There is always a difference between what one thinks one might do if one had one’s druthers and what one would in fact do when given a concrete choice. In the past month more job applications have been sent, and just last week I received a promising query. The query, however, brings to the fore a very significant question about moving: What are my limits? This particular job is located in a prominent northeastern city OK, Boston—expensive to the gills to live in. Career-wise, the job could be a very smart one to take, and MA has other benefits that are difficult to ignore. Still, the question has been vexing K and I this weekend: Can we seriously consider moving to Boston from Iowa? How much salary is too little? Are we willing to surrender the already paltry luxuries we enjoy simply to live and work there?
I’d do it, but I don’t have to suffer the downsides. But then again, I’m living in poverty now in order to do something interesting in the (also extremely expensive) Boston of the UK, and I wouldn’t trade my current income to make 3x that if it meant I had to live in a shithole and work for The Man.
Take that for what it’s worth, which is nothing.
by JH—Feb 17, 12:45 PM
I’ve been doing salary research today. I do not know how much to trust the data, but some (small) hope: salaries for the job appear to be apace with cost of living.
by greg—Feb 17, 12:58 PM
(Not so much for university professors, btw, though I bet the AAUP has better statistics on that than the places I’ve been looking.)
by greg—Feb 17, 01:00 PM
i love boston and ma dearly, but definitely don’t underestimate the cost of real estate, esp if you are thinking of expanding the family in the next few years. my best friend from college tried living there for a few years and finally moved to richmond, va, largely b/c of the cost of living (esp w/kids).
by mary—Feb 18, 11:20 AM
Do you mean the cost of child care in particular?
by greg—Feb 18, 11:26 AM
aaup has inflated and/or deflated salary stats, depending on the branch of professoring you do: if you are business, IT or law, you make can make easily 20 to 30 percent more than stated, if you teach humanities you make 15 to 20 percent less.
by Balthasar Gracián—Feb 18, 01:35 PM
i think she’s talking about the cost of space in which to live. the cost of living in boston (or in one of the near suburbs) will maybe be shocking. as someone who still pays ma income tax (for a complicated set of back-pay reasons), i am still in awe of some of the tax and insurance disparities between our current and former lives. there are real reasons why some ma residents have fake nh p.o. box addresses as their primary addresses.
by chris—Feb 18, 03:43 PM
We have indeed looked into rents; they’re more than twice our current!
Still: For now, I have a phone interview tomorrow.
by greg—Feb 19, 11:51 AM
Try three times our current rent—at least! Oh, well…We’ll see what happens…
by kl—Feb 19, 11:55 AM
How about “somewhere between two and three times our current rent, perhaps a little more or a little less, depending on what kind of place we can stand to live in”?
by greg—Feb 19, 12:00 PM
Good luck with the phone interview! Hopefully it will work out, enabling you to worry about the money later!
by chris—Feb 19, 05:21 PM