Canadian Finance Blog
Canadian Finance Blog |
Posted: 13 Jul 2011 02:00 AM PDT IMDB describes the movie Winter’s Bone as “An unflinching Ozark Mountain girl hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her drug-dealing father while trying to keep her family intact.” It is a great movie, and definitely one worth seeing. It shows a teenager who struggles through a wide variety of problems just in an effort to keep the family and the family’s house all together in one piece. I definitely understand the motivation behind the character, though there was always one little nagging thought in the back of my mind. If this place is so tough, and so rough, and doesn’t provide any semblance of help for the family – why do they stay there? In my own life, I’ve recently been struggling with a very similar question. When we moved to our current place, we had jobs that we liked, plenty of friends nearby, and it was where we knew we wanted to spend a couple of years “just living”. No bigger goal or purpose than enjoy life and the first year or two of our marriage. That time, however, has passed. Our jobs have been stagnant, and we can’t see a way to make them work for our needs in the future. Our friends have moved away or moved on. And I think we are coming to the end of our “just living” phase, and we need a plan and a direction for something more. Whether that be saving money for a vacation, or so that we can buy a house, we don’t know. We do know, however, that our goals are in conflict with our current place of residence. The reality of our current living situation is that we live in a city that has the second highest cost of living in the country. Our housing costs more, our food costs more, our transportation costs more. This definitely clashes with our plan to save money. It is worth it, for a time, to spend that money in order to live here, but seeing as our motivation for staying is dwindling, and our motivation for leaving is growing, I am not too sure how much longer we are going to stay here. Sometime financial reasons trump personal reasons, and sometimes personal reasons trump financial ones. In this case, I am thinking that it is a little bit of both. What shocks me the most, I think, is how rarely people consider just leaving. There seems to be dominant instinct to stay where one is most comfortable. People grow up in a city, go to school in that same city, and settle down in the city. Perhaps they move from district to district, but they won’t move out of province, or even across the province. And I don’t understand why that is. Some friends of ours moved to another province, far away from the majority of their friends and family, just so that they could take advantage of a better job economy. They are planning on getting out of debt, so they made a necessary sacrifice to do what they needed to do. If you have a financial problem that could be solved by simply relocating, why wouldn’t you? In BC, for example, there are plenty of jobs up north that pay significantly more than their counterpart in the “nicer” parts of the province. Yet, even if it was temporarily, no one seems willing to go up there and do that work. It is not like you have to stay there for the rest of your life, but if you could, in 3 years, pay off all your debt and be able to afford a house, would you? If not, why not? Are you really so attached to your local supermarket that you aren’t willing to abandon it for a better future for yourself or your family? There are plenty of people who moved from a different country to Canada just for the opportunity to make more money than they could back home. A lot of them live as cheap as possible in this incredibly expensive city so that they can send money back home and support their extended family. That is a huge sacrifice and dedication to a better future, and yet so many Canadians of my generation seem unwilling to put up with temporary hardship in order to make for a better future – myself included. Why is that? If you are having some financial difficulty, or even if you have a plan or a dream you don’t think is otherwise possible, have you considered relocating? Why or why not? Do you feel like the personal sacrifice would be worth the financial gain? Why or why not? Related Posts:
Get Out of Town originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on July 13, 2011. |
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