Help me decide, because I'm an idiot and can't do it myself...

So, I’m writing this blog both to help sort things out in my own head, as well as to ask the opinion of a few people who are not emotionally or financially invested in the decision-making process that is going to help determine where Sara and I move to (or if we move at all). As most (all?) of you know, I was offered a job in Salt Lake City with TSA. When I posted that information on facebook with the very simple query of whether or not I should take that job or stay in Eugene where I’m happy and have strong ties to friends, family and community (but no job and no prospects of “career”), the response was overwhelmingly that I should move. But it was also, as I said, the very simple “one variable” equation. The truth is that SLC might be impossible to do for financial reasons (we’ll get to that), and that before making the decision to go there, I really needed to sit down and figure out more than that single variable. This is the much longer, thought out version of the choice that lay before us.

This will be long, and not nearly as fun to read as my year end blog. If you don’t have it in you to put in the time, I certainly won’t hold it against you. You are all good friends, I value all of your advice, and I hope to hear from each of you what you think. I chose each of you (well, the one’s who got the email from me directing you here; if you found it on your own, well, bully for you! and I’ll still take your opinion into account), because you have no vested interest, and can offer me the sort of sound advice that only impartial observers can.

So, here is the case for and against each of my three options:

Eugene:

Wow, we really love it here. It’s home. It’s where I’ve spent the last 18 ½ years of my life, where I’ve owned my home for the last 12 years, and the place that I truly never thought I would leave. Sara has moved around for much of her adult life, and for the first time has someone and someplace that she wants to call home. As far as non-financial comfort goes, there is no better choice for us.

Eugene has a few things on the “pro” side of the ledger when it comes to finances as well. The biggest of these is poker. I have both AIPCO and my home game, “The Rob”, which are based here. Going back four years (a suitable amount of time to factor in both good and bad years), I have averaged $450 a month from those two sources. That’s all cash, non-taxed, so roughly equivalent to $625 or so from “real” jobs. I also have the cheesecake business with the restaurant down the road, which between what I sell directly to them, and what I sell to friends as “overstock” from the restaurant orders comes out to another $100 a month, also cash. So, another $140 or so, giving me the equivalent of roughly $750 a month worth of income that will be lost if I leave the area. That money needs to be accounted for in any decision.

Poker is also one of my only social outlets, and a major part of my life. Speaking of social outlets, not all of you know this (and if you’re uncomfortable with it, I do apologize), but I’m active and involved in the kink community here in Eugene as well. I publicly scene at the local Fetish Balls. I enjoy performing there, and it is most definitely a part of Sara’s and my life here, both publicly and privately. We are able to be open and honest about it because Eugene is such an open and honest place to live. It’s just another part of the community. I am paid a nominal amount for performing at the Balls, but it isn’t enough money to make much of a difference either way. Having BDSM as a part of our lives isn’t something that we shout from the rooftops, but neither is it something that we ever have to hide. Living here, we don’t generally need to worry about ramifications of sharing that knowledge with the wrong person.

There are things that I do have in Eugene that I can find elsewhere: bowling, coaching Babe Ruth baseball, etc., but I am more deeply rooted in those communities here, simply because I’ve been doing it for so long here.

In the short term, Sara will make less money here. However, her ideal scenario is to change careers into a few different areas (Yoga instruction, holistic/naturopathic medicine) that are both accessible and active here. The problem is that they require quite a bit of money, and that leads us into the crux of the problem with Eugene.

I can’t get a job. Even if I do get a job, it is likely to be something that pays $12 an hour or less, has little to no benefits, and has little to no opportunity to turn into a “career”. Obviously, it would have been great if TSA would have brought me on here, as all of this would be a moot point. But thanks to their changed hiring guidelines, and the brutal Eugene economy, I missed out by a few spots on getting hired here.

I’ve tried to find work for 2 ½ years here. I’ve put in over 500 applications, and had over 40 interviews. I’ve been qualified or overqualified for all of those jobs, and I don’t have anything to show for it. I had a group interview at one point last year where I thought I would finally be able to show how much better I was than the other applicants, and walked out depressed because I was only the fourth or fifth most overqualified person in the room. (Really, a lawyer and a teacher applying for an entry-level social work position?)

The marketplace is brutal, and doesn’t look to be getting better. And the longer I’m out of the workplace, the harder it is for me to find work. I’ll be underpaid at nearly any job I can find in the short term.

If I move, I’ll need to rent my house. I hopefully have two friends that are going to move in, but if they don’t, I’ve recently come to find that the rental market here is brutal as well. A good friend just told me that it took him nearly 6 months, and three lowered offers, to rent out a house similar to mine, for an amount that would just barely cover my mortgage. I can’t afford to eat this house payment for more than a month or so.

It’s expensive to live in Eugene. Food is high, gas is high, utilities are high, and wages are low. Poker offsets some of that, cheesecakes help, but without a decent job as well, we can’t survive.


Utah:

Utah only has two things going for it, but on a scale of 1-10, they’re a 10. I’ll never have to get another job for the rest of my life. TSA will be a career, and because I’m not a complete idiot, I’ll never have to worry about getting fired. It’s also full federal benefits from day one. I’ve never even sniffed a benefits package like what I’d have there. But other than those two things, there isn’t much to lure us there. There is no question it’s a great job, and if it had been offered to me in Eugene, I would have been set for life.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t offered it in Eugene, I was offered it in SLC. The problem with the TSA job is that its only guaranteed 20 hours a week. I spoke this morning with the hiring coordinator there, to get a feel for how easy it would be to pick up extra hours. You can’t just “pick up” someone’s shift if they call in sick, take a vacation, etc. They have to be offering overtime, which is only done in peak seasons, or when they’re understaffed. Right now they’re understaffed, but they are in a massive hiring binge (I’d be the third of five or six classes of employees hired), and she said that once that’s done, they’re not going to be short on employees at all. Full-time positions are awarded based upon seniority, and there is a long list of people waiting for them.

So, basically, while long-term, I’d be set with TSA (Eventually I could transfer or accept a promotion elsewhere), in the short-term, it would be like having a job that paid less than full-time minimum wage.

On top of that, it is one of the few places we’ve ever found that Sara’s fall back career position (she’s been a vet tech most of her life), isn’t a slam dunk for her to get a job. The last time she changed clinics in Eugene, it took her two hours to find a new job. We dropped off two resumes, and before dropping off a third, the second place called her back and hired her on the spot. But for whatever reason, there’s very little marketplace for her in SLC. If she can’t get a job before we were to move, we can’t survive there financially.

I’d be giving up all poker income. There are a few “poker houses” there, just as there are in Eugene. I wouldn’t play at them for the same reason I don’t play at them here, the house always wins. They take far too much money as a “rake”, and the games are unbeatable from a player standpoint. They are decent enough social outlets, but not anything that I could make money at, no matter how good I am.

Sara wouldn’t be able to change careers, as we’d be struggling just to survive financially for a few years at least. It would take us somewhere in the neighborhood of $5-$6K to move there, once all moving, storage, snow tires, etc. costs are figured in.

Rent is cheaper, gas/food/utilities are cheaper, but we’d be losing money every month on the difference between my mortgage, the rental income being charged here, and what we’d be paying in rent there. So most of that is a wash. I would also be an absentee landlord, which would make it much more difficult if there was any problem with the house in Eugene.

While there is a decent enough kink community in Utah, it is all “underground”. We would not be thrilled at having to hide that part of our lives. Sara is also basically a Nouveau hippy, and we’re not sure how well the tye-dye clothing and flowers in the hair will go over there.

And of course, there’s this:

Portland:

Our third choice is moving to Portland. In many ways this seems like the best choice, but in other ways, the worst. The biggest advantage to Portland is that from a wage standpoint, we’d be better off there than anywhere else. Far ahead in the short-term, and possibly ahead in the long-term. Sara would be able to make double what she’s making now, maybe more once overtime is figured in. She would be working a lot harder, and not as happy because of it, but we’d not be struggling for money.

It would be a mixed bag for me financially. I don’t have a job waiting for me there, but the marketplace is considerably bigger, and I can’t imagine being out of work for long. Even if I take a crappy $10-12 an hour gig, combined with Sara’s income, we’d be making far more than either Eugene or SLC. But, I wouldn’t necessarily have a “career” either.

One of our biggest fears in all of this is that neither of us ever wants to go through this again. My last job was a crappy job, but it paid well enough, my boss was great, and the benefits were mediocre but serviceable. I stayed there for 16 years out of a combination of comfort and loyalty to my boss. But it certainly wasn’t a “career” and in the end, the industry turned and I was out of work. I would hate to go to work for someplace, in any industry, where that happened again in 10 years. I do not want to be doing this at 50. That’s the allure of TSA, and the fear with anything else. I’m a great employee. In 16 years at my last job, I missed two days of work. I have a very high IQ, a strong work ethic, and can work individually or in a team. I’m self-motivated and secure in myself and my decisions. I’ll thrive in any industry. But if that industry collapses around me, there’s not much I can do about it. TSA isn’t going anywhere, I can’t say that about many other jobs.

I would retain the AIPCO side of poker, as I’d simply commute down to Eugene on that third Friday every month, and be able to play. I would lose my weekly home game, but have enough poker playing friends in Portland that I would most likely be able to have regular play up there as well. It would take a while to generate the income that I do here, simply because it would take a while to learn the players tendencies. But it would be available.

Socially, both kink and everything else would be far better up in Portland. There is much more to do than there is in Eugene, and far more people to do it with. I’m not much of a big city person any more (I loathe when I have to travel back to SoCal for any reason), but Portland has a much smaller feel than most cities its size. Sara and I both have ample friends and family in Portland, and would easily be able to call it home.

I would be closer to the house in Eugene if anything were to go wrong here.

Sara would probably be able to switch careers more readily in Portland, but it would still take some time as we’d have to get me settled into something that paid well, and get out from the up front debt of moving, neither of which would be immediate, but probably would happen quicker than either of the other two places.

Portland is also easily the most expensive of the three places to live. We’d lose a few hundred a month on the mortgage/rent/rent; gas/food/utilities are higher there; I’d have the added cost of gas to/from Eugene in order to keep the poker (and possibly cheesecake) income coming in. But, we’d also be making the most money of the three.

The biggest problem with Portland is that it combines the negatives of Eugene and SLC. We’d still incur the moving costs (smaller because of a smaller distance, and no need for snow tires or some of the other things needed for Utah), but they would be paired with the career uncertainty of Eugene.


Summary: So there you have it, our conundrum. We’ve been in a daze for the last week just trying to figure it all out. Sara has been taking it very hard, and I’ve been more lost than my usual self (although it has focused me pretty well at the poker tables).

I would love to hear any of your thoughts on what YOU think is the best option and why. As I said before, I value all of your input. I’ve included all of the friends I have that have that intuitive/empathic/instinct based compass inside of them, and I ask you all to question that side of yourself and let me know what it says.


IMPORTANT: remember that the email that brought you here in the first place was a GROUP email. Any responses sent to that will go to everyone in the group. So if you have private advice, suggestions, comments, please send them in a separate email, either on facebook, or directly to me at foxmuldur@aol.com.

Thank you all for taking the time to get through this. I appreciate your support and love.