It’s Official: I’ve Resigned From My Job

No more protected posting for a while – it’s finally official that I have resigned from my job. It only took a week for The Company to decide to accept my resignation. *lol* I can now begin telling people, who will be shocked to hear that my last day is next Wednesday. I turned in my notice last Thursday morning, but because of the holiday and Mr. Russell’s request that I keep it mum, it’ll seem like my final two weeks is really only a week.

For those new to Cootiehog and who don’t have access to private posts, you may be wondering why I turned in my notice? Well, the answer is simple: We sold our house and will be moving to South Carolina on July 16. After much debate Denis and I made the decision back in April that we couldn’t afford to live in NoNJ any longer. It’s just too expensive and the costs are increasing month by month, year by year.

And while we love our neighbors, love our church, love our house (for the most part), and love our community (mostly), we just can’t do it anymore. So we’re going elsewhere. We’re going to a place where we can have more house for half the money. Where property taxes will be under $2000 instead of over $8000. Where car insurance will drop by 60%. Where commuting time can potentially drop by half. Where real estate is booming instead of sagging. Where the ALL of the schools are great in the entire town instead of living near the ONE good school in the whole town.

We’ll be further away from family, but not totally alone. Since we made the decision to buy land down there I’ve been in contact with four couples I know from my college days as well as two women who actually LIVE in Fort Mill, SC who have been so helpful to us over the six months or so with our constant barrage of questions and requests for land drive-bys (shout out to Amy and Christy!). We own land but plan to wait on building until the kids are in school full-time and we’re more established in our careers down there. So in the meantime we’ll buy a house to live in for the next 3-4 years.

Denis won’t have a job but will get his real estate license upon arrival and will begin to try and break into the biz down there. I won’t have a job – Mr. Russell was going to try and arrange a jobshare situation for me but failed to get approval. I’ve sent out just over a dozen resumes and will start being more aggressive about sending out for jobs I find online that look interesting. Once I get settled I’ll do a broad sweep and send out 50 unsolicited resumes and see if anything sticks. I’m confident that I’ll find something relatively quickly once I really start actively looking.

So that’s that. Next Wednesday is my last day of work. We’ll spend three days after that packing up the remainder of the house (2/3rds of our stuff is already packed up and in storage – we did that in order to make the house more attractive while it was on the market). Moving truck arrives super-early on Sunday morning, and once done we’ll make the drive to VA. We’ll attend my grandfather’s funeral on Monday then head to SC on Tuesday to pick up the keys to the short-term apartment rental we are setting up. We meet the moving truck on Tuesday morning.

It’s going to be an adventure, that’s for sure.