New2Maine.com

I found a link to a very interesting website today. Rentometer allows you to look up comparable rentals in your neighborhood and let you know if you’re paying too much (or too little). A very useful tool for someone looking for a new apartment. Surprisingly enough, they had over 100 apartments in the area we’re looking at (I guess I’m not the first person to find this site), and the amount we’re going to pay seems to fall right in the middle of the range.

We’re starting to work on our pre-move checklist. One of the first things on our list (which I’ll publish in a later post) is finding out what we need to do to transfer our driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations. Maine’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles website seemed like a good place to start, so I browsed that for a while. Under the Licensing information page I found a short blurb (at the bottom) on converting an out-of-state license. According to this, it looks like it’ll be $40 a piece for Her and I to get our Maine licenses. The application is linked here. Getting to the BMV location in Portland doesn’t look like it’ll be too tough either. So that’s one thing at least that will be pretty easy to take care of.

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 past week has been a slow one for our Maine move planning. As I’ve mentioned before, She is a teacher, and it’s the end of the school year. Anyone who is married to a teacher knows that all things not school related pretty much cease to exist for the final two to three weeks of the school year. We did, however, manage to make it down to Connecticut to be part of a very close friend’s wedding. That was great fun, but didn’t leave any time for browsing Craig’s List or any thing else Maine related (except to explain to lots of friends and acquaintances that, no, we don’t really have a reason to move other than that we love the area).

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…

Sorry I haven’t written in a while. We’ve been away dealing with a death in the family. Family funerals are always a time for mixed emotions–it’s wonderful to see family members you’ve not seen in a while, but the reason for the impromptu reunion is not a happy one. In this case Her grandmother’s battle with cancer is finally over, and we know she’s gone up to a better place, so we take comfort in that.

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.
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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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