New2Maine.com

Some of you may be wondering why we’re moving to Maine? That’s a difficult question to answer, but I’ll try my best. I had never set foot in Maine before July of 2006. And now we’re moving there, only 13 months later. Strange, no? Well, yes, probably. But you’re only young once, and so we’re going.

We’ve been contemplating a move for a while. We both went to college in New York’s Capital Region, and we’ve never left. By the time I leave here at the end of July, I’ll have lived in this area for 10 years. It’s simply time for a change of scenery. We’ve talked about moving south (the Carolinas or Virginia), and we’ve even contemplated moving west. Maine never entered the conversation.

Then, for a friend’s birthday, I went whitewater rafting in central Maine last July. The town we were in was very economically depressed and I wouldn’t ever consider living there, but on the way up, we drove through Portland on 295 and it caught my eye. Something about it just matched the picture I’d had in my mind’s eye of where I wanted live. I even called Her from the rafting camp and (only half kidding) reported that she should start packing. I knew we needed to come back and find out more.
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After much cropping and scaling to get this theme to look right in Internet Explorer, I noticed that the header image of our dream house on Prout’s Neck was in pretty bad shape. I cropped a new one from the original at the correct size and have put it in place. Now it looks like I actually know how to use my camera. Well, at least I think so.

We finally are making some progress in the apartment hunt. I’ve heard back from two different landlords and have been in touch via email with three or four others. Craig’s List even has a few listings now for August 1st availability! We’ve also heard back from the real estate agent we met with when we were up in February and will be meeting with him on Friday I think. It’s looking like our trip this weekend may be very worthwhile after all. Only two more days of work until we leave…I’m counting the hours.

She and I are going up for a little apartment hunting and a mini-getaway for our two year anniversary over Memorial Day weekend. We’re heading out Thursday night to hopefully avoid some traffic. Note to anyone traveling to Maine–I-495 during rush hour is a parking lot, avoid it at all costs. We’ve tracked down a few listings for apartments that we’ll be going to see and will probably talk to a few real estate agents too. I’m not sure we’ll be able to find the place we’ll be renting, as it’s still quite early, but we should be able to get an idea of what we get for our price range. We’re hoping to be in the $800-1000 range, depending on location and extras like a fenced yard for the dog or laundry hookups.

For those of you looking to head up to Maine, I wanted to remind everyone to shop around for a hotel room. We ended up booking through HotWire.com for a total of $143 for three nights (tax included). This is for a two star hotel in Scarborough, but the price we got was almost $50 cheaper (total, not per-night) than Expedia, or Travelocity for the same hotel. Even Priceline wasn’t able to come up with anything for $45 a night. I’m sure this probably won’t be the nicest hotel in the area, but it’ll serve our purposes well (our purposes being a place to sleep in the area of Portland). I will withhold the name of the hotel for now until I can write up a formal review of it when we get back. We’re bringing along our camera too, so New2Maine should have some photos of the area soon. Stay tuned…

Anyone looking to move to another area of the country should check out the relative cost of living before doing so. In fact, for many people, that might be one of the determining factors in whether or not a move is advisable, or even feasible. Since She and I are going to Maine, costs be damned, I thought it prudent to see how much our costs might change in doing so. There are a number of cost of living and salary calculators on the web. Here I present the results from three of these sites. The conclusion I reach from the somewhat dissimilar numbers is that our cost of living isn’t going to change much, but what little it does will be in the less expensive direction (I hope).

Source #1 – Sperling’s Best Places. Sperling’s asks that you put in your salary and your current and destination locations. For the sake of simple numbers, I told them we made $100,000 between the two of us (no, that’s not actually what we make, but it’s simpler math). Here is what I found out. According to Sperling’s, the Portland area is about 3.7% more expensive than New York’s Capital Region, our current home. Albany-Schenectady-Troy rates a 108.7 on their cost of living scale (where 100 is the national average) and Portland a 113. Ouch. Interestingly, Albany is more expensive in almost every area which Sperling’s lists, with one major exception. Food, transportation, health, and miscellaneous expenses are all more expensive here. The cost of utilities is way out of whack with the rest of the country, but is pretty much a wash. The area where Portland fares much worse than Albany is housing. Given that housing is generally everyone’s number one monthly expense, it’s not surprising that this single item would cause Portland to rate as more expensive than Albany. And the housing cost difference is not slight either–118.6 for Portland versus 84.5 for Albany. I guess the $900-1000 range we’ve been seeing for two bedroom apartments is about right.
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