Constraints

When compared to a lot of people we really aren’t constrained by much. I’m a software engineer which means if I want to make a crazy-high salary I need to live in a relatively few major cities: Bay Area, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and New York. But I also have the ability to either work remotely or travel for consulting gigs a few times a year. L and I have also built quite a nice life savings so we can certainly go quite a while without having to work. The exact number of years we can survive without working greatly depends on where we live and how we live. But we could go several years in the major cities and indefinitely in the less expensive parts of the country.

We have children though, which is quite a constraint. We have two boys and the oldest is of kindergarten age. If we were normal people we’d include “good schools” as a requirement. But we’re not normal people. We don’t necessarily believe that high average test scores are a good indication of a good environment for our children. And we’ve also been seriously considering alternative educational environments, like homeschooling. So we have more freedom when it comes to location. Though, it could be argued that in order for homeschooling to be optimal we’d want access to museums and other places to inspire and learn outside of the home. And it would certainly be a lot easier for us if we had a community of other homeschoolers around, which favors larger and more liberal cities.

We generally dislike very hot and humid weather and very cold weather. The Bay Area is just about perfect, but where we are on the Peninsula it’s a little too sunny and hot for me. I’d prefer more crisp days. I don’t think weather is a huge constraint though. But it is something to consider.

We don’t currently have family where we live. That sucks. We have to fly all the way across the country, with two young children, to see family. And because our family is just about all in the Midwest they don’t have much of an incentive to visit us in California. We’d like to live closer to family if possible. We’d like for our children to spend more time with their grandparents and cousins.

I have fantasies of spending all summer with our extended family and their kids at a lake house in the country. But we are the only family that could make that happen financially. Everyone else in highly constrained by money and work schedules. To be honest, we are currently constrained by work schedules but we don’t have to be.

So that really argues for living close enough to drive a few hours so we can spend weekends with them. I’m a private pilot, so we could also extend that to a few hours in a small plane. Though, I might be starting to hit fantasy land again with that.

There’s also the option of living abroad. We both want to do it at some point in our lives. And we’d love for our boys to grow up with that sort of experience. But both of our mothers are reluctant to fly, and I believe don’t even have valid passports anymore so that makes living abroad less desirable from a family standpoint.

The discussion of needing to work at living close to family makes me want to increase the chances of our boys living close to us during and after college. Both L and I believe that it’s a horrible tradition in the United States for children to leave home at 18 and move across the country, only seeing their family a couple times a year. Of course, we both went ahead and did it ourselves, but we don’t like the outcome and don’t want our children to feel the need to do this. I need think more about why we do this. I wonder if we can find a place that they wouldn’t want to move away from.