Spanish/French family with a little boy moving to Orange County - Please Help!

[Coldjensens]

That is going to be tough. Very tough. If you are working at UCI do they have any subsidized housing available?

Santa Ana is considerably cheaper than Irvine, but parts are Santa Ana are pretty awful. Some parts are nice. Naturally the nice parts cost more.

I suggest you set your sights to the north where rents are cheaper. Tustin, Orange, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Garden Grove Fountain Valley. In all of those places, you need to be aware of what you are looking at. All of them have areas that would not be a good choice.

Speaking spanish will be a big help. Your wife may speak a slightly different form of Spanish than they do in California and Mexico, but still she will be ahead of the game. Being bi-lingual is a big help in getting a job.

It is really none of my business, but I am curious, on a realtively limited income why woudl you pay for a three year old to go to private school, especially when your wife is home? Some people think it is necessary for kids to have two or three years of pre-school. However i can tell you some of our kids had pre-school, some did not. All of them went to school with kids who had really intense early pre-school education. All of them evened out by middle school or earlier. It is readily apparent to me, it makes no difference in the long run. It seems like you could save a huge expense there and have more money to use for living expenses, or savings (like a college fund). (Speaking of college funds, a bt of gratuitous advice: We had college funds for our kids. We had a financial emergency and raided those accounts to bail us out saying we would repy them later. Now it is later. Two kids are in college, a third starts in the fall and a fourth will start the following year. They all will get scholarships, but not full rides - that is very rare. We could repay the college fund accounts, but then we would have less money to give the kids for tuition, so it is just money shuffling. We wish we had not raided those accounts no matter how serious the crises. It sure would make a difference now. Even if you put $5 a month in a college fund initally and then increase slowly, it will make a difference. A few thousand dollars can make the difference between finishing college and taking a year or two off to work and try to earn money to finish college. While not a disaster, there is a good liklihood they end up never going back once they start working. We do not know how we are going to manage next year. Hopefully my business will pick up. Otherwise one or more may have to take a year off.

[ysr_racer]

Start teaching your son English NOW. The USA is a tough place to live if you don't speak the language.

Plus, speaking a second language as a child will help you later in life. Trust me on this one.