Location, Quality of life, profession/trade or family? What single factor influences where you live?

[Anglo-American]

It's no one factor but a balance of all of those issues.
In saying that we are currently in the process of trying to move from Cumbria, UK to New England because the wife wants to be closer to her family.
So family is high on the list.
The hunting will be better to, England and British wildlife is alot more stale than the US.
Being able to bow hunt and to hunt bears are two things I'm really looking forward to.

 

[wind gypsy]

You can have it all, you just can't have it all at once. Unless your family is also in Alaska. I have extreme envy for those people. Those people have it GOOD. Endless job opportunity, babysitters, no wasted vacation and $$$ on traveling to visit family, and ample outdoor recreation opportunity. I spend almost two weeks vacation annually just to visit mine and my wife's family which live in different states. Not to mention the cost of flights. Looking like ~$5,000 to fly the family to my parent's for Christmas. Another ~$3,000 for my wife and kids to go to a wedding in a couple months. Between that and the increased cost of living, it's almost cheaper to live in the lower 48 and pay a guide to hunt sheep....

Definitely cheaper when you factor in that you could only do it once every 4 years.

 

[Pramo]

I live in the mid Atlantic on the farm my wife grew up on, we have about 30 acres I can play on, I am under 10 minutes to about 3000 thousand acres of bowhunting only places and our property touches a stocked trout stream. The hunting/hiking/biking is fun enough and my wife is happy here and we can help out with the "old folks." She also gets I like hunting west and we vacation in the mountains as a family in the summer and winter. At times I'll stash a truck at a mountain west airport to make traveling a little easier.

If I had no wife/kids I'd move to WY lol

 

[Grumman]

I took about a 15% pay cut and dropped a career level last year to move my kids back closer to family. Them growing up with cousins and grandparents now has been totally worth it. I gave up too much quality of life as an employee of a Fortune 50 company the first half of my working career. My family is taking more priority going forward.


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[ramsdude47]

Curious if anyone here has spent any time living in Europe, most specifically Germany?

Those countries have consistently scored higher (by a wide margin too) on quality of life for the past few decades. I already know what most guys on here would say about that, but on paper at least I believe the pros outweighs the cons.

 

[Anglo-American]

Curious if anyone here has spent any time living in Europe, most specifically Germany?

Those countries have consistently scored higher (by a wide margin too) on quality of life for the past few decades. I already know what most guys on here would say about that, but on paper at least I believe the pros outweighs the cons.

I spent six months in Hamburg, Germany as a 16 year old.
Lovely country and people, very dry sense of humour.
Breakfast was quality, just cold cuts and cheese.
Wired cultural stuff around sex. It was like an aspect of the country and its soul was broken.
That wired-ness is common place in England and elsewhere in the Western world now to, sadly.
Its not the country it was then, now however.
Same issues there as elsewhere.

 

[CorbLand]

For me its regional preference, political structure of the state, being close to family and reasonable cost of living. All of those in my opinion can be summed up to quality of life. I do worry that some of that is changing and changing fast, especially the cost of living part.

 

[JBrown1]

Curious if anyone here has spent any time living in Europe, most specifically Germany?

Those countries have consistently scored higher (by a wide margin too) on quality of life for the past few decades. I already know what most guys on here would say about that, but on paper at least I believe the pros outweighs the cons.

I’m sure that you already know this, but I would look real hard at what factors they are tracking to come up with their rankings. I notice that they often leave out things that outdoorsman would find important: freedom, gun rights, hunting/recreation access, etc. And the things that they do focus on have little or no bearing on the quality of life of people who are middle class. Social programs that are available to the poorest people probably won’t have much of an impact on the quality of life for someone in the middle class. Same for wealth gap, etc.

I have friends from Germany and they say that personal freedoms are severely limited. This is especially true with guns and hunting, but also with other things that are more general.

 

[Mojave]

If I was 14, I would have pulled my head out of my ass and gotten through school and into Med or Vet school after a pre-med/vet bachelors and have free reign on where I want to live.

Choices are harder if you wait until you are in your 40's to pull your head out of your ass.

Curious if anyone here has spent any time living in Europe, most specifically Germany?

Those countries have consistently scored higher (by a wide margin too) on quality of life for the past few decades. I already know what most guys on here would say about that, but on paper at least I believe the pros outweighs the cons.

Yep, spent 3 years in Germany, 3 years in Australia, 2 years in Spain and 2 in Italy.

I have a German hunting license.

Crime: There is crime, little girls are abducted by SW Asian and African immigrants and raped and killed. Old people are pushed down large train station flights of stairs. Even with a complete moratorium on the public owning guns (other than hunters and sports shooters and the police and military) the dirt bags have guns and shoot places up. There was a recent shoot up this weekend in Sweden or Denmark. They happen regularly in France (worst) and occasionally in Germany. Saying that the worst cities in Europe are about as bad as Salt Lake or San Antonio where a murder happens a couple of times a month. Not a couple of times a night. You do not have a right to defend yourself beyond matching scale. Someone pulls a knife you can hit them with a stick. Pepper spray is legal in most of Europe. German police are really good, some of the other ones not so much. Italian carabanari "care bears" and Spanish guardia civil are a joke.

Hunting is fabulous. No draw, you pay your local pechter (game keeper or hunt master) for spot in a revier (1 square mile small game revier) for about $800-2500 per year. You can hunt small game, roe deer and wild boar. Hochfelter (high game) reviers are about $5000-50,000 a year. There will be limits in what you can and are expected to shoot based on the abschuss plan (hunting kill list). For a small game revier, you will get to shoot 1-3 roe bucks, and have to shoot 8-15 roe does. Plus as many pigs, fox, racoons, racoon dogs, jackals (rare) as you can kill. You might be able to shoot birds (pheasant, partridges, ducks and geese and corvids). You will have scheduled days you are required to hunt for drive hunts and have to help around the revier.

You can also pay or be invited to both hochfelter and small game driven hunts, stalking hunts "die pirch" and "soft drive or seat hunts" where you just sit in a high seat and wait for deer or pigs to walk by. Cheapest deer hunts for roe are about $500, chamois, fallow, mouflon and sika are about $1500, and red stag are about $2500. Really good trophies are typicall $1500 for reh, $2800 for chamois, fallow, mouflon and sika and $4500 for stags.

Depending on where in Europe you are you can hunt red deer rotwild, sika deer, mouflon sheep, fallow deer damwild, wild boar, roe deer rehwild, chamois (gamswild), ibex (steinwild), grouse, ducks and geese.

 

[tciprick]

I moved to Northern Alberta Canada from Southern Utah back in 2015. I was fresh out of a divorce and wanted as much distance as I could get from her. I had a standing job offer in the Oil and Gas industry up here so I took it. 7 years later I'm now doing sales for an environmental company. Still haven't left because of the wilderness here. I can drive quite literally 15 minutes in any direction from the small city I live and have every opportunity to pull over anywhere and get lost in some of the thickest most beautiful woods I've ever seen.

The winters are pretty brutal and long. I mean like 8 to 9 months of pretty crappy weather. But that's not enough to push me away from the peace I've found out here.

 

[tbro16]

I've enjoyed reading others' thoughts on this thread. I wanted to move to MT/ID/CO a few years ago but pay in my field is much less there than where I'm from. Now, as a travel nurse, with no wife/no kids/no attachments and in my late 20s I'm fortunate I get to bounce around more than most. Grew up in MN, still in MN taking advantage of the crazy high pay here now, but (temporarily?) moving to MT in Oct/Nov for my general rifle big game combo tag. Maybe by spending a few months there I'll be more inclined to care more about quality of life/personal freedom and less about leaving money and family/friends.

 

[ramsdude47]

I have little doubt that I’m downplaying the cons and overstating the pros when it comes to Europe, but it does have a strong appeal. The biggest thing for me personally is PTO and flexibility, and both are areas the US falls remarkably short of Europe. Even the way the school calendars are organized in Europe is more conducive to a work/life balance. Not having to worry about going bankrupt if you or a loved one have a freak accident or get cancer is pretty nice too.

“Personal freedoms” is pretty far down the list for me. There is plenty of freedom in most civilized countries, and perhaps a bit too much Free-Dumb around here for my liking.

 

[backcountry_hunter]

“Personal freedoms” is pretty far down the list for me. There is plenty of freedom in most civilized countries, and perhaps a bit too much Free-Dumb around here for my liking.

 

[PredatoronthePrairie]

1- Population, live in a town of 45 people. If I get stuck behind one vehicle I consider it a traffic jam and am looking for alternative routes.
2- family, most within 2 hrs
3- hunting, got access out my backdoor step.

 

[kybuck1]

Always family first. In my younger years I might have thought hunting was important enough to guide a big decision like permanent location, but as I get older seeing and being close to family continues to be the main focus. Being close to family and financial stability are 2 really big factors that should be weighted very heavily IMO.

 

[Mojave]

I have little doubt that I’m downplaying the cons and overstating the pros when it comes to Europe, but it does have a strong appeal. The biggest thing for me personally is PTO and flexibility, and both are areas the US falls remarkably short of Europe. Even the way the school calendars are organized in Europe is more conducive to a work/life balance. Not having to worry about going bankrupt if you or a loved one have a freak accident or get cancer is pretty nice too.

“Personal freedoms” is pretty far down the list for me. There is plenty of freedom in most civilized countries, and perhaps a bit too much Free-Dumb around here for my liking.

We have seen from the epic failures of the Australian European and Canadian Covid response what freedom means. The hardest part for me is that everything can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye. In the case of the Australian in Canadian governments I don’t believe what we are seeing on TV is a really what the average Australian or Canadian is experiencing. I left Germany 18 months before Covid hit I work with tons of people that have come back from Germany during Covid they all have different stories about the lockdowns. Lockdowns here in New Mexico warm basically a joke but other states were heavily scrutinized . We used to joke when I lived in Australia about the concept of freedom. The idea of freedom is bullshit, no matter how many years I’ve spent in the military how many deployments I went on how many people died freedom as a joke. You are only ultimately as free as you can exercise the right to be .

 

[AK_Skeeter]

I've lived in Alaska since 1993, now retired so summers in AK, winters in MT to extend the hunting season.
Before Alaska it was Idaho, New Hampshire, Utah, Michigan, New Jersey.
My twin brother lives in Virginia.

For me it is not family, not the job, but what is most important is wide open spaces,
living a quiet friendly neighborhood where we can not see our neighbors,
but are neighbors are our friends.

 

[hunt1up]

I live in central IL about 30 minutes from where I was born. Now WAIT before you get those nasty ideas about IL. There's Illinois south of I-80 and north of I-80. Two very different worlds. Yes, the urban influence impacts us a little in the form of taxes and policy. I think I've been to 40 states now and my two preferred regions are the mountain West and the Midwest.

Pros of living in downstate IL(or any similar region of the Midwest):

1. Housing prices. We have a pretty nice house and I think I have maybe 200k wrapped up in it after improvements. We just paid it off. I also recently bought my own hunting ground for a very reasonable price that's 20 minutes away.
2. Deer hunting is pretty good. There's better areas but I've got it pretty good compared to many.
3. Our local schools are excellent in this area. That certainly doesn't go for the whole state but this district is awesome.
4. Crime is extremely low. My kids can ride their bikes around our little town and I have no worries. Everyone looks out for each other.
5. My wife and I both work about 20 miles from home. 20 miles takes me 20 minutes and I pass 10 cars. 6. We're close enough to mid sized cities and not too far from Chicago when it comes to airports for travel.
7. Being centrally located in the country it's not that bad to drive in any direction to get places. Driving to WY or CO isn't difficult.

Cons:

1. Not enough water for my liking. We've got a few rivers and lakes but I sure wish I had more spots to walleye fish.
2. It is FLAT here. About as flat as flat can get. So as far as scenery goes it is far down the list of pretty places. There's a few scenic areas along the river valleys and the woods are great in the fall.
3. Property taxes are sort of high, but the low cost of living greatly offsets this.
4. Winter can be LONG, cold, windy, and gross. Summer can be 100. So we get all of the extremes when it comes to weather.

There's a few other places I'd be happy to move to. I loved Alaska and plenty of mountain states. But we're pretty happy with what we've got going. I've got a lot of friends and family here too so that's nice. Some days I'd prefer to look at mountains every day but fortunately I'm able to travel a lot for work and play.

 

[Poser]

Lifestyle.

Decided to move out to SW CO to pursue lifestyle obligations after a number of years in Nashville and Memphis. I wanted mountains in my backyard, large swatch’s of public land, hunting, a long ski season, world class Mtn biking and a relatively low population. Took a bit of transitional work, but landed a good job here in under a year and a half. I put lifestyle demands first and let the other aspects work themselves out.

 

[WCB]

I have little doubt that I’m downplaying the cons and overstating the pros when it comes to Europe, but it does have a strong appeal. The biggest thing for me personally is PTO and flexibility, and both are areas the US falls remarkably short of Europe. Even the way the school calendars are organized in Europe is more conducive to a work/life balance. Not having to worry about going bankrupt if you or a loved one have a freak accident or get cancer is pretty nice too.

“Personal freedoms” is pretty far down the list for me. There is plenty of freedom in most civilized countries, and perhaps a bit too much Free-Dumb around here for my liking.

I mean I know A LOT of people that have almost as much PTO as they want and more so now than ever companies are a lot more flexible.