I moved to New Hampshire in late January from Iowa. I am a New Englander by birth, but life landed me in Iowa for the past seven years, happily so. My wife is still back in Iowa settling up affairs there, and I moved early to start a new job. Having lived in both Connecticut and Massachusetts previously, when we decided to move back to the area the choice was between two states – Vermont or New Hampshire. I would like to say that we chose the Shire for reasons of principle, and that was certainly a factor, but the overriding factors were the pragmatics. As a technologist it opened up the greatest number of options for employment for me (Manchester, Concord, and the Boston area); the taxes are favorable (I’ve given more than enough money to Taxachusetts); and the mode of life here is more to our liking. Once we sell the house in Iowa, my wife will be moving out here as well and we will be purchasing property to start a small farmstead. Our goal is building toward self-sufficiency and working with like-minded people to secure as much freedom and privacy as possible for everyone.
While I respect and support many, we are not revolutionaries – we balance our desire for personal action against the risk to our family’s security. We are simply a middle-aged couple, fortunate enough to be able to come here and help secure a better future for our children. I expect that as they grow and become independent from us, our level of activism will rise, but for the time being we will take the safer path. Selfish though it may seem, they are our overriding concern; we are not ashamed of that. We hope to pass on to them more options than we had, to give them experiences we could not provide where we were, and New Hampshire seems like the most likely place where our ideals may blossom into reality. And so we are here to lend our support, such as it is now, such as it will be in the future.
I realized as I was writing this that it is not the prototypical FSP mover story, but I wanted to share it honestly and openly to encourage others who share our concerns regarding the risks related to activism. We’re here to help and provide support, but we are not positioned well to fully engage the way we both would if we were in our twenties. I think that once my wife moves (she is also a signer) it will be easier to quantify, as by then we’ll have a more definitive sense of what/where we are going to land within the Shire. For right now we are just in transition, but I wanted to do my part to help bolster the mover numbers.
Josh
Moved January 29, 2017