to see. So cool!

I took Eileen to Lady Bird Lake (where I had run early in the morning) and we went for an awesome long walk together. Check out this panoramic I took of the river.

On Tuesday night we went to a Round Rock Express baseball game with our friend Dave and his girlfriend Amy. As you can see, we had awesome seats but I think this field would look awesome from anywhere. The Express lost the game in extra innings but we did see Brent Lillibridge hit a two run jack as soon as we got in our seats.

On Wednesday I returned to Lady Bird Lake for another early morning run. On Wednesday night Eileen and I went to the Congress Avenue bridge, also known as the Bat Bridge. There are 1.6 million bats under the bridge and every night people gather to watch them fly out at dusk. It was really beautiful.

Another thing we've been doing is eating, a lot. Pretty much every restaurant around here is at least decent and pretty much every place has gluten-free and vegetarian menus.

The weather has gotten hotter but the humidity is almost non-existent. Might hit triple digits later today.

Today I'm going to check out Pinballz Arcade. Tomorrow we're going swimming in the world famous Barton Springs Pool. We're sad our trip will be drawing to a close soon, but there is still much to do!

I forgot a few things in my first email. First of all, they sell wine and beer everywhere here, and it's cheap, like five bucks a bottle for my favorite Yellow Tail at 7-Eleven and Walgreens. Also, the first day we were here we went to the Whole Foods corporate headquaters/flagship store and we saw the pictured promo display for Ah!Laska Chocolate syrup. Only six bucks a bottle (but there's a coupon!). So in short, wine is cheaper and more available than Ah!Laska chocolate syrup here.

*********************************************

Lots of pics in this spoiler tag:

Spoiler (hover to show)

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[Duke.Togo]

Congrats on taking the big steps, Shawn. I enjoyed seeing the Facebook posts about your trip, and you're working hard at it. Don't give up.

[singlebanana]

Sounds like a great plan. Very happy for you and wishing you and the Mrs. the best.

[zcrich01]

Did you end up moving? I've only heard wonderful things about Austin and have every inclination to vacation there before too long

[GrayGhost81]

We're still in New Jersey. Basically the situation is status quo. Everything is just taking longer than we thought it would, but we're not letting it get us down. I've been wanting to move to Texas for my entire life. Another few months or so will be no big deal.

[gbpxl]

I was forced to move to Florida from Minnesota and I'm not surprised at all to hear that your friends moved back to Jersey (I met a lot of them while I was there). Place was a f'ing hellhole. I went back in 2013 to visit my parents for a while and I haven't been back since, nor will I ever go back.

I relocated back home to Minnesota after not having lived here for 8 years and it's pretty tough to regain a social life, especially when you didn't have a big one to begin with when you left. Job market is really good here so there's no problems there at least.

[GrayGhost81]

I've been reluctant to update this thread because in reality, nothing has happened since our trip in August. In early January my wife went to Austin for three days for what seemed like an extremely promising job interview. The interview went very well and we really thought that was our golden ticket. In the end she didn't get job, and I knew we'd have to move on to Plan B.

Plan B is: Eileen is moving to Texas immediately, taking with her what possessions we have left, with her sole mission in life to find a full time job with health benefits (because she is on my employer's insurance right now, preventing me from leaving my job first).  As soon as her benefits kick in, I will move down there and join her to live happily ever after. I'll be living a monkish existence by myself in NJ for at least three months, but I'm ready, and my job is going into a busy season anyway (which brings also the benefit of a lot of much appreciated overtime hours). 

So, it's finally real. We have a lease on a really nice apartment, the moving company is all set up for less than two weeks from now, and although as mentioned before we're both willing to walk away from our mortgage, we still have some not so hot leads on short-selling our house in NJ. If that happens, great. If not, we don't care any more.

Once again, thanks for the kind words of encouragement. Looking back on this thread, I received very little actual advice, but I'm the kind of person who find communicating my thoughts to other people to be very organizational and thus calming, and I appreciate ya'll just listening.

Below are some random thoughts about my previous posts in this thread, followed by one of my favorite songs about Texas.

Our current plan is to first and foremost aggressively pay off our credit card debts (under $5K right now, they were a lot higher when we first met, we've been paying them down for years and now finally this is a goal that is seriously within reach).

We actually got the credit cards paid off months ago, but our dirty little secret was my wife's student loan, which at this time last year was about $4,000. My wife was never big on paying it. I know she felt guilty about bringing it into our relationship. Logically, we're in the same boat so I told her it would have to be paid before we moved. We paid it aggressively for the past three months and killed it last Thursday 02/26, just in time. We are completely debt free, for real this time.

Slowly getting rid of all of our earthly possessions to lighten our load and make for a fresher start. Our house is already looking like we've moved out.

This is something I'm so glad I did, as it is really paying off now. We're still finding stuff to donate or throw away, which I guess is a good thing, but we are not bringing too much furniture at all and I am really glad that every single week for the past year I was putting stuff in the garbage and the donation pile.

Only 81 days until we set flight. It'll be here in a flash, I know it. Gotta keep getting those ducks lined up.

It's crazy looking back and seeing that I was this nervous about our initial trip. I wasn't sure Eileen would like the city, but more importantly I think I knew we weren't actually ready. I envisioned us vacationing there in August, one or both of us getting jobs, and moving the next month. Looking back now, I'm very grateful it didn't happen that way. We still had the aforementioned debts and considerably less in savings at the time.