Moving from Michigan to Orange County (Irvine, Aliso Viejo: renting, houses, transfer)
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It depends on how much cash they have to put down. 170k is lean at least around here without a lump of cash to put down.
I’m assuming op has equity and will be bringing that in the deal. If not he can do less than 20% down conventional loan but would have to pay PMI.
OR
They have the option of renting/saving and hope housing drops a bit to a more affordable level.
But they dint need to buy a mansion. There are PLENTY of townhouses in the 450/550k range in cities nearby to Irvine. Like I said before Irvine isn’t the end all be all to schools and housing.
The whole of Orange County except a few areas has reasonably good school. It doesn’t have to be Irvine or Fullerton. But I know these two areas very well though.
It’s not LA where you have to pay top dollar to get a decent one. I’ve been looking at townhomes in the LA for one of my kid and it was nothing but bad.
We did this and then moved back to Michigan after 18 years.
Yes, 5 kids is expensive in CA. (We also had 5 kids). Towards the end we were making in the low to mid 300K range and things seemed pretty tight (but we manage money badly). We lived in Santa Ana which has mostly bad schools but there are some decent charter and public school options, however three of our kids were in private school in Orange, Another one was in a special charter school in Santa Ana which is a really good school but still had fees (about $2600 a year - much cheaper than private school, but probably considerably higher now). Everything is more expensive, gas, groceries, taxes. Car insurance is cheaper. Housing is about twenty times more expensive. Depending on where you live air conditioning can be a huge expense. Closer to the water is cooler, but the real estate costs a lot more.
Tustin might be a good compromise for you. They have reasonably good schools and it is less expensive. Tustin Memorial Academy is a highly rates school. We found it too competitive and intense, our kids ended up hating school, but it might work for you. Keep in mind all of the top schools are going to be super competitive and intense. You may end up with neurotic children. Frankly I would not want my kinds in Irvine or some of the other "top" schools. Parents competing with each other through their children gets excessive and the kids are overly pressured by their parents and by other kids.
You will find raising kids is pretty different in So Cal. You do not have the wide open spaces and forests, streams etc where they can go play. You make appointments with other parents to meet at a park. If it is windy, no one shows up - weather and all.
I am not sure anywhere has school busses. No place I can remember had them. You have to get your kids to school on your own.
It is not terribly difficult to live in a cheaper place and get your kids into another district. For example we lived in Santa Ana and our kids went to school in Tustin for a while because I worked in Tustin and had to drive them to school.
You will have a much smaller home on a tiny tiny lot, but you do not need as large a home. You do not need seasonal clothing for each person, so less storage/closet paces is needed. You will eat out a lot and likely do things away from your home/neighborhood a lot more often.
Watch your commute. It can take half an hour to go five miles. It gets exhausting. I was one mile from my office, it was wonderful.
There are so many awesome things to do, that is the fun part. The crowds, cost and lack of water and trees is the bad part. We used to go hiking in the foothills out at Silverado Canyon every Sunday after church. It was a great experience for the kids. There are lot of similar places you can go that are awesome Whiting Ranch (red rock canyon), Irvine Park, there is another wilderness park down south by the ocean, very pretty, I forget the name.
It is really dry and dusty at times, especially in October when the Santa Ana winds hit. If you have asthma or lots of allergies, that time of year will be miserable. Luckily that is the best time of year in Michigan, so just come back and visit then.
There are lots and lots of nice suburb type places you can choose. Most of them are essentially clones of Irvine and are clustered around Irvine. A lot of Sameness. Compare to Rochester Hills, or Troy.
Beach cities like Dana Point are different and really nice, they have some unique amenities like a downtown (and a beach)but the commute is terrible and they are very expensive. Laguna Beach is also really nice and uber expensive. Newport beach is fancy, but I do not think it is a good place for raising kids. Compare to Birmingham, Northville, or maybe Blooomfield Hills or the Pointes. Only pretty different because of the beach focus.
North Orange County is cheaper, less nice, less clone like/more eclectic but may offer some good options for you. Schools are less good, with some exceptions. Fullerton is decent. Fullerton also has a charter school that is usually in the top five ranked school in OC. Orange is a neat town but the schools are good, not great and some of them are bad to terrible. Anaheim has some nice parts and some blagh parts. Also one great school and some mediocre schools and terrible schools. Fountain Valley, Westminster and Garden Grove as well as much of Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa are older suburbia. Compare to Livonia or Farmington Hills. Compare Orange to maybe Milford. The north County Cities a nicely located for freeway access with multiple freeways in lots of different directions.
Costa Mesa near Newport and Huntington Beach near the beach are pretty different. More expensive, fancier. More like the beach cities.
Tustin is kind of in between Irvine and its clones and the North County Cities.
Santa Ana is a roughish city, primarily poor and primarily Hispanic, but it has some pockets that are very nice. We love it there. Think Detroit with its pockets of nice places like Indian village and Palmer Woods.
After 18 years in Orange County we left for a lot of reasons:
First and foremost was family support. We had no family at all in Orange County or anywhere within 1000 miles. We had some very good friends including an older couple who adopted our kids as surrogate grand-kids since their kids failed to produce any grand-kids for them. Still, it is not the same, It is hard to raise a large family without extended family support. Also our kids barely knew my parents or my brothers and sister or their cousin.
Probably the second biggest reason is we wanted to move away from the part of Santa Ana where we lived mostly because they were planning to build a 40 story skyscraper about two blocks from our house. We also wanted better public schools since we were facing $36,000 in tuition for private schools (3 kids in private school). However anywhere we wanted to go (places with better public schools) would require a huge downsize in our house and yard. Because property values had climbed so much, property taxes would have killed us. we bought hour house for $175,000 and sold it 9 years later for $757,000. But at the time, $757,000 only got you an average to less home int he nicer cities.
Our property taxes based on $175,000 were about $2300 a year, but on $757,000 they would have jumped to over $10,000 a year. Most newer/nicer places also had Mello Roos taxes and HOA fees. Mello Roos are kind of similar to Millages, only you do not get to vote for or against them. The places with better schools also tended to be very bland sea of conformity type places. Clean and nice, but not for us.
Another reason we wanted to move was the general moral atmosphere for raising kids. While materialism, drugs, sex pressure, general weirdness, are everywhere, it is magnified by several hundred percent in Orange County compared to most of Michigan. You can still raise good well mannered kids and they can find good moral friends, but it is a lot harder and the cards are more stacked against you. The bigger problem to us was the insane hyper competitiveness, mostly driven by parents obsession to prove they are better than other parents by producing more accomplished better dressed and outfitted children. This too is everywhere, but it is refined to an art form in Orange County.
Living in a bee hive wears you down after a while. It is exciting to have so many people around and so much going on - at least for a few years or ten. However it begins to get grating. People are always overshceduled and always in a rush, and when they are late they can be very rude without really intending to be. Getting anywhere always seemed to take twice as long as anticipated, even if it were only a short distance.
Open space and trees was another reason. Our kids had a huge parking lot to play in on weekends, or we could drive them to a park (there was a small park in front of our house, but it was not very exciting for them). Palm trees seem magical at first, but eventually start to look like telephone poles with hats. There is no true greenery in any substantial quantity. (the flocks of wild parrots are cool though). Often it is too hot to play outside. There is little relief from the sun. Other than beaches, which are wonderful, there is virtually no water. A few man made ponds in subdivisions with water colored green or blue, but even that is pretty rare. It is very dry and even in the wet season the vegetation never really gets truly green. We wanted our kids to be free to play in forests, streams, lakes, rivers, fields etc. BTW, we found our kids spent a lot more time outside after we moved to Michigan. The dramatic weather changes drove them out to see what it was like for that day. Nothing like a blizzard to get them away from their computers few a few hours. Sledding is more fun than fortnite. There are neat things to do in California, but very few of them out just outside your doorstep. You have to drive to them or have an appointment. It is a hassle and eventually you often just don't bother.
Don't get me wrong. OC is a wonderful place to live, but it is not nirvana, especially not after a decade or so. The opportunities for hiking, biking and beach stuff are wonderful. Also you can do day-trips to hundreds of super amazing places. (Joshua Tree National Park or Catalina Island for examples). There are a lot of pluses, but you should approach it with your eyes wide open.
The most critical thing I can tell you is to watch traffic patterns. Figure out the things you will want to do and find a place with good access to those things. The commute to work and to your favorite things to do is what really drives your quality of life. Schools and pretty much anything else can be worked around. When we moved to within a mile of my office, I was able to have lunch with my family every day. I could get up twenty minutes before i needed to be at work. I could pop home for an hour if the kids had an event or performance. I had 5 times more family time in my life than I did when I had a 40 minute commute and could not go home for lunch etc. Key to good family life, is short commute - for everyone.
I loved the weather. My wife hated it, she thought it was boring, and the Santa Ana winds made her sick every year. I used to tease her saying what perfect every day is not good for you? She missed storms, and rain, and clouds and fall, and even snow. I was fine with perfect every day.
Another side note, all of our kids were born in California. They are all now adults and three have moved away from Michigan, but none chose to go back to California (although one is waiting to hear back from an interview to be a college professor there).
Kind of a side note - at least to us, earthquakes, fires, mudslides, drought were not a big deal. You get used to them.
We lived in Laguna Beach (South Laguna), Newport Beach (Balboa Peninsula), Costa Mesa, Irvine, Orange, and Santa Ana, so we got a pretty good flavor of the area.
Also consider Silverado Canyon. That is where we probably would have gone had we not moved to Michigan. It is unique. It has some problems, but it also lack many of the things we disliked. Also you are living right inc the Cleveland National forest ("forest" does not necessarily mean trees, there are some trees, but not a forest as we know it). I think it is Orange schools though - not great. However schools for us was just something you work around.
Hope that is helpful to you.
Last edited by Coldjensens; 01-30-2019 at 11:03 AM..
Salary combined is about 170K. We currently own a house over 3,000 SF have 3 young kids. We will for sure rent first before we purchase and we know that we will not get a large house and we are ok with that. Looking for some suggestions on where to rent. Looking to rent closer to top rated Elementary/Middle schools. Also hoping to eventually purchase a house in the same area so we don't move put the kids in another school again. Let me know is 170K good enough to start? and what kind of a life I will be expecting poor/average based on the income. And the most important thing for us is finding the right school for my kids.
You will first have to decide if you want to live in North, Central, or South OC. I'm mostly familiar with South OC, but it's not any better or worse than the other parts of the county. In the end, it all depends upon your personal preferences.
Schools are almost uniformly good in South County, and students belong to a large district, like Capistrano Unified, with school assignment made by address. So, that should not be an issue.
Rent is probably reasonable for your income level, with money left over to save. Since you already own a home, you'll likely have money to make a down payment on a purchase.
Overall, I imagine that, with wise financial decisions and expectations for income growth, you would have a good QOL in South OC.
Even though, I am not the OP and I am not plnnig a move to OC, I wanted to thanks coldjensens for taking the time to write such a nice, long, informative posts. I wish more were like that
This little thread has two absolutely outstanding posts
Even though, I am not the OP and I am not plnnig a move to OC, I wanted to thanks coldjensens for taking the time to write such a nice, long, informative posts. I wish more were like that
This little thread has two absolutely outstanding posts
Michiganders love the try to help each other out. We have to, in this climate a day will come when you will need help in one way or another. Trying to help people is virtually an obsession with some people here.
Of course apparently that particular Michigander did not come back, but maybe the title will catch someones eye who needs information.
Last edited by Coldjensens; 02-14-2019 at 04:21 PM..
Hi guys, It's me again so we are in the process of moving to OC and now we are freaking out about schools for the kids. do they have buses. what should we expect. what time does Elementary start and middle school if we are thinking to stay in Irvine, or Aliso Visio ..
Hi guys, It's me again so we are in the process of moving to OC and now we are freaking out about schools for the kids. do they have buses. what should we expect. what time does Elementary start and middle school if we are thinking to stay in Irvine, or Aliso Visio ..
School districts have their own school calendar..to avoid the long lines at Disney during school breaks
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