It’s been a while since my last post — I’ve been one busy beaver lately. So I’m taking a few moments to catch up, as much as for my own benefit as for you Gnomies.

I continue to be swamped by paperwork and administrative chores surrounding both of my parents’ trusts. My mother was always very secretive and vague about her investments and assets, and in the months leading up to her passing last April, my brother and I barely were able to get some documents drafted to help us bring everything together with the both of us as co-trustees. The trick is that I have some documents that my brother and I both have to sign to get things moving, and he’s currently deployed to Iraq. Thank heavens for scanners, faxes, e-mail, and Adobe Acrobat! One way or another, we’ll get things moving in the right direction.

The other big project is the sale of my parents’ empty house in the suburbs of Chicago. It’s been vacant for well over a year, but only on the market since February 2007. It took a long time to clear it out and get it ship-shape to be listed. As many of you know, the real estate market is still a little slow, and the sale is dragging on longer than I would like it to. We’ve had a few offers, but they were very low, so we figure we’ll wait things out until the market starts to improve a little.

The other big news is that my wife and I have had some discussions about possibly moving away from Chicago. It was a convergence of events that gave rise to the discussion. First, her sister and brother-in-law and their kids are moving out of state — to Austin, TX to be precise. Her parents, who came to the Chicago area from their home state of Oklahoma to be close to them (that’s what brought my wife to the area in the 1990s), are all but decided to move back to Oklahoma as they still have friends there and like the pace of life there — not to mention the cost of living is much easier on the wallet there than it is around the Chicago area.

My wife, Monica, is very close to her parents, and has always lived in the same geographic area as them. She was nervous to even ask me if I would be open to the notion of moving… but by the same token, I have little holding me to Chicago any more. Since losing both my parents in the past 18 months, I have little in the way of family in the area any more. The company I am currently working for full time is shutting down the downtown Chicago offices where I work, so I will be out of a job at the end of the year.

My wife works for a large health insurance company that has offices in Tulsa, OK. She’s already floated a trial balloon with her boss in Chicago about the notion of working out of the Tulsa offices, and she said it shouldn’t be a problem. So we started surfing the real estate listings out there, and boy howdy you can really get a lot of house for the money!

Again — we’re purely in the hypothetical stages right now. It’s all just talk. But if I can line up some work out there, we may just do it. I’d miss some things about Chicago, you can count on that, but I’m also ready for a change. I could stand to live somewhere that you don’t have to pay $3.75 for a gallon of gas.

[tags]cost of living, rural real estate[/tags]