But what if you want to do something silly like send your kid to school? I get that the South has a pretty reasonable COL, but they also have demonstrably terrible services like education.
Well, I honestly can't think of a single state of the old Confederacy that has a public education system that even comes close to New Jersey or Massachusetts. I'm sure there are some good individual schools, but the combination of very low investment in public education and unorganized, low-paid teachers is deadly.
I'm confused. All you need is ONE school (per kid, per unit time...). Your kid cannot attend every school in the system simultaneously. You can definitely have the LCOL and a decent (even excellent) public school in the South, particularly if you're in a major metro area, even if you find that the system on the state level is terrible. In some cases, you don't even have to be zoned there because you can send your kid to a magnet school ranked in the Top 25 public high schools in the nation. You don't have to like the whole system; your part of the system just has to be acceptable.
Well, I don't know about you, but I find the idea of searching for that needle in the haystack to be really unappealing and tedious. Honestly, though, when it comes time to retire, I'll probably consider moving to a Southern state due to the fact that they don't care about education, because that would reduce my tax burden when I'm on a more fixed income than I am now. Going from New Jersey to somewhere like Mississippi would be like taking the weights off the bat when stepping out of the on-deck circle, financially speaking.
You get a little bit of this everywhere, though.
I live in So Cal, and at least half of our locals schools really suck. And we transferred our son from a really bad school to an only "sorta" bad school.
I have to admit, I searched the job boards yesterday afternoon for northern Alabama (lots of Chemical processing jobs, which would be great if I were 20 years younger and could remember my college Chem E/ distillation). I am even remembering a conversation with an old guy here who mentioned Huntsville as the "next place to be".
In any event, it's all hard. Where I live, rents are through the ROOF and people who live here are totally pissed. I mean, someone was advertising a BR/BA in a house for $1400 a month, utilities included and all the comments were horrible. "You're crazy, you're greedy, something needs to be DONE!" I'm kind of over pointing out that it's supply and demand, and in fact if you bought a 2BR 1BA home in that neighborhood, the mortgage alone would be $2800, so $1400 is actually cheaper than buying a home. (And $1200 is the going rate for a room these days).
The locals especially talk about how unfair it is that they cannot afford to stay - they can't afford the rents, they can't afford to buy. And many of them think they have a *right* to be here because they were born here. News flash, this place is nicer than 95% of the country, so other people want to live here. You don't have a "right" to live here unless you have the money to live here.
It makes it challenging for everyone. High rents, high housing prices, low inventory, and a lot of people doing AirBNB or VRBO because they can make more money. The people who have owned for a long time get mad because it ruins the neighborhood, the people who bought later are just trying to keep above water.