How hard is it to move from a LCOL area to a HCOL area?

[riverwed070707]

You from the QC?

I am. Born and raised.

How are you liking St. Louis? I applied for a job there -- been kind of applying all over but the St. Louis one is one where I think the job would be a great fit but we were not terribly sold on the area. We visited this summer and didn't love it but we were primarily downtown. Does the city have a lot more to offer outside of the downtown area?

[DRILLINDK]

There's been a huge movement from downtown to the burbs. Downtown is slowly coming back, but you'll have to visit the burbs to obtain a better picture of everything.

[Gina23]

Wow, this thread is starting to make the world feel really small. The quad cities are great, I have a lot of old friends up there working for Deere and, like a previous poster mentioned, live in Davenport due to the real estate taxes!

Emanon - I know Washington very well, the Panthers were a high school rival and one of my dear friends is a varsity coach there currently

DRILLINKD - You are right on about the "super city" COL. There are larger-small cities out there that are very manageable without having to be totally shocked by the HCOL.

I have to chime in about STL here. STL was my home for 7 years after I graduated college and I was very lucky to land a good job within a large corporation and really had nothing to complain about. However, it was without a doubt the worst 7 years of my life. In my opinion, STL has all the problems of a large city without any of the convieniences. It is by no means "small" as it took me 1 hour and 15 minutes to drive 6 miles on a sunny dry day. It is very, very hot there, much hotter than Central/Northern IL. I lived in one of the mediocre to upper level suburbs (Kirkwood) and my car was broken into 3 times in a span of 3 years. I owned a cute home on a quiet cul-de-sac and my neighbors did not say hello to me once in the 3 years that I owned there. In fact, because I was a single female in her 20's, they assumed I would not take care of my home/yard and informed me with a note on my door (after living there for 3 days) that since "there wasn't a man around the house, they recommended the following lawn services." It was also bizzare to me that all of the kids went to tuition-charging Catholic schools and shunned the public school system. When I left (2006), the public school system was pretty much non-existant. I never fit in, nor did the folks I worked with from Bloomington, Chicago, Orlando, or Dallas. We have all since moved away. In the defense of STL, I didn't actually live in the city and surely would've had a much different experience had I done so. I couldn't take anymore traffic, however, and was forced into the suburbs along with all of my other co-workers running the rat race with me. Oh, and that "good job" I mentioned above... being on the IT/HR side of things, it was in my face everday that I was hired-in making at least 6k less than my male counterparts with the exact job titles and years of service. My experience is just that, a personal experience, so take it for what it's worth. I'm not at all saying that STL isn't great for some people, there has to be something keeping folks there... I'm just throwing this out there to prepare you for a bit of culture shock that you may not be expecting.

Good Luck