The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Real Estate and Landlording => Topic started by: whywork on December 19, 2020, 02:52:08 PM
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Given a chance to buy a home anywhere in the US, which city would you choose and why. Assume you still have kids at home and schools are important.
We will personally be getting there (FIREing and moving out of current HCOL) and wanted to see what the community thinks are the best places
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You will need to be a lot more specific.
What kind of weather do you like?
What's your housing/COL budget?
What kind of politics do you like?
How big of a "city" do you mean?
How old are your kids and what do THEY like?
Do you like outdoor/indoor sports, museums/arts/culture, etc? If so, how would you prioritize?
Do you value proximity to family? If so, where do they live?
Do you want to be near an international airport?
I could go on and on. Don't get me wrong - you'll get lots of answers. But they will be from people who live where *they* like to live, which might be the opposite of where you want to live.
-W
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If schools are the priority then go for the best school district. Fairfax county (Alexandria VA) seems to rank pretty high.
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check out school digger for school rankings or niche has similar rankings
us news world report just updated there rankings of best place to live - Colorado does quite well
https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/best-places-to-live
there are many other rankings if you search on the inter-webs
like others have said, you are too vague right now.
In a perfect world, i personally would want to live in a great school district (top 20% national ranking), on a lake front lot with large enough lake to tool around on, within 1-2 hours of a ski resort (with 1,000+ ft vertical), preferably next to a medium sized college town in a "purple" state, with total our of pocket home costs (PITI) of no more than $2,500 a month for a SFH. if you know where this unicorn land is please let me know.
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We actually selected our location based on the old NYT series about the "hardest" (ie, worst) and "easiest" (best) counties to live in based on 2010 census data:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-hardest-places-to-live-in-the-us.html
You can click on the map (only broken down by county as that's how the census data is tabulated) and see rankings based on their criteria (income, education, health/obesity, etc).
We bought 2 houses, actually, but decided we liked UT better and sold the Los Alamos one.
That data is 10 years old now, of course. I hope they do a followup in a few years to see what (if anything) has changed.
-W