Researching our Short Term Home

So after we decided to take a year away, we had to decide where to go. In considering Dave's work we determined that he would need to stay in a similar time zone to the U.S. in order to keep his work schedule mostly the same. I didn't really want him working in the middle of the night. So this kept us mostly in the Americas. Next, we compared states that we were interested in for cost-of-living. We looked at North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, Mississippi, Hawaii, Alaska and few others. We ruled out quite a few because the cost-of-living was too high. Then I started googleing rental property in a few other countries to see what rent might be there. I looked at Mexico, Quebec, Australia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Puerto Rico. I also checked out a few sites that offer house exchanges for educator sabbaticals. In the meantime, Dave emailed a client of his from Canada that lives in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico part of the year to get his take on Mexico. As I made a list of all of the many arrangements that would need to be made, it seemed almost just as much work to go to North Carolina as another country and not as much fun. So we were leaning toward foreign fields. As I looked at sites, Mexico kept coming up. Immigration laws seemed to be more flexible than some other countries. Most countries were much too expensive for us. We wanted to keep our house and rent it while we were gone, but didn't want to figure the rent into our budget, just in case. A dim hope was the opportunity to trade houses with someone, but we never did find anyone from France or Hawaii with a need to be in Utah for a year. Although we did get our hopes up when I found a family of 6 from Australia that wanted to take their family somewhere for a year, but when I contacted them, they had decided to get a pool instead. Gotta have priorities!
So after months of research, we had mostly settled on Mexico.