How the heck do you go about moving cross country?
I live in the southeast, and I'm finally in a situation where nothing is really keeping me here, so in the next month or so I'm intending to begin selling everything I can't fit in my car, and move out west.
Unfortunately, I don't have a job lined up or anything like that, which obviously makes things more difficult. I figure something like offering to put a year of rent into an escrow account can probably cover that?
On top of that though, how are you supposed to get a feel for everything? Like, there are virtual tours and things like that, but it's not exactly the same.
I guess I'm just looking for general advice and tips at this stage. I feel like I don't even really know what I should be asking, but I'm definitely intent on ending up on the west coast.
I recently completed a move from the Midwest to the east coast for a job, and we basically split it into a couple of parts.
Before even accepting the job offer, my partner and I flew to the city for a weekend to take a look at possible housing options. Friday and Saturday morning were spent scoping out neighborhoods, while Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were then scoping out potential rental options.
It was a lot, but we’re really glad we did that much physical research. We really like the place that we picked (and got lucky enough to get), and I don’t know how we would’ve done it without going there in person to scope everything out.
I feel similarly about wanting to do this, but then I worry about 'striking out' per se and being out more than a few hundred bucks-- between boarding my dog, a round-trip ticket, the ubers, car rental, etc. It feels like it would be a lot. Any sort of optimization I can do there?
I think I would trust Internet-level searches for some rough ideas on neighborhood quality, or places to see in person, but I’d also take a chance to drive / transit around a little in between rental showing appointments, if possible. I really don’t know how to optimize it better, unfortunately.
Do you have your destination narrowed down to a region or a city?
A big +1 to taking transit around a city and exploring neighborhoods of whatever city you want to move to. While you can get a rough idea of what a neighborhood is like on the internet, nothing matches first-hand experience. I recently experienced this myself funnily enough. I've been looking at moving into the big city near the suburb I live in. People on the internet recommended a handful of neighborhoods and mentioned that the neighborhoods I was originally looking at aren't the best choice for someone in their 20s like myself. Well, I checked out the neighborhoods the internet mentioned and really wasn't a fan. Walking through the neighborhoods I was looking at originally, I really liked them and started focusing my apartment search around those neighborhoods.
I would highly recommend traveling in person to check a place out before moving in.
I have moved cross country twice, but both times I had someone I was moving in with on the other side, which made it a fair bit easier, and also not applicable to your situation.
If you have more stuff you are planning on moving with than will fit in your own vehicle, I can recommend using a “moving pod” service like U-Pack or PODS. I personally used U-Pack, and while stuff did shift around in transit, it was pretty hassle-free and easy enough, though I think it was around $3k for the two-thousand or so miles I had it shipped (a few years ago). Which is both a lot, and not very much at the same time.
Edit: I guess I missed where you said you were selling what you couldn’t fit in your car, so maybe not helpful to you, but I figured I’d leave my comment alone in case others want to reference it later.
I mentioned this in another comment but the best way to get a feel for things is to actually live in and explore the area you want to move to. People usually go about this in a few different ways. You could just get a hotel room near the area you want to live in and try to get a feel for things over a weekend. If you want to get a more natural feel, you could go for an Airbnb apartment/home for a week/month and really get a feel for things.
A cheaper way to also get a surface level feel for an area could be POV walking videos on YouTube. It's definitely not the best way to explore a neighborhood and it might be hard to find videos depending on the area you're trying to move to but I like watching them just to get a basic idea of how things look/feel.
Oh, a "long term" rental like an Airbnb for a week/month is a great option I would think. Especially if you aren't moving a bunch of stuff at first, that would let you get to know an area, and give some stability while you look for an apartment to rent for actually moving to.
Works best if you can still leave your "permanent" address at your old place while you are moving, but I believe you could also likely get a P.O. Box from a post office in the area you are planning to move to, to use for local mail or as a "local" address while you figure the rest out.
Rental P.O box was actually something I didn't even consider but would work too. I believe the USPS lets you rent P.O boxes so you could rent a P.O box as you live in an Airbnb and explore a neighborhood for a bit. Overall the Airbnb + P.O Box option wouldn't be cheap but it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to break a lease and sign a new one elsewhere.
Moving without a job is pretty scary, what industry are you in? You mentioned putting up a year's worth of rent in escrow so it sounds like you have enough money saved up to be pretty comfortable without a job for a while.
When I moved from a small rural town in NC all the way to LA (pretty much as different and far away as you can get from where I grew up) it took me a hot minute to get over the culture shock. My living situation fell through while I was making the drive across the country so I had to scramble to find a room to rent on FB marketplace while staying in hotels which ate up a lot of my savings. While I eventually landed on my feet, it was pretty stressful and soured my first impressions of LA quite a bit. Didn't help that only 4 months after moving there and starting my life over, covid hit and basically shut down the entire city and put me back to square one. If I wasn't young and adaptable I probably wouldn't have been able to get through it as well as I did, and I definitely couldn't go through that bullshit again haha.
I basically did what you did though, except I did have a job lined up. I moved out of my place with only what I could fit in the back of my tiny Volvo S40 (that thing was crammed so full of crap that it weighed the suspension down a full 6 inches) and drove across the country in a week with no real plan and only a vague idea of what my life was going to be like. I think you'll be ok, sometimes you just need a big life change and a cross country move will definitely give you that. Just don't be like me and lock yourself in your room for 6 months straight doing nothing but working and playing video games; it'll kill your motivation and ambition to do anything exciting and fun.