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Mrs. Groovy and I are big proponents of geoarbitrage. When done with a nice chunk of home equity, it’s a great way to radically change your financial fortunes for the better. By using geoarbitrage, we went from Baby Step 0 (i.e., awash in debt and living paycheck to paycheck) to Baby Step 7 (i.e., no debt, outright homeownership, and saving 50 percent of our gross pay) in a mere three years.
One day, I’ll write a post explaining how we used geoarbitrage to hack Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps. For now, though, I want to address the one glaring downside to geoarbitrage that fills a lot of people with trepidation: moving from a high-cost-of-living area to a low-cost-of-living area will invariably mean moving from a big cosmopolitan city to a small city or an even smaller town.
Small Town America Ain’t That Bad
Mrs. Groovy grew up in New York City. I grew up on Long Island. The New York metropolitan area contains over 21 million people.
We now live in Louisburg, North Carolina. Louisburg is an hour from Raleigh and has a population of 3,500.
Louisburg ain’t Manhattan, of course. It doesn’t have a single museum or theater and it’s most iconic eatery is the Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen on Bickett Blvd.
But we love living in Louisburg. The people are nice, our neighbors are great, and because we’re not too far from Wake Forest, Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, there’s no shortage of things to do.
A Day in the Life of Two Small Town Retirees
This past Monday, Mrs. Groovy and I decided to venture into Raleigh for some food and culture. But before we did, we stopped by our neighbor’s pasture to look at the newborn cows.
In my city-slicker mind, the cow-birthing season would naturally be the spring. Newborn cows couldn’t possibly be hardy enough for winter weather, right? Wrong. The cow-birthing season is apparently the fall. There are at least a dozen newborn cows in our neighbor’s pasture now.
Quick aside. The newborn cows are adorable, of course. But they’re fun to watch because, by cow standards, they’re incredibly active. They actually chase each other and roughhouse with each other.
Our first stop in Raleigh was the Morgan Street Food Hall.
The Morgan Street Food Hall has 21 vendors, serving everything from lobsters to macarons. Mrs. Groovy and I decided to delight our gullets at Iyla’s Southern Kitchen. She went for the shrimp sandwich. I went for the barbeque bowl.
After our very satisfying lunch, Mrs. Groovy and I then walked over to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. We’ve been to this museum a couple of times before, but we love coming back. This time around, we made sure to visit the anthropod zoo and the butterfly conservatory.
Quick aside. Admittedly, I wasn’t particularly jacked up for the butterfly conservatory. What bonafide manly man would be? But there are some incredibly beautiful butterflies in this exhibit and it’s worth a visit. Besides, if you’re a bonafide manly man, and a butterfly lands on you, you can show other visitors just how manly you are by not freaking out like a girly man.
Back to Louisburg
After a couple of hours in the Museum of Natural Sciences, our curiosity was sated and it was time to head back to Louisburg. The cost of lunch, museum, and parking was less than $35.
Final Thoughts
Small-town or small-city living isn’t for everyone. Saying you hail from Raleigh doesn’t have nearly the cachet as saying you hail from New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. And going to a Carolina Mudcat game doesn’t generate nearly as much excitement as going to a New York Yankee game.
But don’t let small-town or small-city living scare you away from geoarbitrage. Thanks to the internet, small towns such as Louisburg aren’t nearly as isolated as they were ten years ago. And as long as you’re within an hour of a decently sized city, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to entertain your senses and enrich your soul. Heck, because doing something down here in North Carolina isn’t nearly as costly and hassle-plagued as doing something in New York, geoarbitrage has actually made me and Mrs. Groovy much more active and adventurous.
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Is geoarbitrage worth it if it means abandoning the cosmopolitan city you grew up in? Or is it better to suffer the indignities of living in a big city than to suffer the yokelities of living in a small town? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.
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