Can you feel the stinging pangs of envy every time you hear a successful moving story?
Do you get assaulted, kidnapped, and kept captive by the green-eyed monster when somebody says something like,
I’ve been living in New York City for 10 years and it’s changed my life.
We moved to Los Angeles 4 years ago and we’re loving it there.
I’m moving to Dallas next month because of a great job I’ve found there.
If you can’t help but wish you were that lucky person, then maybe it’s time for you to have a serious conversation with yourself. You know, the very conversation you’ve been putting off for years because you are scared of what you might hear.
Remember that the sooner you ask yourself the hard questions and get their satisfactory answers, the sooner you’ll find the inner peace that’s been eluding you for so long.
Who am I?
What am I doing here?
Is this really what I want from life?
Am I happy?
To find who you really are and what you really want, you need to overcome your fears and doubts in order to find the courage to lose yourself before you truly rediscover yourself.
How to know when it’s time to move house?
To help you in your quest for true happiness, here are the top 10 signs that it’s time to move to a new city.
1. Your budget is stretched tighter than Santa’s belt
If your disposable income tends to disappear before you can say your own name and you can’t seem to find a lasting solution to the tight financial spot you currently find yourself in, then it’s probably time to turn things around by moving to a cheaper city.
It’s no secret that some cities are much more expensive than others and the most important factor that comes into play when considering a move to a cheaper place is the cost of living in the destination town or city.
Make sure you research extensively the overall living costs (housing, utilities, food, healthcare, education, transportation, and so on) of more affordable cities before you make up your mind to try to reverse your bad fortune.
Don’t forget to check the unemployment rate either, and more specifically the one in your area of expertise, because moving to a more affordable city only to find it impossible to find a good and well-paid job won’t be ranked as the best solution to your financial difficulties.
In short, if you can’t decide whether to move or not, then it’s time to reassess your financial situation. Sometimes the answer is simpler than you think: if you just can’t afford to stay where you are, then the moment has come for you to move away.
90 minutes of daily commute = 33 hours lost in a 22-workday month. 33 hours! Isn’t it high time you moved closer to work?
Underpaid and unappreciated at work?
The unmistakable feeling of escalating dissatisfaction with your current job is a sure sign that your career is heading in the wrong direction.
Long working hours, stalled professional growth with virtually no hope of promotion, constant and unproductive bickering with your colleagues, or being excessively bossed around by your superiors can only be the tip of the iceberg of your frustration at work.
If you sense deep inside that your professional skills are being wasted and taken advantage of, then be brave enough to set your sights on a bigger city. Moving to a big city will automatically give you better job opportunities to pursue your unfulfilled career goals.
Moreover, long hours of commute can be a reason enough to relocate to a new city and search for a workplace that you can reach from your home in less time than it takes to listen to an entire audiobook.
Moving closer to work is an important aspect to consider when weighing your employment options, for it can give you something even more valuable than money – more free time!
Whenever you feel stuck in your current job, it’s time to unstuck yourself by moving to a new city where you’ll feel much happier at work.
Everyone has their “freezing point” or “melting point” – those extra degrees that, rather than breaking the camel’s back, will get you packing for a move.
It’s definitely no fun living in an area with climatic conditions you’ve come to hate. And while your body will probably go into autopilot and turn on the survival mode for the typical six-month-long winters in areas such as upstate New York, your mind will still wander dreamily towards places with year-round mild climates.
After shoveling driveways, driving on slippery ice-covered streets, and fighting raging blizzards for years, you may decide it’s high time you moved to a new city with a warmer climate.
Shoveling snow is a skill taught from an early age.
Of course, different (heat)strokes for different folks – some people actually prefer to live in colder places.
Have you ever dreamed of experiencing a fairy-tale snow-white Christmas, making beautiful angels in the deep snow, or engaging in exciting snow fights? Are you sick and tired of the never-ending sweltering heat or fed up with the annoying arachnids and insects and anything else with too many legs?
If the answer’s mostly positive, then maybe it’s time for you to move to a colder city and start living out your snowy dreams with no bugs.
One of the most obvious signs it’s time to move away is when the weather in your area happens to be too cold, too hot, too wet, too windy, or too ANYTHING – what matters is that you just can’t take it anymore.
4. You’ve met someone who completes your unfinished sentences
And not only that – call it Fate, but you’ve finally managed to meet a person who completes you as well.
The moment the thought of spending an entire lifetime with that special someone seems perfectly natural and pleasing and not scary at all is the exact moment to start building your future plans together.
When there’s someone special waiting for you in another part of the country, then you won’t really need any fateful signs to tell you that you need to move to a new city – you already know it deep inside and there’s hardly anything that can stop you from completing the move.
While your current residence may have been the perfect place for your single self, the logical change of your relationship status may be the right signal for a move to a new and much bigger home in a new city.
Sometimes size does matter – the tiny closet of your bachelor pad, which could hardly hold your own clothes, is now replaced by a spacious walk-in closet plus three additional antique dressers.
Without a doubt, moving for love must be the best reason to want to move away. Provided that you’re a good sign reader, you and your significant other can now move to a new city, maybe even to another more exciting state, where both of you can pursue your happiness together.
The weird feeling that your residence is turning into a LEGO model is an unmistakable sign that you need to upsize your home.
Pacing up and down the corridor while desperately trying to hold the call of nature for a few more excruciatingly slow minutes can be another unmistakable warning sign that it’s time to move out and upsize your home at the same time.
A growing family has the tendency to make a reasonably sized house or apartment too small too fast. As children grow, their needs grow as well.
Pretty soon the room that your two kids shared peacefully until now may be turning into a conflict zone of two opposing teenage forces with no truce in sight. As a result, a move to another bigger residence could turn out to be the only practical solution to regain the peace and understanding you used to take for granted.
Also, unless you have the good habit of regularly purging your home of no longer needed stuff, years of family life will undoubtedly bring a score of new household items inside your house or apartment until a hazardous “bursting point” is reached.
Your children and possessions aside, you and your spouse may also find out that you crave more professional or even personal space as time passes.
Is moving good for you? As long as moving to a new city means moving into a bigger house, then yes.
The truth is that you may be in dire need of an extra room for work, extra space for relaxation purposes (for example, a gym, a yoga studio, a billiard room, and so on), or just extra living space to complete the renovation projects you’ve always wanted.
In either case, one possible solution is to move out of your current place and find a new home that will better suit your increased needs for more space.
The upsizing process has proved to be an outright success. The move to a larger home has served its purpose brilliantly and you couldn’t be any happier about the life-changing decision you took years ago.
And yet, now that your children have left the family nest and moved to another state to study, work, create a family on their own, and so on, your huge house or spacious apartment feels deserted and ghost-like.
You walk around the empty rooms and the echo of your sad voice bounces back while the ghosts of the past try to catch up with you. All of a sudden, you realize that your home has too much space, too many rooms, and too many dear memories of days of old.
And that is the moment when the thought of downsizing your home crosses your mind for the first time.
Maybe the time has come for you to move to a new city and retire in style.
If you’re not sure whether you should downsize or not, take a good hard look at your home maintenance costs, and if your jaw drops in disbelief, then your old place has definitely become too expensive to maintain.
Less space doesn’t only mean lower energy bills (more money into your savings account), but it also means fewer maintenance responsibilities (more time to devote to favorite activities such as hobbies, traveling, sports, writing, reading, etc.).
Downsizing one’s home can also come as a part of a master retirement plan when the retired person vows to never work again in their life. After a lifetime of stressful work and constant struggles for career advancement, it should come as no surprise that such sweet promises (simply packing the golf clubs and hitting the links, or taking it easy in an expat-friendly foreign country with great health care, eternal spring, and affordable living costs) come long before the anticipated retirement party.
So, if you happen to be a happy retiree, consider downsizing your huge house or apartment and moving to another city, state, or country to fully enjoy your Golden years.
One of the most apparent signs that you need to move to a new city is when the neighborhood you live in has become too unsafe, too noisy, or too environmentally hazardous for a normal life.
On one hand, some of your neighbors may be driving you up the wall. Neighbors change with time so even if things were perfectly acceptable when you first moved in, now you may be surrounded by folks who are too nosy and gossipy, too noisy (loud parties, constant fighting, musical instruments, pets that never seem to shut up), or too inconsiderate and negligent. Some of those folks could even be involved in a number of illegal activities as well!
On the other hand, it’s the lack of safety and peace in the neighborhood that may prove too much and get you to pack up your things before long. It’s a horrible thing to be living in fear of being mugged in the streets around your neighborhood or having your home broken into when you least expect it. Hearing police sirens way too often can easily affect you mentally as well.
The realization that you’re now living in a bad and dangerous neighborhood is a sure sign that it’s time to move to a new city that’ll be a much safer place for you and your family.
One of the telltale signs it’s time to move away is being told to stop complaining more than once a day.
Quit complaining. Move away. Be happy.
That’s funny – you never thought of yourself as a person who likes to complain about trivial stuff, and yet you realize you’ve been constantly dissatisfied with one thing or another for quite some time now.
There’s always something that drives you insane, isn’t there? The horrible weather, heavy traffic, rude and noisy neighbors, levels of pollution, high crime rate, ridiculous prices… the list goes on and on.
But if there’s one thing you’re sure of, it’s that you didn’t use to be like that. Therefore, the only logical reason for the negative change in you must be the depressing city you’ve called home for years now.
You do know that complaining won’t change anything, don’t you? That’s correct – packing up your bags (boxes!) and moving away will.
Sometimes it can be really difficult to make the right decision simply because you’ve been asking yourself the wrong questions. It’s not always WHY you should up and move to a new place – sometimes it’s a question of WHY SHOULDN’T YOU?
One of the most glaring signs it’s time to move to a new city is the lack of good reasons to stay behind. In fact, after counting the pros and cons of whether you should move away or not, it suddenly dawns on you that there’s absolutely nothing to keep you where you are.
No meaningful relationships, no promising job, no family obligations… no one and nothing worth fighting for in your current town or city. That thought alone is enough to make you sad and miserable but there’s really no time to feel down when there are so many boxes to pack.
It’s time to move on, time to get a fresh start in a brand-new place.
It’s time to get excited about the future – you have absolutely no idea who you’re going to meet in the destination city and what you’re going to experience there.
10. You can’t get the song “Hazard” out of your head
“I need to make it to the river, and leave this old Nebraska town…”
Are you running away from bad memories? Or maybe you wish to get rid of good memories! Either way, you can sense that there’s something wrong with the place you live in.
The city of broken dreams!
You remember that you used to like it not so long ago, but now the place is suffocating you, tying lead weights around your weary feet and dragging you down to its bottomless pit. You realize that the place is changing you for the worse and you’re slowly becoming a different person.
Do not despair, for there is always an orange light at the end of the tunnel.
You desperately need to feel alive once more and breathe in the refreshing and revitalizing air of change.
And you just know that the only way to end this disastrous relationship with your town or city is to run away before it gets any uglier.
Even worse, if your current city cannot provide sufficient mental stimulation for you and you feel like your mind and true potential have been in a coma for the last several years, then it’s time to pack your bags (or moving boxes to be more precise) and move to a new city – hopefully, a place that will challenge you in the right direction.
If you’re seeking the answers to more than one existential question a day, maybe it is.
Having decided to reset your life by moving to a new city in the same state, another state, or abroad, what lies ahead of you is the long and somewhat complicated process of getting ready for the move itself.
But fear not, for we have your back: refer to our helpful Moving Blog posts that will kick-start your relocation to another city.
Also, get free quotes from top-rated city-to-city movers to know how much your cross-country move will cost you.
I’m going through another “move change” and hope within the next year it will happen. I’ve moved 5 times in my life
1)Hometown to college twon.
2)Then to another state in New England (from NY state) Prov RI Lived there 22 years
3) Moved south to New Orleans(loved it )
4) 3 years after Hurricane Katrina to a small town in north Mississippi.
Now it’s time for a change again.
Change is good. Research the place you want to live in-visit it,see how it feels to you.
The last town we didn’t do this but it worked out
We needed a respite from some the ordeal of Hurricane Katrina…but now it’s time to go.
Chnage can be scary but it’s necessary too.
It’s Never good to feel “stuck” Good luck to all of us.
Thanks for pointing out that moving to a bigger city can help you get out of a dead-end job by giving you more opportunities to pursue your career goals. I’ve felt really unhappy lately and have been looking for ways to shake things up. The idea of a new city sounds fun and exciting, so I think I’ll take your advice and start looking at real estate!
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I’m going through another “move change” and hope within the next year it will happen. I’ve moved 5 times in my life
1)Hometown to college twon.
2)Then to another state in New England (from NY state) Prov RI Lived there 22 years
3) Moved south to New Orleans(loved it )
4) 3 years after Hurricane Katrina to a small town in north Mississippi.
Now it’s time for a change again.
Change is good. Research the place you want to live in-visit it,see how it feels to you.
The last town we didn’t do this but it worked out
We needed a respite from some the ordeal of Hurricane Katrina…but now it’s time to go.
Chnage can be scary but it’s necessary too.
It’s Never good to feel “stuck” Good luck to all of us.
Thanks for pointing out that moving to a bigger city can help you get out of a dead-end job by giving you more opportunities to pursue your career goals. I’ve felt really unhappy lately and have been looking for ways to shake things up. The idea of a new city sounds fun and exciting, so I think I’ll take your advice and start looking at real estate!