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I wonder what the average age of the negative commenters are - maybe they don't remember how much you can put up with as a 20-something
I'm a 20-something, so I ruin your theory
I think everyone is in agreement that it is possible, but is trying to warn the OP that she will not be able to live her Atlanta standard of living (sans roommate) in DC on the same budget, nor will it be an extravagant budget by any means. Once she later added that she's been making do on $10k less in Atlanta, posters seemed to generally be encouraging of the move idea.
Almost 3 years ago, my best friend's daughter was in the same position. She got out of college and got a job making $45,000. She spend the first 6 months living at home and socking away every penny that she made. Then, through a friend of a friend, she found someone in Clarendon (Arlington) looking for a roommmate. She moved there taking the smaller of the two rooms. Her rent was $895. The rent came with two free parking spots so she had that. She had a very old car (paid for) and no student loans. She lived very frugally and managed to live as well as put a little bit of money in the bank. Gradually she has gotten raises and has been able to move into a place on her own (now making about $65,000).
I think it can be done but it was very tight for her and she did not have the car note and student loan payment that you do.
Location: Ft. Washington/Oxon Hill border, MD (Prince George's County)
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I have done it, granted back then I rented an efficiency in South Arlington for $650/month and prices have definitely gone up since then. I also had roommates a few times in those years and also I had no car and used metrobus and metro/subway and rented cars when I needed them and did Zipcar when that first started. I moved here from Missouri to go to school here and have never regretted it. This area offers a lot of opportunity if you take advantage of it gaining skills and more education. I say while single/no kids give it a try...you never want to look back and wonder what if. I regret never giving NYC a shot and turning down amazing dream job positions there that didn't pay much when I was younger and single for a similar reason being scared of how I would make it there...I often wish I had at least tried. This is a great area for young people starting out in life in many ways...just not very affordable unfortunately but you can make it work.
I moved to Reston in early-2009 newly-minted with a B.S. in Accounting and with a job offer in hand paying a $40,000 salary (pre-tax/pre-deductions). Being a naive small town dude of just 22 at the time I was oblivious to the dramatic cost-of-living difference between my native Scranton, PA and Fairfax County, VA. Most of my friends and classmates who were also moving to NoVA had already found roommates with each other, leaving me the "last kid picked on the kickball team", so to speak. I didn't want to room with a potential "CraigsList psycho" so I ended up trying to make it work in the cheapest clean 1-BR apartment I could find at the time ($1,135/month as a move-in special at Archstone Charter Oak). Coupled with a car payment, student loans, cell phone, utilities, car insurance, gasoline, etc. I soon found myself living not only frugally but also skipping meals and going very hungry. I dreaded going to after-work social functions, happy hours, etc. that I thought would be essential to career advancement because I knew those charges would have to go on a credit card (sure enough all that credit usage really hurt my credit score).
A year later my rent was being increased to $1,325/month. I was forced to relocate because I was now too poor to live there. After once again being unable to find a roommate (most of my initial "clique" from college that moved down with me had coupled up---literally) I moved to Colvin Woods (formerly Carter Lake), which was another apartment community in Reston, once again preying upon their discounted move-in special for monthly rent where I was once again paying around $1,100/month. I left my church, one of the few things that brought me joy in NoVA, because as a volunteer offering counter/accountant I couldn't withstand any longer seeing my fellow parishioners all contributing $100+ checks weekly while I could only cough up $20, on average. I felt like I was being judged for not "tithing my fair share", although I was pretty much the youngest head-of-household parishioner there. Constantly having to just sit around at home, very lonesome, I fell into a deep depression and would often cry myself to sleep. I needed to take an unpaid leave of absence from work and seek professional therapy, which also killed me financially as I started prioritizing which bills to pay and which bills to pay late.
My therapy didn't help as I eventually forced my therapist to require her own therapist as she, too, began to question why she was living in NoVA, and I drastically cut ties to NoVA in one fell swoop---quitting my job, securing a replacement tenant for my apartment, and hoofing it to Pittsburgh on a whim. I had two job offers within two weeks, and I cashed in my 401k to help me get settled. I now make more money in Pittsburgh than I did in NoVA and live much more comfortably due to a much more relaxed cost of housing (although with our recent growth our own housing prices are rising steadily now). I was able to buy a hybrid vehicle here, which was a luxury I had always wanted. I have four figures in savings right now, whereas I didn't even have $0.01 in savings in NoVA. I am planning to purchase my first home here in the city next year. I found the dating pool to be much better up here, too. Guys in NoVA, overall, were much more superficial and shallow in terms of writing someone off if they didn't make enough money, didn't look sexy enough, etc. In Pittsburgh I had two guys fighting for me, which was a confidence booster I sorely needed. I love history, and I currently rent a portion of a 100+-year-old rowhome in a neighborhood with original brick sidewalks for about 60% of what I was paying to rent shabby 1-BR apartments in Reston.
You ultimately need to do some soul-searching before moving to Northern Virginia. Are you the type of person who will be perfectly happy absolutely struggling on a $40,000 salary with the hopes and dreams of your career skyrocketing in the future, or would you be more content earning a similar salary elsewhere and living extremely comfortably due to a much lower cost-of-living? In my eyes your youth is to be enjoyed, and living in hunger wasn't my way of "enjoying" my early-20s. Now I'm in my mid-20s, and for the first time in years I'm happy. I truly am. I may have eventually made $100,000 in NoVA in my mid-30s vs. making slightly less here in Pittsburgh by that same point in my life, but while I'd either still be renting in NoVA or buying a shoddy 1-BR condo in the 'burbs here in Pittsburgh I can buy a historic older home with character in the city, despite the lower pay, and have it paid off much more quickly, using the money I would NOT be paying to rent in NoVA to instead invest wisely for a wealthy retirement.
If you move to NoVA with a low salary relative to the cost-of-living AND find out you hate your job (my case), then you'll be absolutely miserable. Be 100% certain you want to take such a gamble before moving to McLean.
Hi. I have a possible job offer in Mclean, VA for $45K. I would be relocating from Atlanta. I want to move for the new opportunity and chance to do something new. Also for a good opportunity to move up in the working world.
With the salary im offered in Mclean, will it be enough to live?
!!
That's a lean salary anywhere, let alone one of the most expensive parts of the country.
Almost 3 years ago, my best friend's daughter was in the same position. She got out of college and got a job making $45,000. She spend the first 6 months living at home and socking away every penny that she made. Then, through a friend of a friend, she found someone in Clarendon (Arlington) looking for a roommmate. She moved there taking the smaller of the two rooms. Her rent was $895. The rent came with two free parking spots so she had that. She had a very old car (paid for) and no student loans. She lived very frugally and managed to live as well as put a little bit of money in the bank. Gradually she has gotten raises and has been able to move into a place on her own (now making about $65,000).
I think it can be done but it was very tight for her and she did not have the car note and student loan payment that you do.
^ Not picking on you in particular, but your example also points out to the unfair advantage that NoVA natives in our peer group have over incoming transplants. All of my NoVA-bred/VA Tech-graduate colleagues, who earned the same exact salary (we were Feds, after all) were still living rent-free with their parents and using that extra ~$1,000/month in housing savings (factoring in rooming + utilities) to either live high off the hog OR aggressively save/invest. One of my friends bought a brand new luxury sedan. Another was saving for the down payment on a house. Another went out to eat almost daily. Meanwhile I was skipping meals. That was very sobering to me, and it was yet another reason I decided to move. If you didn't have family connections in NoVA to help with the burden of expenditures (and I'm not exactly from an affluent background back in Scranton, PA), then you struggle.
I'm a transplant to Pittsburgh, too, but I don't feel like an "outsider" here the way I did in Fairfax County. I'm not trying to bash NoVA (I have to reiterate that since the word "troll" gets hurtfully tossed in my direction on here so frequently). I just would hate to ever see anyone else, including the OP, make the same mistake I did---leave a stable job in an area with a lower cost-of-living, move to NoVA, struggle, and become depressed.
P.S. A startling note would be that when I was searching for a therapist all but one I called was fully booked and no longer accepting any new clients. Apparently many in NoVA shared my struggles with adjusting to the area, even after living there a while.
Last edited by SteelCityRising; 04-25-2013 at 06:12 AM..
Also take other issues into consideration - the traffic here is horrible - you have to plan your day around the traffic - I know Atlanta can be bad - but nothing is as bad as here. Everywhere you go will be crowded; stores, events, etc.
Everything is VERY expensive here - and people are very stuck up and will judge you on how much you make, where you live, etc. People are standoffish and not very friendly.
This area has a lot of jobs and high salaries but housing and cost of living is so high it kinda cancels out the good salary. I think there are much better places in the country to move to -
That's a lean salary anywhere, let alone one of the most expensive parts of the country.
Not really. I net $40,000 in Pittsburgh (my gross salary wouldn't be all that much higher than $45,000) and live quite comfortably. People in NoVA have just become so conditioned to everything being so "bubble-priced" that they feel like a $45,000 salary makes one borderline impoverished.
Everything is VERY expensive here - and people are very stuck up and will judge you on how much you make, where you live, etc. People are standoffish and not very friendly.
^ This was the final straw that broke the camel's back for me. When you're depressed you begin to become more attuned to negativity spewed by others. As such I began to more frequently notice "I'm important" white-collars being downright demeaning to service workers (many of whom were immigrants) much more frequently than I had when I initially moved to NoVA and still had rose-colored glasses on about how much prettier, cleaner, and more "exciting" the area was. I began to call these people out in public more and more frequently and challenge them for their reprehensible behavior, sometimes causing scenes. A lot of these "I'm important" people were, like me, bright-eyed young transplants who wanted to change the world at age 22 and instead morphed into being fussy middle-aged stress-pots from two (or more) decades of working 60-hour weeks, sitting 45 minutes each way getting to and from their offices, and enduring long lines just about everywhere they went on their rare weekends when they could shut off their Blackberry and see the family they had been neglecting while telling themselves they were "helping" them by making more money and buying them more "stuff" to account for less time spent together (which is what a child truly wants---not more XBox games or a Mustang at age 16). It seemed as if many people I met in NoVA were friendly at first to strangers but had this constant underlying and thinly-veiled aura of "stress" about them that you could perceive if, like me, you're a good "reader" of people's personalities. Whether this stress was financially-related, job-related, family-related, congestion-related, or whatever else was unknown to me, but I felt truly sorry for anyone I met who exhibited such characteristics and just wanted to give them a hug.
I tolerated the traffic when I lived in Fairfax County. I tolerated the lines everywhere. I tolerated the summer humidity. The one thing I could NOT tolerate, though, was seeing people being downright rude or mean to other people (not intentionally---just for being overstressed/overtaxed/overwhelmed) and feeling powerless to do anything about it since I was viewed as being "crazy" if I dare did speak up for someone or come to someone's defense in public as if to say "How dare you buck the trend?!!"
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!! thanks!
