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Might be moving to Madison, Wisconsin within the year. I have a few questions...
AlyceInWonderland
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Okay, so, my boyfriend and I both live in NY. I work in NYC and have been working at my job for nearly 2 years (since a bit before I graduated college). It pays well for my position and I'm happy there. My boyfriend is currently going to school and is graduating in december. He had applied to several jobs, and has gotten a call back from a large company in Madison, Wisconsin. It will pay EXTREMELY well (65-75K), especially for an entry level position. If we stay in NY, he'd be getting about the same salary, plus my 40K I bring to the table right now, however we'd be getting taxed 35% and everything in NY is hella expensive.
If we move to Madison, I'd likely not have a salaried position, but working on building a client base with my freelance work. The lack of steady paycheck on my end scares the shit out of me, as being independent is important to me, but from what I have heard (and researched) Madison is pretty much 50% cheaper to live than NY/NYC, and we'd be able to survive on 65K, given that my freelance thing nosedives.
I dunno. I'm worried, because I have a LOT of loans (1K monthly payments), and I'm not only worried about my lack of steady job (or..I guess, being completely dependent on someone), but I'm also so used to NY being so ungodly expensive, that surviving on a 65K salary alone doesn't seem possible with rent, loans, utility, food, etc.
I guess what i'm asking is how is Madison? I'm used to NY rent being 1500 for pretty much a hallway with an oven. I'm used to NYCs excellent subway system? Is there any sort of public transit, besides buses? Would it be better to stay in NY with a combined salary of about 90-100K or to move to Madison with a combined salary of 65-75K? I'd especially love to hear from folks who actually live in Wisconsin.
Who knows if he'll actually get the job, but I like planning ahead since I'd pretty much be uprooting everything in my life to move there. Thanks in advance.
If we move to Madison, I'd likely not have a salaried position, but working on building a client base with my freelance work. The lack of steady paycheck on my end scares the shit out of me, as being independent is important to me, but from what I have heard (and researched) Madison is pretty much 50% cheaper to live than NY/NYC, and we'd be able to survive on 65K, given that my freelance thing nosedives.
I dunno. I'm worried, because I have a LOT of loans (1K monthly payments), and I'm not only worried about my lack of steady job (or..I guess, being completely dependent on someone), but I'm also so used to NY being so ungodly expensive, that surviving on a 65K salary alone doesn't seem possible with rent, loans, utility, food, etc.
I guess what i'm asking is how is Madison? I'm used to NY rent being 1500 for pretty much a hallway with an oven. I'm used to NYCs excellent subway system? Is there any sort of public transit, besides buses? Would it be better to stay in NY with a combined salary of about 90-100K or to move to Madison with a combined salary of 65-75K? I'd especially love to hear from folks who actually live in Wisconsin.
Who knows if he'll actually get the job, but I like planning ahead since I'd pretty much be uprooting everything in my life to move there. Thanks in advance.
AlyceInWonderland on
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Madison is a very hip oasis of a city in Wisconsin with a world class hospital and university. It's not NYC, but it's a pretty awesome place with a great culture and environment. Definitely one of my favorite cities. Buses are how you'd get around with transport, but I'd wager you'd want a car.
In the Midwest, with even an approximate combined salary of 100K, you'll live very comfortably. Most people do fine on less.
Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
Others would argue that Madison (and other mid-size midwestern cities) are cheaper because there's simply nothing to spend your money on, so you get paid less and spend less.
Things that cost less: Car insurance, housing (for square footage), prepared foods, utilities, booze.
Things that cost more: Produce (oddly enough).
You can still burn through money in Madison, though. In either case, going from School to Paying Job is a major change and will affect your budget together. You can get a job in Madison. I think this decision is more about the relationship and how you feel about it rather than purely monetary.
Point 1- The transition from college to full time work is a hefty one for a relationship to survive. Particularly true when this also involves a big move away from social circles. I did this with my GF. I had graduated and we were living together while I waited for her to finish up school. We were together for like a year and a half before the move this way. After she graduated, we moved. It was a very jarring life transition all around. Ultimately, the relationship didn't survive and I found myself in an area that I didn't particularly like (we moved for her career prospects).
Point 2- Being dependent on someone else is a bitch. Don't do this if you can at all avoid it. Start searching now and see if you can land a job there that you like. Freelancing might not work out when you move if your contacts are local. I work in design myself, and the market for a "Big City" that's in a more rural state is not close to what you'll be used to.
As a personal rule, I also never expect anyone else to pay my way. My loans are my own, and I at the least pay rent and for my own food. Things can get weird fast when you start treating a boyfriend/girlfriend like a spouse. $1000 a month off the top sounds pretty rough to me. It would take quite a lot of security for me to move away from a job with that hanging over my head. You want to make sure you've got your deferment paperwork in order if you're looking to be willingly unemployed in the near future.
TLDR: Your boyfriend having a job prospect in Madison is nice, but you really need one yourself. Look in your field for what the market is like. Be wary of treating a relationship like a marriage.
Good Luck in whatever path you take!
You need to be prepared for a dramatic culture change. Madison may be the hippy liberal part of Wisconsin, but it’s still the midwest. Expect to meet a lot of people who have not read anything but the bible and American Rifleman since high school. The food in Wisconsin is almost universally terrible unless you are really good at cooking with the local produce, of which the selection isn’t especially good. If you just want to walk around cool neighborhoods and shop you’ll need to fly down to Chicago for the weekend. Same goes for decent art galleries and museums. And you’ll need to buy a car and drive everywhere. And don’t forget that it gets really, really fucking cold out there.
This isn't true and it would be an abnormality to meet such a person. That's quite a wide brush you're painting with.
Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
Having lived several years in both Madison and Chicago I can say that the only remotely true statement in this paragraph is the last two sentences.
OP: As others have stated, $65k in Madison will go farther than $100k in NYC. The public transit isn't great, so definitely plan on acquiring a car when figuring out your budget. A quick look on craigslist should give you an idea of what kind of rental prices you will be looking at.
Almost everywhere in the midwest, 1500 is a house payment. For a pretty decent house. It'll rent you a goddamn nice apartment.
The real question, though, is about the stability of your relationship, not the money you'll have to live on. If you're uprooting your life to move halfway across the country and potentially depend 100% on someone else's income, I'd want to be damn sure about your relationship with that person.
I live right between the two and have all my life, and yes, there are a lot of odd statements in that paragraph. Madison is a reasonably sized town and Milwaukee is only about an hour and a half away.
Money wise that would be plenty. Come up with a good down payment and you could get a two to three bedroom house for that as long as you aren't dead set on living right in Madison. Living in the 'burbs would be a big adjustment, though. There is no denying that small town living is a little on the slow side.
Don't just look at the stability of your relationship. Even if you're crazy in love and perfect for each other, etc. etc., what will this move do to your own career? Are you essentially giving up years of valuable experience and the ability to grow in your current field? I don't know what you do, so I'm just asking. Don't just think about the money itself, think about your ability to provide for yourself in the future by having a stable career. Some moves like this will simply reset your career entirely and you'll end up having to change all your plans to account for living in a different part of the country.
If you want to get a rough judgement of how much it will cost to rent a place in downtown Madison, http://www.apexrents.com/ will give you a pretty solid idea. Most of their properties are in the heart of the city. I live really close to downtown (I rent) and I pay just over $1,000 for 1,100 square feet.
As far as housing, a friend of mine owns a 2.5 level, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage, on the very edge of Madison, and it cost him $218,000.
Not sure what else you really want to know about Madison. If you have any other questions about the city itself, lemme know. I've done just about everything there is to do here.
Keep in mind I was comparing Madison to New York City. Madison and Milwaukee may seem great for Wisconsin, but I just got back from a week in Milwaukee and, aside from the art Museum, it’s about as interesting as a derelict apartment block in the Bronx.
We've been trying to look at this in the most logical manner possible. If he gets the job (and who knows. He might not), even with out my 40K I'm bringing in, we'd be bringing in more over all money if we moved to Wisconsin.
Basically, I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not worried about the relationship itself, what so ever..only the money. And Wisconsin :P
I dunno, it's late. Excuse my incoherence.
e: I kind of want to elaborate on the freelance end. Building up a client base will take time, but it doesn't necessarily need to be local. I did freelance for a while before I got my job, and most of my clients were on the other side of the country. It'll take a while to build up what I had (or what I want) again, since I have neglected the freelance aspect of my job so much the past couple of years, but it's not impossible. Plus, while my salaried job is awesome, and I do like it quite a bit, I'm also pulling 60-70 hours a week and I don't necessarily want to do that forever.
I live/have lived in upstate NY my whole life. I'm no stranger to boring farm land, and boring everything. It doesn't really bother me, and I kind of like it. Then again, I've also been commuting to the city every day for the past 5 years, so I get the best of both worlds, I guess.
I can't imagine a whole lotta nothin' bothering me, though.
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I'm okay with it, and Jim (boyfriend) is okay with it. We met in NY but he was only temporarily here, and is originally here from Texas. After dating for a while, he ended up packing up his things in Texas and moving to NY, so all of his family is 27 hours away. I feel like I'd be such an ass if I didn't do that for him, especially if we'd be making very good money (and benefits. Oh my goodness are the benefits at that job amazing) in such a cheap area. I've been thinking about that a lot, and while I will miss the city, and my family, a lot of my friends have moved away, and I've been flying to visit them. Doing that for family won't be much of a change.
I do like zoos and museums and shit though, so I guess I'd have to research what's around madison. Anyone know any cool little hot spots/restaurants/cafes/parks?
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Madison is more college town than big city. There's plenty of cafes, cool music spots, parks, free events, odd things, and so on. There's the Henry Vilas zoo which is free, and since Madison is the capital of WI there's museums and other cultural things. It's like a frozen Portland.
Hah, yeah, it's at Epic. Do you know if it's a good company to work for?
Madison sounds like a place I'd like.
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Oh good! That's awesome. Jim had his first phone interview yesterday and it went very well, so we'll see!
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on the CoL:
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx?ec_id=m1025820&ef_id=NGFOgkFtJRcAAAPt:20120810164352:s
Says that making 100k in Brooklyn, is the equivalent of 58k in Madison. Granted that is assuming you are buying a house, so housing cost is a huge driver of that difference. But really even the gouge you in the ass since its near campus, rat holes I rented as a student were something like 1700 a month for a 4 bedroom apartment with a living room/small kitchen. My friend's who rented away from campus/downtown for year more out toward burbs were paying I think 750 for a 2 bed room 2 bath apartment with huge living room area with a fire place, in suite washer/dry, and kitchen in a new built apartment complex, with a shared pool(for the 3 months a year you can use it) and a workout room.
Also using that same math, a min wage shit job till you find something better here is like you pulling in 40k in NYC.
EPIC:
From what I've heard about Epic(second or third hand) is that it has a tendency to get new engi/CS grads fresh out of UW and just grind them into dust in 2-3 years. A lot of it sounded similar to the standard 'why being a game developer sucks' stuff except you work on health care, crazy work weeks, lots of vacation/comp time you never get to spend etc, but this is all very indirect information, so it could be total horse shit. I don't know anyone who worked there directly, and if he's not going to be a code monkey, it could be a completely different environment even if that stuff is all true.
Stuff to do:
On the stuff to do, I am less helpful here because when I was in Madison most the stuff I did was your standard college stuff, based around being on/near campus. The one thing not to over look is this: Right now you are doing all your living expenses & amusing yourselves on 40k in NYC dollars. Even if you were not making any upgrades in actual income, you'd be effectively freeing up something like 15k a year worth of fuck around money by moving to Madison. Me and my GF had a similiar thing happen when me moved from Chicago, even though less is happening in an objective sense, basically saving 15% on CoL, and her getting a pay boost meant we could actually afford to do stuff. A whole bunch of cool stuff you can't afford to go to doesn't do you much good. We can go on real vacations now.
http://www.majesticmadison.com/ Is probably your best bet for music in Madison, if it's not someone who'd sell out an arena.
Even if you aren't huge football people, you should really go to a Badger game, and the farmers market on capital square is great.
Also, Ale Asylum(in city), Capital(in city), Tyranena(20 min car ride), and New Glarus(40 min car, it's in the middle of nowhere) breweries are all near by.
WI likes to drink. Madison on football Saturdays and Halloween is nuts.
Madison, from what I hear, sounds like a very pleasant place to live, and I'm definitely easing up on the idea of potentially moving there. I really like the idea of not spending an absurd amount of money on housing that is the equivalent of a hallway, and actually having some space for a relatively low amount of money.
I also love farmers markets more than anything in the world.
Thanks for the info!
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Hey, I'm in Orange County, too!
It's sad how expensive NY is. I never realized just how expensive until I was looking at places out of the tri-state area/New Hampshire.
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For Zoos, we have the Vilas Zoo and it's completely free, but it is rather small and basically a once a year walk through type of place. If you want/need a bigger zoo the Milwaukee County Zoo is about an hour to hour and a half drive depending on traffic, but this one will cost you about $20.
For music it depends on the type of music you like to listen to, but there are tons of different acts that come through town and there are a lot of small venues for them to play in. Each side of Madison has it's own unique flavor (North and south sides are "crime ridden" hell holes, East side is "old" Madison, West side is "New" Madison, and it gets even more in depth when you get into neighborhoods within the sides), the people are friendly, and we were just rated as having the best public transit system of it's side in the nation.
One great, often overlooked, perk of living in Madison is new and free Onion newspapers every Wednesday.
I grew up in upstate NY, lived in Boston for a while, and now live in Madison. When I first moved out here to be with my now-husband, I was pretty worried about it. I thought that it was going to suck moving out into the "middle of nowhere" and planned to move away as soon as possible.
After living here for a few months I came to realize that Madison is actually an amazingly nice place to live and having lived here for 5 years now I have to say that I really like it here.
Pros:
- The rent is obviously cheaper than in NYC. Keep in mind that your mileage on this is going to vary depending on where in the city you'd like to live. This ties in with your transportation question and what it boils down to is that the mass transit systems degrade in quality/frequency the further out from the center of Madison you get. This generally means that rent gets cheaper and buys you more as you get further from the center (read: the Capitol/downtown/campus area) but the need to own a car will increase as well.
- Madison has some pretty amazingly good food. Your mileage on this may vary depending on your taste, but the reality is that there are decent restaurants for most types of cuisine, excellent restaurants for specific other types (mostly things that are locally sourced like cheese, beef, produce), and some things are just naturally going to suck (e.g., why are you ordering seafood in the middle of the country?).
- There's a big buy local/environmental awareness presence in Madison. The farmer's market here is the largest producer-only farmer's market in the US. Also, there are still a lot of locally owned shops rather than big chains. That's not to say that there aren't big chains, but just to say there are a lot of nice unique local places.
- Also because it's a big environmental awareness city and despite its size, Madison has two separate car sharing companies in residence. If you do choose to live in the downtown area, this means that owning a car is not strictly necessary.
- Having the university here means that there are actually a lot of weird funny ways to save a bit of money because of the students. Things like the campus meat lab where you can get steak meat for cheaper than the grocery store on Fridays is a good example.
Cons:
- The Madison airport is one of the most expensive ones in the country to fly in/out of. This generally sucks when you're trying to travel or if you're doing a lot of flying. I'm partially convinced that this is because Epic flies their employees around alot so the airlines know they have a captive consumer base.
- This may be a pro to you, but just be aware that Madison is definitely one of the more politically charged areas in the country right now with the recall and all that other stuff happening recently.
Jarring differences from the east coast/NYC:
- People here are honestly friendly. This was shocking to me. On the east coast, if someone tries to say hello on the street they're probably trying to panhandle and it's best to not make eye contact. In Madison there are really people who are saying hello and asking how you are who are total strangers and don't actually want anything from you, they're just being nice.
- There's a ton of support here for bicycles. Madison is one of the most friendly bike cities in the US and Trek is based here. As a result, there's a ton of push here for bikes to like having bike rental kiosks all over the place even though it's a small-ish city.
More fun stuff to note or look for!:
- If you choose to rent, never ever ever rent from Madison Property Management. They are essentially slum lords.
- The Henry Vilas Zoo is free to go to and is actually a pretty nice (and amazing for being free!) zoo.
- You can get free tours of the Capitol every hour and it's actually pretty cool and fun to do.
- L'Etoile is a really fancy (expensive) french style restaurant on the square near the Capitol that's been nationally lauded for its amazing and locally sourced food. (Let me know if you want more downtown area restaurant recommendations!)
- There are a ton of coffee shops and bars in the downtown area. If you prefer the suburbs or are planning on living away from the isthmus the liveliness of the neighborhoods won't be as apparent.
- As Veevee pointed out, free Onion newspapers!
- There's a very nice venue in the middle of the downtown area called Overture Center that hosts between 2-4 broadway type shows a year, so you aren't totally cut off from that kind of culture.
On Epic: I have heard from some people that they do grind their software engineers down very fast. One of the reasons for this is that they use mumps, but I've also heard that this has been changing because they've been porting all of their stuff to more modern languages. It sounds like what they tend/tended to do was to make all of their new employees work on the mumps stuff so their older employees could work on more fun things. However, I do know some people who are working at Epic who are very happy there, so I think the whole thing is very dependent on the person and on what job position you're in. I will also note that they have an incredibly nice campus (make sure you make them give you a tour and check out their D&D building and slide!) and they do seem to go out of their way to make sure that their employees are happy with all of their perks.
I can't speak on the potential customer base here for art/design. I worked as an in-house designer here but have since changed occupations and I'm not sure on your specific art background. There are some galleries here though and a large art fair in the summer, so I'm not sure on how that might pan out.
Again, feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions and apologies for the spamminess!
I'd certainly choose Madison over Milwaukee.
I know you said the relationship area was fine, but just some things to consider; how soon will you be 'dependent' on him for money for groceries, basic living stuff, going out, etc? Are you going to do a joint account, is he going to give you an allowance?
For your work, do you think there will be any issue with clients wanting to work with someone in Madison? That is, are they excited to be getting an "artist from New York" and may take you less seriously if you're here in the Midwest?
Not that it's right, just trying to think what others might. Guessing you have an accent, so may not need to share where you're located. On the other hand, you may get more local clients, as they're be impressed with a NY artist.
As for being dependent on my boyfriend, I'm awesome with money and we have a fairly sizable savings. I take care of all the financial aspects of the relationship, and would continue to do so in the future as I'm really good at making budgets and saving money (This has been agreed upon by both of us). I'd budget out what we'd need to survive (rent, loans groceries, utilities, etc), and it would most likely be an "allowance" type deal when it comes to entertainment until I start making money of my own.
I've honestly never thought me being a New Yorker would be a "perk" or whatever, but I do have a fairly strong NY accent, so it'd be pretty obvious that I'm from that area. The thing is, back when I was freelance, I got all of my clients from posting in message boards (gotten a bunch from here actually, way back), freelance sites, etc. Not many actual local clients because I just never went that route in advertising my work. I feel like if I actually took the time to create some work of my own and start posting around again and advertising, I'd be able to build up my client base. It'll take time though.
After reading this thread I've gone to dreading this potential move, to really hoping that it happens. Thank you so much!
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