planning to move (Billings, Great Falls, Kalispell: fit in, apartment, rental)

[gottagowest]

I am planning to move to the absarokee area from michigan. can anyone tell me what a good place to start looking for a job would be, also what are rent prices like there and are rental houses readily available???

[rickers]

Oh boy, why Absarokee or the area. I have a feeling that it may be kind of a BYOJ type of town. If you move there without a solid job lined up you may be out of work for quite a while until you make friends and even then you may be over qualified for the jobs available. What are your skills ?

[gottagowest]

thank you for the reply i appreciate any info i can get as ive never been to montana but it has been a dream of mine since i was young to live there. we like the small town type places im no city boy absarokee just looked like a good place to start my girlfriend needs to be fairly close to a hospital (she works in the e.r.) i am a carpenter and i also have a cdl class b and a good amount of driving experience. what area would you recommend? I am also a serious hunter and fisherman and raise labs and beagles. I can also work cattle and horses!

[rickers]

When we first moved to Montana we went straight to the Flathead Valley area and lived in Kalispell and just outside of Kalispell. We only had 2k in cash, no savings account no credit cards and we were virtually broke before I finally got hooked up with a temp agency that gave me some assignments. I got tired of working my butt off for chump change so I fell back on my long time hobby of fabricating jewelry and started traveling all around the northwest selling at every type of fairs, festivals, craft shows or gun shows we could find. We ended up moving to the reservation for lower rent and ended up buying a mobile home there. Now we used the equity in one property to secure a commercial loan for our building here in Conrad. So now we have our mobile bringing in rent, an apartment upstairs bringing in rent and we have our store and we live in a small studio in the back of the store. It's been a tough haul but the hard work has paid off for us but I think we were just lucky and the economy was in better shape then. Things could have gone the other way we very easily could have wound up homeless and scraping by on the streets.
I know that if we had to try to get a foothold in Montana by starting off in a tiny town in eastern Montana we probably wouldn't have made it.
You may find work at the mine, and your girlfriend may be working in nearby Columbus or you may both have to commute to Billings for work. I don't think Absarokee has a hospital and keep in mind about the weather. The Billings Gazette had an article about the snow storm that hit the state in October, it said that Absarokee got a foot of snow on Oct 8th. I really like living in the rain shadow of the Rockies, you have the prairie on one side and the mountains on the other with very little snowfall compared to much of the state. Montana has a way of either taking a person in like family or chewing a person up and spitting a person back to where they came from ! If you're polite and project a willingness to work hard and if you are normal looking (not covered with tats and sporting dreadlocks or something you will most likely be taken in like family right off the bat. Finding work and an affordable abode will be the biggest hurdles I think. I could be wrong though, I often am !

[snowdreamer]

Rickers~ can I ask what year that was when you guys first moved to MT and to Kalispell? That's where we tried to make a go of it and failed, not because of the people or us looking weird or anything...lol, but because of the lack of good jobs. You are dead-on correct about "finding work and an affordable abode" being the biggest hurdles. They were for us.

To the OP: Please know I'm not trying to discourage you. We want to return to MT and are gonna do it, but next time we will be better prepared. If you want to go, by all means go...MT is awesome. Just know that the job and housing situations are not good right now. Good luck to ya!

[rickers]

Originally Posted by snowdreamer

Rickers~ can I ask what year that was when you guys first moved to MT and to Kalispell?

I'm thinking it was in April of 1997. We moved from San Diego where we grew up and we used to come north on ski trips every winter. One season I got in 41 ski days ! I skied in Mt., Wy., Ut., Wa., Or., Nv. and of coarse Ca. and I kept wanting to come back to Mt to live so we moved.
I don't ski anymore but back in the day I skied down every avalanche chute on Mammoth Mountain on 204 cm long K2 Extremes and I'm only 5'4" tall ! We were broke all the time because of my skiing addiction and I seem to be fearless to the point of recklessness so I didn't worry about moving on a shoestring.
My wild days of surfing, dirt-bike riding and skiing are over so now I go kayak fishing in my trusty old Tupperware trawler. Like in the pic below.
I'm am really glad we made the move, but I think we were just lucky as I here about and see folks really struggling just to barely get by here.

[mtlogger]

Getting started in a small town is really difficult. Class B license is sorta worthless here. You need a Class A CDL with Hazmat if you're going haul any serious loads. I pulled logs here since the early 90's and that has pretty much dried up. With the influx of people just wanting to be here, competing with those who already are has proved a near disaster. Montanan's for the most part ignore where you're from - we just want to be left alone.

[amyflorida70]

I don't have much to offer as I am still learing myself, but I would have to just say with the economy and all jobs are slim, my husband is working on getting a position in Great Falls where the
economy doesn't seem to be as bad as some other places. When looking on job sites, great falls and billings seem to have the majority of jobs, maybe you guys could find work and commute from a smaller area closer by.
Maybe we just lucked out I don't know but if he gets this job, we are jumping on the boat and going, and if we have to leave the house behind here and rent cheaper for a while we will do what we have to. Fortunatly for us he will be making decent money and will have great benefits. I know there probably isn't such a thing but this is like a dream job for the hubby, wow dream job and a dream location, however did we get so lucky...

[gottagowest]

thanks again to everyone for the info. (to mtlogger we dont want to ditsurb the way of life for montanans we want to fit in to that way of life.!!!!) ive heard that ranching jobs are fairly available is this true also it seems that according to job searches ive done that delivery of home heating fuels is in high demand but job descriptions are vague at best. i am in michigan now and here most propane and fuel oil trucks are class b vehicles , is it different there? if anyone can reccomend an area it would be great. we have no jobs here michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the country and its a democratic state i am NOT a dem.

[gaduchman]

Originally Posted by gottagowest

thanks again to everyone for the info. (to mtlogger we dont want to ditsurb the way of life for montanans we want to fit in to that way of life.!!!!) ive heard that ranching jobs are fairly available is this true also it seems that according to job searches ive done that delivery of home heating fuels is in high demand but job descriptions are vague at best. i am in michigan now and here most propane and fuel oil trucks are class b vehicles , is it different there? if anyone can reccomend an area it would be great. we have no jobs here michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the country and its a democratic state i am NOT a dem.

That wasn't my Dad's point. You need to read some of his other posts on this subject.

All commercial delivery trucks require a Class A CDL to drive them. "B" vehicles doesn't compute - is that a class 6-7 vehicle? I transferred my CDL from GA back to WY - my homestate without so much as a blink and a nod.