1. Pay your excise tax. This is done at the local level, so in Portland, we had to visit City Hall on Congress. In order to accomplish this piece of the registration puzzle, you’ll need the following:
   • Proof of insurance
   • Your VIN
   • Money (they take cash, check, or plastic)

   For Her 2002 Subaru Forester S, the excise tax was $91. For my 2002 Subaru WRX, it was $95. Not too bad, but it’s an annual tax, so it will be a bit expensive over the long run.

2. Go to BMV and fill out the registration and title paperwork. The BMV/DMV is everyone’s favorite place in the world, right? Unfortunately, there’s no way to avoid it. We’ve gone twice so far, once for our Maine driver licenses and once for registration. We breezed in and out at about 1:30 on a Thursday afternoon (driver licenses). The wait at 10:00 AM on Tuesday was quite a bit longer, but it gave us plenty of time to fill out the paperwork. You’ll need to bring the following with you:
   • Receipt excise tax payment
   • Bill of sale for vehicle (just in case, though we didn’t actually need this)
   • Title from previous state of ownership
   • Proof of registration in previous state
   • Proof of current insurance
   • Your current odometer reading

   There are two separate forms to fill out for this part. The first is for your new title in Maine. The second is for the vehicle registration itself. Once your ticket number is called (you’ll need a B ticket for this in Portland–can’t say whether they use the same system at other BMV locations), the actual registration and title process is pretty quick–10 or 15 minutes. The fees are $25 for the registration (annual), and $23 for a new title (one-time).

   If you want a special license plate (the have a lobster plate, a loon plate, a UMaine Black Bear plate, and a UMaine System plate available to the general public), there’s an extra $20 charge. After the first year, you pay $15 extra each renewal year. These extra monies benefit various Maine causes.

So there you go. That’s the process. The Maine BMV site outlines the above process, but isn’t particularly specific about what the differences were depending on whether this was an out-of-state transfer or a vehicle purchased in Maine. The big difference is that you don’t need to pay sales tax, as you didn’t buy it in Maine, and you don’t need the green dealer form they mention (though this is why we brought our bill of sale, just in case). I’ve seen a few hits here searching for information about registration transfers, so hopefully this answers all those questions. If you need any more information, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Total truck rental cost, before taxes and gas, breaks down as follows:

Days included : 2
Estimated miles: 250
1 days added : $56.00
40 miles added : $22.40
Total extra added : $78.40
Truck Size: 16′ Truck
Truck base price: $228.00
July 07 Mover’s Guide – 10% Fri – Sat $22.80
Furniture pads: $13.00
Hand trucks: $0.00
Cost Recovery fee: $9.00
Due at drop off:
Refundable deposit: $150.00
Total estimated price: $305.60

Taxes, at the New York rate, will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $25.00. I’m budgeting $200 for gas and tolls (hopefully it won’t be quite that bad, but I’d doubt this thing gets more than 8 or 10 miles per gallon, so we’re looking at probably 35 gallons, minimum). That brings the total cost to $550.00, give or take. Not great, but much better than the $2000, on average, we were quoted by moving companies.

Option A (the Memorial Day pick) was a 2.5 bedroom third floor apartment at Ocean and Walton. The neighborhood was pretty quiet, Back Cove was within walking distance, and the sunlight in the place was stellar. The thought of having a separate office was quite appealing too. Much of the apartment was newly renovated, but the kitchen left something to be desired. There was simply almost no prep space. As I like to cook (and am told I’m pretty good at it), that was a major minus in my book. Balancing that out was the fact that the landlord is a great guy and we’d have loved to live in a building he owns. This place was going for about $1000 a month, plus utilities–just a bit above our original desired cap of $1000, utilities included.

Option B (the winner) was a 2 bedroom second floor apartment on Forest Ave. This one is only a half-mile from Option A, so it’s still within walking distance of Back Cove. Baxter Woods Park is just down the street too, so our dog will get to enjoy the outdoors quite often. The bedrooms are a little bigger, but there are only two of them, so I’ll have to set up my “office” in the guest room. The kitchen has ample counter and storage space, and the feel of the place is just a bit more modern and cheery. Coin-op laundry in the basement is a minus, but the other apartment had hookups, so we would have had to buy a washer and dryer or used a laundromat. In the end, though, the overall value of the apartment was too much to turn down. Forest Ave. is much busier than Walton St., so this place was listed for $925 a month, heat and hot water included.

It’s tough to make your decision solely on the basis of money, and we did not use that as the only deciding factor, but a chief concern in my mind was not financially crippling ourself by taking on an apartment that really was not within our budget. In the winter, the difference between these two places will work out to probably $300 a month or more. That’s just too much money to ignore. We’re happy with the place we chose, regardless of the cost, but the fact that we’ll continue to be able to put money toward an eventual down payment makes us even happier. We finally (almost) have an address! Now it’s time to get the lease signed and start planning the actual move…

Unfortunately, finding information on transferring vehicle registration wasn’t so easy. I eventually gave up on the BMV website and looked to another site which ranked very highly on Google. DMV.org appears to be a clearinghouse site for state motor vehicle departments. The information there is a bit better organized, but I still didn’t find anything on registration transfers. I’ll have to keep digging tomorrow I guess.

The wedding was in New London, another coastal community. I realized that the ocean smell and the sound of waves are probably very high on the list of motivators for moving to Portland. They bring back memories of vacations at the shore when I was young. If you haven’t experienced sleeping within earshot of waves lapping at the beach, do yourself a favor and rent a place on the coast somewhere, if even just for a weekend.

Okay, back to the moving prep. Our very promising apartment off Ocean Ave is still on the table and looks like it will be our new home starting at the end of next month. I’ve been playing a mean game of phone and email tag with the landlord, but we plan to head up to Portland again in two weeks to get a look at the finished renovations and sign the lease, assuming everything looks good. I can’t wait. Once that’s done, the moving planning can begin in earnest.

Speaking of planning for the move, I counted today, and I only have 28 working days left. Yay! While at the wedding this weekend we did enlist some help to drive my car up to Maine and unload the truck. We’re pretty set on renting a moving truck and doing this ourselves–it’s just too expensive to have someone else do it for us. Too bad my company isn’t covering moving costs. I think that’s about it for now. We’re down to seven weeks, give or take. It’s getting so close…

Anyway, We have continued our apartment search and think we may be on to something. We were discussing our apartment hunt with some family we saw at the wake and were lamenting the difficulty of searching for a place to live two-plus months ahead of time. Her uncle suggested the following strategy, and it seems that we have found a few landlords who are interested.

The suggestion is to offer to pay slightly higher rent for a year in exchange for holding the apartment until we’re ready to move. Most of the places we’re looking at are in the $1,000 a month range (that seems to be the going rate for a 2 bedroom in and around Portland). We can’t really move much before July 20th, my last day at work. We’ve found at least one place we very much like, but the owner wants it rented by June 15th, more than a month ahead of when we’d actually be able to occupy it. With the cost of moving and security deposits already weighing heavily on our bank balance, the thought of forking over another $1,000 up front to hold a place when we can’t even live there yet is something we just can’t stomach, especially when we still need to pay our rent in New York too.

So instead, we’ve offered the following to the landlord, and he seems agreeable: we will sign a lease for July 15 and instead of $1,000 a month, we will pay him $1,050 or $1,075 a month for a year. This allows us to amortize the extra $1,000 for June 15-July 15 over the course of an entire year (and pay a little less than $1,000 to boot), and allows the landlord to not have to spend his time and money advertising and showing the apartment. This seems to be a win-win for everyone involved. The landlord doesn’t need to continue to try to get the apartment rented, and we don’t need to see a dozen more apartments when we head back to Portland at the end of June to finalize our living arrangements.

We’ve made a similar offer to two different landlords and both are intrigued by the idea. Thanks to Her uncle, it looks like we’ll be able to find a place a good bit easier than we thought, and we won’t even have to settle for the best of what’s available the last weekend in June. I’d imagine this strategy will work better for individual landlords than it will for the large corporations in the business of renting out apartments (in fact, I’d be very surprised of any of the latter category would consider this arrangement). If you’re looking to follow Her and I up to Maine and are trying to get a head start on the process, suggest this type of arrangement to the owner if you find a place you really like. You might be pleasantly surprised by his or her reaction.

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.

Source #2 – CityRating.com. The CityRating.com Cost of Living calculator yields slightly different results. Again, I used Albany, NY and Portland, ME as our current and eventual locations and $100,000 as our combined annual salary. CityRating.com doesn’t give the same level of detail in its cost breakdown that Sperling’s did. The information I get is that my $100,000 only needs to be $96,249.09 in Portland. This is again almost exactly a 3.7% difference, but in the opposite direction. CityRating.com gives their cost of living in terms of CPI, but does not give it in individual categories. According to this site, Portland and Albany have an identical CPI of 181.8, which is a full 8 points higher than the national average. Strange, then, that it tells me we don’t need to make as much money.

Source #3 – Salary.com. Salary.com’s Cost-of-Living Wizard asks for your current salary, where you currently live and work (two separate input fields), and where you’re moving to (again, separate fields for home and work locations). Based on this information, the Wizard gives you a comparison of your cost of living and how much you can expect to be paid in your new work location. According to Salary.com, housing in Portland is 12.6% cheaper than Albany, but I can expect to make about 3.5% less in salary. I certainly find the idea of an increase in disposable income, which Salary.com reports at just over $9,000 (again, on a fictitious $100,000 annual salary), a pleasant one. Let’s just hope that it’s actually true.

So, looking at the above sources, which one(s) do I believe? I’m not sure any of them have the whole equation down, but it’s good for initial comparison and budgeting purposes at least. As Sperling’s listed the cost of housing in Portland as significantly higher than in Albany and Salary.com reports it as significantly less, I’m not sure which way to look at this data. All three of the sites seem to agree on Portland and Albany both being costlier than the national average, but that housing is the only real differentiator between the two locations. Given what we’re seeing on Rent.com and Craig’s List for apartment prices, I have a feeling that Sperling’s Best Places may paint the most accurate picture. Google’s page ranking for Cost of Living calculators seems to agree.