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Friday, August 4, 2017

Trump’s right: Adaptability is Key


I was reading the news today and read something President Trump said about people not moving to where jobs are available.
Trump is right about this: Americans need to move where the jobs are
August 3 at 3:57 PM
Vehicles sit in rush hour traffic at the interchange between the Interstate 405 and 10 freeways in this aerial photograph taken over Los Angeles, California. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg).
President Trump said something last week that deserves a lot more attention. Americans “are going to have to start moving,” Trump said in his interview with The Wall Street Journal (Politico leaked the full transcript of the exchange this week).
He’s right.
Americans aren’t packing up and moving as they used to. Mobility is at an all-time low, according to the Census Bureau, which has tracked how many Americans change addresses since World War II. About 10 percent of Americans moved in the past year, the Census Bureau found. That’s way down from the 1950s, '60s, '70s and early '80s, when more than 20 percent of the nation was on the go.
(continue reading https://www.washingtonpost.com/....)
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Making ends meet is a key factor when it comes to finances, a rather important aspect of preparedness. I read all the time about people not finding jobs, or not finding good ones or jobs that pay well. Well… sometimes there aren’t any around and you need to move.
Especially in smaller communities this can be an issue, even more so if the specific town or general area is going through a depression.
In general people don’t like moving. It’s a very natural instinct to feel safe in the environment you know and avoid changes but sometimes they are necessary. It’s also true that once you do it a couple times it gets easier and moving when needed or when you feel like it isn’t scary any more. Like with everything else in life, we adapt, we get used to it. And when you get used to adapting to new places, new people and new surroundings you don’t stress over doing it again if you have to.
Now I’m not saying move around all the time. Sometimes though, it is worth the effort, especially if the economic stability will allow greater peace of mind, security and overall a better quality of life in general.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

People don't often talk about the practicality of moving for better jobs. I have lived in several states as an adult, over the past 20+ years. Moving is hard. Making new friends is hard. Raising children without grandparents and cousins nearby is hard. However, for us, moving was the logical choice. It also helped us become more independent, and we learned to rely on each other back when we were newly married, young adults.

I will note that people must consider cost of moving as well as the overall cost of living in the new location. We are in a part of the country now with much higher salaries (nearly twice what we made elsewhere), but the cost of living is also much higher. Do the math before making a big move, but be open to moving if it will mean a better quality of life for your family.

Anonymous said...

For some of us, the reason we don't move is because we own property that cannot be moved with us. Our family has a five generation owned piece of property. Its been family owned since before Texas was a state (1836). We would have difficulty selling it, so many great memories of it so choose to live here, though its inhospitable climate (especially summers which are infernos) does make us wish it weren't the case.

If you didn't have this or other connections - good points about moving where the work is. Makes realtors happy, that is for sure.

alex carter said...

They're moving less because they're effectively poorer than they were decades ago.

Decades ago, you could hitch-hike or somehow get yourself to where a job was offered, get a cheap room in a rooming house, work a few months or even just a few weeks, and have the wife and kids come on over and put them into an apartment or even a house. It was like today, getting an offer of $50 an hour. Now, it's more like, Yeah, I'll go across the country for ... $10 an hour.

People are staying put they're staying where they have family, friends, they know where things are, they're more likely to get hired for that min-wage job because they went to the local high school, etc.

People may be staying put because the return on moving is so marginal. Meanwhile, maybe they know some really good fishing or foraging areas. Maybe they're doing activity that's not measured, like barter, scrounging, maybe they know where some good food dumpsters are. That's enough to make a person stay put in third-world USA.

John said...

Now at age 64, living in the family homestead, traveled much, and living and working for 25 years in the Orient and Middle East: my wife of 42 years and I have come to the conclusion that our most valuable asset is one another and the relationships we have built. We have the ideal place that we would move to in the United States if it weren't for all the people we know and that value they bring to our lives. We have taught survival, Permaculture, and the frugal Prosumer lifestyle and have a fairly high level of skill in all these areas but nothing compares to the value that other people bring to our lives both financially and mentally. We have come to the conclusion to move to our ideal spot would be far too expensive in lost relationships.
We have discovered that the more "one another's" you have the less it cost to live and the less you have to earn.
When you start to evaluate whether you need to move to find a job do not forget to factor in what we call UnIncome that comes from the relationships you have invested in over the years.

Jon said...

I like living close to family. But when I run out of money. I move. It's a pain to move a whole family though. I didn't bother buying a house until I got a remote job and could live wherever I wanted (back to where I grew up). I could understand why people don't want to move anymore once their family has grown, it's a real pain. But if there is no money where you live then definitely move. If I ever lose the job I have now I would move again, no problem, if I couldn't find another remote job. But having a remote job is definitely nice and I would be willing to give up 10 or $20k to have one.