Everybody who knows me has been hearing me rave about how much I love Hawaii since my first visit last April. Yes, I know I haven’t even blogged about it, but mainly that’s because I didn’t know where to begin. I’m so backlogged on travel experiences that I’d love to share with my readers, but it seems that with raising 2 kids and working in my “spare” time, there often isn’t enough time to keep up with my blogs.
Anyway, I plan over the coming weeks and months to blog more about Hawaii and what makes it so special. I will also be asking YOU for advice on moving to Hawaii. In the past, I had always thought that I needed an international job to move somewhere. Yes, that’s still a possibility as my husband works for a multinational firm, but chances are they wouldn’t move him to Hawaii (yes, I know it’s part of the US, but it might as well be in another country — it’s so far from NJ!). We had originally hoped that his company would send him to Europe. In fact, he told him that was his plan when he took the job, but 5 years later, he’s still stuck in his stupid office in NW NJ. Not exactly paradise.
So, if you were wondering, yes, we do want to move to Hawaii. Me more than anyone. But I must say that my older girl is pretty sweet on the idea. When we’re here in NJ, she and I suffer from a wide range of subtle health problems having to do with skin and digestive disorders mostly. She seems to get coughs frequently here too. Hawaii (and really anywhere that is far from this part of the country) is a very healing place and it takes virtually no time before she and I feel alive and truly well. Maybe it’s because it’s just too darned rainy and cold here most of the time, I don’t know, but I do know that Berlin was rainy and cold when we visited last summer and we still exhibited vast improvements from what we are constantly battling here.
So this is the plan. I need to make my online income from various sources pan out so that I am making more money or at least as much money as my husband does in his 9-7 plus weekends job. With that we can more than comfortably afford everything we need in life and still sock away a good amount. Our biggest hurdle in moving is being able to afford losing upwards of $100K on this house we live in. We put a lot into this house and the loss doesn’t even consider the $100K we’ve put into this place, but obviously we’d hate to lose this amount in addition to all we have already invested.
Now I know some people who had issues with their mortgages over the past few years and some were able to get the bank to buy them out and so while it may have temporarily damaged their credit score, they got out of their deal without losing a ridiculous amount of money. So this, I guess, would be an option if I can get someone to tell me exactly what they needed to do to make this happen in their favor.
The other option I was thinking of was maybe trying to do a home exchange with someone. It is not something that I think of when planning a 2 week vacation, but would for a longer stint. I have too much crazy stuff in my home that I just couldn’t trust someone else to take good care of, especially if kids are involved. Antique cookbooks and medical books fly off the shelves and end up tattered even when I’m hosting a birthday party (that’s the parents, not the kids too!), so the thought of someone rifling through my stuff when I’m gone makes me a bit annoyed.
On the other hand, if we are going to exchange homes for a year or more, then that would be something different. At that point, I would assume each family would simply move their belongings to the new location and rent out the house either semi- or unfurnished. This would also give us the opportunity to see if the islands are really where we’d like to end up or if we’d like to go to Europe instead. The other advantage is that perhaps by the end of another year or two, the market will be back enough that we can sell this house for a profit or at least for a smaller loss.
So if you currently live in Hawaii (or know someone who does) and need to move to New Jersey maybe because of a job offer near NYC or to be near ailing parents or something, please contact me with your situation and maybe we can arrange something. If you have any experience with home exchanges, I’d love to hear your experiences there as well. I’m all ears!
