At the beginning of each day can you open your eyes, look around and see the place you want to see? Do you live where you want to live? Of all the places in the world, where do you want to spend your life? If you are wondering how to choose a place to live, there are three key factors you should use to evaluate your current situation.

Taking an close look at each of these factors can give you eye-opening insight into whether you may want to stay put or move somewhere else, be it a new neighborhood or a new town altogether. Midlife is a time of many changes and for many women in midlife one of them is relocation.

THE LOCATION“Location, location, location” are the three most important things in all things real estate, according to an old saying. Though market value is important (wow, is it ever!) let’s consider a few things about location. This is a broad, catch-all-category that includes all the things in a place that you can’t take with you.

Family may make this an easy decision for you. If you are fortunate enough to live close to family that may be blessing enough that you are content to not even imagine living anywhere else. But, maybe your children have left home and you would like to live closer to them. What about grandchildren, who often hold even greater sway over us than our immediate offspring. Or, as your parents age, being nearby may offer peace of mind for you and them.

Love, or the things we do for love. Being in love may settle the question of where to live. Being with the man we love may be the reason that wins out over all other factors. Many couples end up living in a town where one or both are from.

Career or work opportunities, after family, are the top reason for many relocations. The job of your dreams may make a location desirable or a necessity. Also, your tolerance for commuting or need to be close to an airport or other transportation hub should be considered.

Geography and Climate may not be as big a priority for you as family or career, but can definitely tip the scales. The weather and terrain of many cities are an intrinsic part of the character of many places. Climate preference tends to be deeply personal. While one woman enjoys long, snowy winters, another may feel that forgoing frigid winters are a worthwhile tradeoff for year-round temps above sixty degrees.  

THE AFFORDABILITY of an area is not necessarily as static as location–after all the cost of living of a place may rise and fall with the times for a number of reasons. At this time, certain markets in the U.S. that were considered to be reliably affordable are now at the centers of red-hot housing markets. But, provided you are able to work out the other factors, affordability can make a place more desirable. Imagine the possibilities if you can comfortably afford your housing, and are able to sock away cash or pay down debt. Such a prospect might make compromise in other areas tolerable either short-term or in perpetuity. Ditto for owning your home outright.

THE HOUSE of Your Dreams can also make even considering a relocation a no-go for you. Having your perfect home can override affordability or zip code. What’s the perfect home for you? Maybe you finally got the perfect apartment after spending ages on the waitlist. For many, it is important to keep an ancestral home or land in their family. If you completed extensive renovations to your dwelling or worked with an architect to live in a stick-built custom home you may not ever want to move. Maybe there is no price or opportunity that could get you to leave that balcony with the perfect view. There is overlap with the other categories here as well.  

Here’s a diagram that can help you visualize the interplay of the three categories!

So, how did my family decide where to live? When it comes to analyzing, my husband and I are definitely master analysts. Who needs license plate bingo? We spend our long drives and dinners discussing and examining issues and trying to come up with solutions. Sweet, right?

Years ago, I had a startling question: What if I’m supposed to be living someplace else? I wrestled, fought, and questioned the question. Instead of crumbling under my scrutiny, the question solidified into a declaration: I want to live someplace else. There is no place like Chicago, but after twenty years of living in my husband’s hometown I was ready for something different than the outlying suburb we called home. The traffic, the taxes, the harsh winters and humid summers were getting to me. This realization began to nag me. Many drives later we had distilled the analysis of where to live to the three categories I’ve shared above.

By the time our daughters were in the fifth and third grades, after two years of mulling it over, we took the leap. We sold our house and made a cross-country move. It was not an easy decision because we had many good friends and neighbors that we were leaving. We lived within six hours of most of our family. We loved the schools. We had built our home. But reality is often not gentle. After a series of spikes in our property taxes left us struggling and hustling, we were forced to strike through “Affordability” on the pro column of the pros and cons list and had to add “High Property Taxes” to the con column. It might have been the prospect of new opportunities or too many sub-zero mornings, but I would like to think that it was the many statistics and fun facts about other cities that finally opened my husband to seeing what was beyond our part of the nation.

That was almost a decade ago. Nothing is perfect and there will always be one thing or two things or a cluster of challenges to deal with. In our case, the move from Chicago to Portland was not perfect and it definitely was not easy. We rented for the first five years ended up moving three more times before we bought a condo. This is NOT something I would recommend for families with two very busy teens.  

But though I still miss my family and our friends, gradually I’ve made new friends. And I love the Pacific Northwest. Many people complain about the overcast days, but I like the rain. Depending on who is driving, we now live about two hours or so from the Pacific Ocean. The Portland metro area is surrounded by scenery so lush and perfect it looks almost artificial: mountains, pines, waterfalls. There is almost always something to do: hikes, meetups, lectures, yoga and live music. Moreover my daughters are older, and independent, which means our lives are not 100% child-centric any longer, so we are free to enjoy more of what the city offers with each passing year.  

Choosing where we live, to any extent, is a privilege, but for many black women it is a choice not taken for granted. No matter your identity, where you call home is an important piece of how you show up in your life. I hope you can use this information to evaluate what you need, too. At the end of every day, if you aren’t getting what you need from where you are, you have the power to make a change. It’s your life and you should live it where you want.

Let me know what you think below.  

Photo by pexels from Pixabay.