Why, O why????

So we're moving close to buying a house. The whole process is nerve-wracking - making sure you get a good price, inspections, and last, but not least, making sure it's an affordable undertaking.
I've found that budgeting for a house is a tricky thing, especially if your expenses are lower now (aka having no kids yet) but will shoot up later (aka having KIDZ). It costs an enormous pile of cash just for basic monthly expenses around here. It costs a HELLA lot of money alone just to piss it away to fund our wonderful and bloated state and local services, much of which we'll never avail ourselves of (public school) and a lot that many of my fellow brethren defraud with gusto (here and here and here, for starters). What I also found is that you really can't get a decent house that you'd want to grow into in a NY Metro, tri-state area, frum community for less than $450,000 - $475,000 or so. Sure there are houses for less, but they tend to be out of the Jewish area, fixer-uppers you need to pour like $75,000 at least just to not wake up each day staring at an eyesore, or just plain POS properties that no one would want to live in, unless they're desperate (which if you're coming from anywhere in NYC, you might be).

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. Budgeting for a home purchase here as gotten my ever-fertile mind thinking. And when I think, I blog.

We orthodox Jews around here are constantly bellyaching (often times rightfully so) about the prohibitive costs of living. We all know that frum living, while giving us deep meaning and direction in our lives, comes at an enormous price tag, what with tuition, utilities, taxes, housing, kosher food, yom tov gouging, and communal obligations all thrown into the mix. Many people I know can't hit their head on the pillow at night without either worrying about their negative financial situation or about something that may likely happen down the road that will put them into such a position. The truth may very well be that most frum Jews in the NY area are one kid, tuition bill, stock market drop or tax hike away from turning an affordable lifestyle into a financial nightmare. News and comment sites abound about this problem and about the rising cost of tuition and how to deal with it. It may well be possible that the "silent holocaust" isn't intermarriage at all, reducing the number of Jews in the world - it's the annual tax and tuition bill. But, there is an answer. It's so simple and clear, I don't know why no one else thought of it. It's not for everyone, but it works.

What if I were to tell you that you could put say, $15,000-$30,000 annually back into your pocket? You think I was a crazy man, right? Wrong.

This event holds the key. The OU sponsored a forum this past June allowing emerging, vibrant, flourishing Jewish communities to showcase themselves to NY area residents. A whopping 1,000 people attended to explore freeing themselves from the financial shackles of frum life in metro NY/NJ. For many, simply moving your butt from one locality to another can dramatically change your quality of (frum) life. I did some searching on housing, tuition, and tax costs and the cost differences of living in town vs out of town are staggering - it could translate to tens of thousands of dollars a year in cost savings, with possibly only (depending on your industry) a small dip, if at all, in salary and income.

We get a raw deal living in NY/NJ metro. We pay some of the highest income and property taxes in the country, and we don't even use most of the state services and programs that we're paying for!! Especially education. For those living in NYC itself, I think anyone who reads this blog knows how horrible it is to live in the city and the direct and intangible costs city living imposes. Just see my last few posts. We pay criminally high costs for taxes, housing and utilities in this area, plus higher costs for child care, tuition, and just about everything else.

So why the hell do we stay here? Is there some perverse relationship between the amount of financial suffering one has and one's share in the afterlife? Don't think so. So what do we gain by staying here? Let's look at some of the possibilities:

Reason 1 - family and friends. OK, I'll concede a lot on this one. Moving away from one's family and/or friends can be traumatic, unless you hate your family or get into a snit fit with your friends that festers forever. But with the amount you save in costs you could freakin' fly once a month to see the fam, you can always make new friends, and keep well in touch with the old via social networking, email, phone, etcetcetc. This is a personal choice though that only an individual and spouse can weigh for themselves.

Reason 2 - job and salary. I'll concede a little here. Many people have businesses here that they can't just pick up and relocate; for them, they are chained to this area. Those who are salaried employees though have less standing here. If you can't get a job somewhere else or don't want to leave a (possibly) sure thing in NY/NJ in this economy, I understand. But if your sole reason for staying put is you think that your salary would, hands down, be higher, that's not necessarily the case. Look up your salary and the salary you'd command in an out of town location on salary.com. Depending on the industry and other factors, you may be surprised at how little a pay cut you may take, if at all. At the worst, telecommuting may also be an option (though you'd still be paying those criminally high NY/NJ income taxes) should your job duties and employer allow for it.

Reason 3 - quality of life. Don't even get me started. Quality of life here SUCKS if you live in NYC. If you live just outside NYC and drive to work in NYC, quality of life still SUCKS. If you live in the NYC metro area and ever drive near the city for anything, that alone makes the quality of life go right down the tubes as well. Plus the aggravation of paying your hyperinflated mortgage and taxes and getting no tangible benefit from either is enough to put a little damper on anyone's existence.

Reason 4 - Jewish amenities. OK, I can hear this one, a little. It even sounds plausible at first. The NY/NJ metro area has, bar none, the richest menu of Jewish amenities you could think of. Mikvah lady's been eyeing you a little to lasciviously for your taste? Go to the one down the road. Don't like the fact that your shul 'inserts the names' for the mi shebeirach for cholim? Go down the block to another one that does. Want to go out to eat but want Chinese food tonite instead of pizza? Go to the local kosher Chinese place. Don't like the haavara (accent) in which your child learns Hebrew? Send him or her to another school. And on and on and on, you get the picture.
The issue is that all this choice really isn't as advantageous as it seems. Having a new school, kollel, shul, and mikva on every block costs the community at large money that isn't necessary to begin with. Having 110 flavors of shul and school within a 30 mile radius gives you choice, but it doesn't do much to promote achdus in the community at large, either. And having 20 different schools in a small area doesn't really drive down costs either as they're not really competing with one another as much as filling a perceived need within a small subsection of the community. So you've got cost redundancies up the wazoo. Plus these are all in no small part donor (read: you and me) funded through hidden tuition subsidies, the ominous, wasteful 'building funds', etc.
Think about the tradeoffs you're making here. Do you really want to forgo cost savings of tens of $000's just so you can have the choice of saying the tefilla for the medina or not? Do we really place such a high value on having like 15,000 pizza places in one square mile and kosher sushi in every corner?

Reason 5 - many more Jews like us. The argument is that there are so many more Jews here than anywhere else. We're 'the Man' over here where out of town, we're nothing, and the KKK is just waiting around the corner to nab us. Plus, us NY/NJeans are just a more sophisticated, less backward lot. This argument, to put it succinctly, is b******t. In fact, it's a reason NOT to stay around here, since all of the financial pressures of frum living plus being cooped and self-ghettoized into these small geographic areas has mutated us average NY/NJ metro area frum jews into a stereotype of being yentish, pushy, self-aggrandizing, money-hoarding conservatives. I'm not saying ch"v that everyone is like this, just that the need to out gun and 'get ahead' and survive in an arid and hopeless financial climate creates a pall over life in this area and is a necessary attitude to have when faced with such a bleak economic future. It's no coincidence that it seems that the bulk of the fraud and money laundering and deception and the stealing and cheating and dishonesty that seems to be going on in our community under our noses originates or has some significant connection to this area.
The common NY/NJ perception that your average out of towner is a more moronic, backward individual is just self-compensating for our own pitiful existence here. Out of town communities can be more low-key, laid back, nicer, more pleasant and less rife with divisive politics than we have here. And no. The KKK is not waiting, rubbing hands with glee, for us to move house to New Orleans or Atlanta or whatever so they can set fiery crosses on our lawns and molest our young 'uns en masse. And there are plenty of anti-semites in the NY area.

So what do we really gain as a community by continuing to cling to the NY/NJ metro area? I think that the current, younger generation has been asking the same question and finding that the answer is: not much, essentially. If the attendance at the OU fair mentioned above is any indication, many young couples and families are starting to realize that there is, for many, a better, vibrant world outside of the self imposed NY/NJ ghetto and are actually contemplating breaking out. Kudos to the brave ones that take responsibility for their families' financial future and do.

Continued dominance of the NY/NJ metro area as the go to place for frum Jews will wane with time - it had better. The tortured and deeply flawed economic model we've created for ourselves here cannot and will not be sustainable. My prediction is that you'll see a vastly changed demographic landscape in this area in the next 20-30 years as younger, more dynamic families realize they owe no allegiance to this northeastern ghetto.