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dinasiano
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| Posted: Jan 29 2014 at 6:18am | IP Logged
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Hi Ladies,
I was wondering if you could help me. My husband and I are considering making a big move from New York to North Carolina, although the place isn't set in stone. New York is so very expensive. My husband works so hard 6 days a week, sometimes 7. Right now he has his own construction business and he is doing well but he is never home! It seems like he lives only to work. It isn't healthy and the kids and I never get to see him. Our property taxes are ridiculous....
We know several people who have moved to North Carolina and other places "down South" and are beginning to pray for discernment in this area. In the meantime, I need a starting point to begin to research this. Can any of you share your experiences in North Carolina? Any great parishes? Homeschooling groups or co-ops? How's the weather? How is housing? Insurance, taxes, schools (just in case  ) Anything!!!
Thank you so much!
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SallyT
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| Posted: Jan 29 2014 at 7:50am | IP Logged
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Where in NC, Dina?
We're in Lincolnton, which is a small town about 30 miles northwest of Charlotte -- near but not in the mountains. If you look on a map, we're off Hwy. 321 between Gastonia and Hickory. It's lovely, rolling country, and though we're right in town, our general area is very rural. Lots of people we know have land.
Many of our church friends are transplants from NY/NJ, who moved down here either for jobs or to escape the myriad expenses of life in the northeast. Relative to NY, cost of living here is quite cheap, especially in terms of property taxes. They all seem to love the milder winters and the slower pace.
I'm from the South myself, so to me there's nothing especially "new" about all this, but our area is a nice place to live. Our particular town is quite small, and Catholic homeschoolers are a bit thin on the ground right here -- but there are huge groups closer to Charlotte, and we may actually start driving to do some things with a big co-op connected to St. Mark's Church in Huntersville, about half an hour away. Meanwhile, there are a lot of Christian homeschoolers in the immediate area, and we do a lot of things with a group we've met through our YMCA Gym and Swim class. Everyone we've met has been very, very friendly and welcoming.
Parishes: both the Charlotte and the Raleigh dioceses have many great parishes and holy priests. Our little parish. St. Dorothy's, out in the country is surprisingly lively and good: our former pastor said an EF Mass as one of his daily Masses every week, and overall, the liturgy, homilies, and CCD have been so good that many people drive over an hour to be part of this parish. Under our new pastor, whose very first church this is, we don't yet have the Latin Mass up and running, but still the quality of the liturgy and of his teaching is really high. And we're not alone. Our former pastor moved just down the road to St. Michael's in Gastonia, which has a large group of homeschooling families, and there are good priests all over the place, especially our younger, newer priests. Our diocese sponsors a hugely attended Eucharistic Congress every September -- I always see Betsy there selling her beautiful rosaries and chaplets!
Weather is hot and humid in the summer, relatively mild the rest of the year. We've just had what will probably be our only snow. Spring always seems pretty short -- you have winter, then this brief window of glorious warm-but-not-hot weather, and then heat! Our utility bills go through the roof in the summer, but that's because we have a very inefficient old house, and not running the AC is not an option from late May to roughly October.
The real downside is that in our immediate area, jobs are not easy to come by. Housing is cheap largely because the market is still very depressed. There are lovely houses in our neighobrhood which have been for sale for two or three years, so while you could pick one up at a bargain-basement price, you'd have to expect to be living there for a long, long time. This is a big lumber area, and many people we know are in some facet of the construction business, and while that's better than it was a few years ago, it's not anywhere close to booming. People are reeling from closures of textile mills and other industries that this area has historically depended on -- it's just not a prosperous place these days. There are probably more opportunities closer to Charlotte, but living expenses rise pretty dramatically the closer you get to the city.
Schools are okay. In our county, the system is not fantastic, but there is a small system of charter schools, which some of our children's friends attend. No Catholic school in our county or, I think, in Hickory to the north; St. Michael's in Gastonia does have a school, and our former pastor, Fr. Buettner, has been really excited about what he can do by way of faith formation through the school.
Our parish does have a number of homeschooling families, and we all know each other and do things together from time to time, but we haven't had a real, organized group, which I miss. A friend and I have been trying to get a First Friday play day going -- Mass together, then to her house for kids to play and moms to socialize -- but we haven't started back up since they moved house in December. St. Michael's in Gastonia has an active homeschool group, as does St. Marks in Huntersville. There's a group called F.A.C.E.S. in Charlotte, and a children's Latin choir with several branches, depending on people's geographical location -- they get together every year to sing at the Eucharistic Congress. I just met a bunch of moms at a chant workshop in Charlotte last weekend, who were looking to take what they learned back to their branches of the Latin choir.
Overall, this is a very family- and homeschooling-friendly area. Homeschool requirements are pretty easy: you have to register with the state during a window of time in the summer, and then keep attendance and immunization records and do yearly standardized testing. They "encourage" you to participate in a mail-in program where you send in your test scores, shot records, and attendance yearly, but under the law you can opt out. We have opted out, and so far nobody's ever bothered us.
Great in-state colleges, too. My husband teaches at Belmont Abbey, which is the one Catholic college option in the Carolinas, but NC does have a very good system of state universities, so it's a good place to be in terms of in-state tuition.
So, that's all I can think of! I hope this is helpful. As I said, we know lots of people who are transplants from NY/NJ, and they show no signs of wanting to leave!
God bless you in your discernment.
Sally
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JodieLyn
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| Posted: Jan 29 2014 at 12:47pm | IP Logged
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It's easier if you have a better idea of the area. HSLDA has the state laws for homeschooling listed. And then figure which other things you'd want to know at a state level, like midwifery laws or gun laws.
Then you'd want to go to Chamber of commerce websites in the area that you're interested in.
Also Churches. You can tell a lot about what goes on at a Church by an online bulletin for instance.
Parks and Rec will give you some more ideas.
City Data has wonderful info on a bazillion places.. like population size and composition and nearest large cities and radio stations and newspapers and climate and income and housing and all sorts of stuff.
Look for local newspapers online.
Look for reality places online.. see what's available and what prices they're going for.
Look for local stores (the business listing on the Chamber of Commerce page is helpful) and see if you can find ads online and make sure they're pointed to the local you're looking at.
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Jodie, wife to Dave
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All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
-Sir Walter Scott
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dinasiano
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| Posted: Jan 29 2014 at 1:17pm | IP Logged
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Thank you Ladies! A lot to think about! Thanks for giving me some concrete places to begin.
Love
Dina
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SallyT
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| Posted: Jan 29 2014 at 3:42pm | IP Logged
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Oh, Jodie's suggestions are great. I leaned a lot on City Data when we were moving, almost six years ago now. It was largely owing to things I read there that we looked seriously at the town where we live, even though there are communities closer to my husband's work in Belmont, which is basically a Charlotte bedroom community, very charming and kind of upscale, and with the kind of housing we really wanted (larger old house) totally out of our reach.
Online real-estate listings were very helpful, too. I'd input our data -- price range, number of bedrooms, age range of the property -- and these Lincolnton houses kept coming up. We came thinking we'd look at some of them, but really focus on Gastonia, which has a nice 1920s section of town -- and we really liked Lincolnton. In fact, I remember looking at our house online, but writing it off as out of our price range. The previous owner had died, and it sat on the market for a long time, at what was by any accounts a really inflated price, so that by the time we came to look, the family were getting desperate, and the price had done a free-fall. And then they came down more . . . and here we are.
So just thinking about what kind of property you'd want and your budget, and inputting all that in a broad geographical area to see what comes up is an interesting exercise and can tell you a good bit about where you might want to live -- what kind of neighborhood you'd really want.
Interesting tidbit: property taxes are significantly higher in my county, Lincoln County, than in neighboring Catawba and Gaston counties. Why this is I do not know, but I do know that it's a real disincentive for businesses to locate in our county. I'd live in Catawba County in a heartbeat -- Hickory is a really pleasant small city, and there are some nice smaller towns -- if we weren't already at the outer edge of what we consider to be a reasonable commute for my husband. Fortunately we really do like where we are, but I wish the taxes would come down! Our town has a new, additional trash tax as well, which apparently was levied to enable pay raises all around for city employees, as was explained to my husband by his barber . . . we are definitely not political-corruption free down here in Mayberry!
Our local crime, meanwhile, tends toward the meth-lab-in-trailers-in-the-country variety. Lots of that kind of stuff, but very little of the kind of crime we saw in Memphis, where people helped themselves to bikes, outdoor furniture, and our lawn mower, all out of our back yard shed behind a locked gate. Here, you can put furniture on your front porch and not chain it to anything, and nobody has touched the bikes piled up in our garage. In Memphis they would have been long gone.
I forgot about it before, but there is a CarolinaCatholicHS yahoo group moderated by JoAnna Parente, who has been a member here. I joined that group before we moved, and many people were very friendly and helpful. It's a quiet list a lot of the time, but there are a lot of Raleigh-diocese people on it, and they are full of good info for people moving to that area.
I think both NC bishops -- Bishop Jugis in Charlotte, Bishop Burbidge in Raleigh -- are very good. Though NC is not, overall, a heavily Catholic state (far from it!), what is here is very vibrant.
I know I'm not the only one here who lives in NC, but Jodies's input made me think of all these other things pertaining to life on the Western Piedmont. Hope it's helpful!
Sally
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Angel
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| Posted: Jan 29 2014 at 4:07pm | IP Logged
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Well, it depends on where in NY you are moving from, I guess, but... we found NY not to be very Catholic either. We were in a *very, very liberal* diocese. And the taxes are horrible. When we moved to Mississippi, it was like we got a raise. Our monthly house payment came down $1000.
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Angela
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SeaStar
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| Posted: Jan 29 2014 at 4:32pm | IP Logged
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I love Hickory... it is so pretty and just seems like the perfect small city. 
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Melinda, mom to ds ('02) and dd ('04)
SQUILT Music Appreciation
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SallyT
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| Posted: Jan 30 2014 at 7:48am | IP Logged
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Oh, I know, Melinda! I love having reasons to drive up there -- it's only about 20 minutes from where I live, and lots of my friends live up that way. You can see mountains from various points in my town, but you can *really* see them from Hickory.
If you come to Hickory, you should really come see me!
Meanwhile, I love that we're also a pretty short shot (just over an hour) from Blowing Rock, which is a real resort town with million-dollar houses, but a fun place to hang out for the day. Occasionally my husband and I will save up and go up there for a dinner date, but more often the kids and I drive up to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a day in the mountains, then stop in Blowing Rock to get ice cream and play in the pretty little town park.
We've always been mountain lovers, and even after almost six years, it still seems like a treat to be able to get to them without driving for an entire day. Hwy 321 is the highway of my dreams -- going north, anyway!
And I have to say, NC isn't as cheap as Mississippi! But according to friends who've moved down here, it's still a vast improvement over the tax load of the Northeast. And while clergy and parishes vary, of course, our dioceses really are, overall, very faithful, which was an exciting discovery for us. Our first weekend here, when my husband and older children went to Confession, our pastor was away, and the Bishop was filling in for him and hearing Confessions. In our old diocese, the Bishop never, ever visited parishes at all -- he just appeared on video a lot. So to get to church and find the Bishop in the box, like the humblest priest, was an amazing thing, and I've always loved him for it.
Sally
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4Real Forums : Tea and Conversation
Topic: Need input- we might move!
