All you need wealth to move folks - uh, no. Especially not if you're youngish and without an established career. Go to new prospective town (y'all are a little timid, so I'm thinking not NYC, SF - somwhere better than /different from home, but not uber hard to get by in). Put yourself up in a backpacker's for a week or two, while making it kown that you're looking for work/roommates. Sign up with a temp agency if you have any office skills and one respectable outfit; otherwise walk into every bar and restaurant and ask for work 'til you get some (these can be combined, as the temp gigs tend to be 9-5). Some folks do movie theater/shop instead - the money's no better, the people are worse, and there's no free food or drink, but your call. In whatever work you get, put out the word that you're looking for a place, maybe with roomies. If you're not an ogre, this will work. If you don't have dependents and thus much greater monetary needs, the risk of actually dying in a ditch is way small relative to your risk of meeting some nice folks and having a good time.

Work, but I've lived in NC most of my life. Just bought a house, so I won't be leaving for a while. Plus, its a pretty haps city.

Good question.
This is the location of my first job and for a while was close to most of my family. I was on the cusp of moving to Austin early last year when in the course of a week two of my four mover friends backed out, I got a sweet promotion (these actually happened within hours of each other) and my mom came down with pneumonia (so I was down one more mover). When you get signs like that, you follow them.

I'm still going to move there. Just looking/waiting for the right opportunity. I'm way connected and involved with the community here and my job rules, so it's not like I dread each day here and I actually have a lot of good times. But I do need to get out of Dodge before much longer.

So I don't know which option to choose. Any ideas?

pretty much born/raised in southern cali - never lived anywhere else but that's all changing soon!!!!!

$$$ Not looking to build a client base from scratch.

got it brother.

Thats just about the most beautiful thing I'ver ever read.

Anyway. I live here because I live here.

Requires the Jonathan Richman song to be playing in the background.
Nice.

I did that stuff back when. Somehow I still wound up back a few miles from my hometown with two kids, wife and house.

It's not that I'm timid so much as don't really like people much.

Sure, but you did that stuff and so now you're where you are by choice, rather than inertia. You know that people elsewhere are lame. Now, of course, with a real job and dependents, you're in it for the long haul

I do wish I'd done the dependants thing a little farther south, but when Lisa and I met, we went through some dire financial and personal stuff. It bonded us like...uh...cops on Homicide or something...but we didn't get out of northern Maine like we thought we would.

From April-November I'm usually a lot more bullish on my area than December-March. February is when I decide I'm a moron for staying here.

Global warming is on your side.

Maybe we need a new category, 'high ground'

and yet you call it "cali".

I'm gonna have to kick Dri in the butt for that. Cali...pfffft!