relocation questions (real estate, rental, house)

[luvmykids08_10]

My only question is if you were not born in texas and moved there from another state how did you relocate? Did you get to texas and start from scratch, and did you have a job offer when you moved? Did you find a job before the big move? If you did how did you go about looking and landing the job without a in state address?

Just some questions because my family and i are trying to relocate next year n feb. and i want to know if we should be starting anything(other than saving) right now. Thank you.

[texasdiver]

My wife and I moved to Texas 7 years ago from Alaska. We moved here for her medical residency. She applied to family practice residency programs around the country and the best one that accepted her was here in Texas. So her job was the reason we moved. Myself. I was a biologist with a federal fisheries agency in Alaska. For the first 3 years I continued to do my same job from a home office in Texas but as an independent consultant rather than a federal employee. It meant flying back to Alaska and Seattle frequently for meetings. But most of what I was doing was writing environmental documents and environmental impact statements that were possible to do from anywhere that I had a computer and internet access to fisheries databases. After 3 years of that I tired of the long-distance professional life and got a local job teaching high school science. I much prefer it to the consulting work as I'm finally out and involved in the community rather than hiding out in a home office all the time.

A month before we moved to Texas I flew out for a 3-day weekend to shop for and buy a house. Spent 2 long days with a real estate agent looking at a lot of options then just bought the one we liked the best after taking about 200 digital photos and emailing them back to my wife. We had a 4 week old infant at the time so she couldn't come with me on the house hunting.

Anyway, we had a house and we both had jobs waiting for us when we arrived with the Penske rental truck with all our possessions.

My willingness to drop everything and move to a new state would depend a great deal on my situation in life. When I was young and single I did that sort of thing frequently. But married with 3 kids I want all my ducks in a row, which is exactly what we did.