5 Important Things to Consider Before Moving to a Small Town

With the increased number of people being able to work remotely and many others who are preparing to retire, more and more people are leaving the big cities and moving to smaller cities, towns, and communities. There are many reasons for doing so but three of the biggest reasons are money, safety and beautiful surroundings. These are all great reasons to make a move and possibly a lifestyle change. It is so easy to get excited about uprooting and moving to a particular area when you are on Realtor.com looking at those lower housing prices. Even more so if you see lovely pictures of a cute little town or pretty scenery. However, before you begin packing, here are 5 issues that are often overlooked by people when deciding if a particular place is really the right place for them.

Medical & Dental Services –

First of all, consider what type of medical and dental services you and your family are in need of. Do you know that this area will have them? Do you have an autistic child who needs a special doctor? Do you need a fertility specialist? Are you interested in bariatric surgery? Are you going to need a hip replacement surgery in the future? Will your child need an orthodontist? Are you used to seeing a holistic doctor? Make yourself a list of what you know you need now and what there is a good chance you will need in the future.

You are also going to need to think about your insurance. What kind of medical and dental insurance do you have now through your remote job? Will you be able to keep them when you move? Are you going to be looking for a new job and new insurance? Are you retiring and losing your insurance? You will want to check and see if any of the local medical or dental offices are going to be in your PPO network if your insurance is staying the same or see if they are taking Medicare if that is what you are on now. What if in your quaint new community no one is taking Medicare or your particular insurance? How much more would it cost you to stay local and be out of network or become a cash paying patient? Can you afford that or are you going to need to travel outside of your new town to find someone in your PPO or who accepts your Medicare plan?

If your area doesn’t have the services you need or does not accept your insurance, the new question becomes how far will you have to travel to get to a town that will? How far and over what terrain? Think about weather throughout the year. Will you have to traverse over mountains with snowy roads in the winter or a highway with long stretches of nothing in the heat of summer? How far will you have to travel to give birth to your child in a hospital? What kinds of emergency surgeries are they capable of handling? How far would you have to travel to have cancer treatments done? How much time out of school would your child have to miss in order to go see their pediatric dentist?

Now if you contacted your insurance company or Medicare and gotten a list of doctors/dentists in your new area that they say are taking new patients, begin making calls. Don’t trust the lists. They usually only get updated once a year and a doctor’s or dentist’s office could have changed policies or lost a practitioner since it was last updated. You can look and see if any of those practitioners on the list have websites and look them up. Sometimes the websites do say whether they are accepting new patients or not but that varies from practice to practice. I personally would still call. Doctor’s and dentist’s offices get busy and updating the website is one of those things that can fall through the cracks.

You really want to find out if there are offices taking new patients. It is not a given that you can just move there and get in with someone these days. Ever since COVID there seems to be a shortage of personnel in the medical and dental fields. This has resulted in short staffing, longer waits for available appointments and more offices not being able to take new patients. Some areas may have a plethora of available openings for new patients and other areas a real shortage. That is something that you want to know ahead of time.

I dealt with this almost daily. Someone who just moved to the area or just got a new job and now had insurance coverage where they did not before – and I would have to turn them away because we had to stop taking new patients because our doctors’ schedules were already so packed. Some would already be sick or in pain when they were calling and I would have to refer them to the Urgent Care Clinic or the ER. Some people would understand but others would not. “I’m in pain, I’m just one person, can’t you fit me in?”

Often people who are not in the medical field do not seem to understand that if we continually add more and more people to a primary doctor, dentist or hygienist’s schedule soon it will be longer and longer in between times that they can get in and be seen by their provider. The provider will also be less likely to have the availability a patient needs when they turn up with a pain, injury or illness.

This brings me to my next point – how long are the wait times to get in and see this provider that you have found? Find out what the standard or norm is for that office. Call multiple providers in the area and see if you have more than one choice in the area or if you are limited to just one option. What if you really don’t like or trust that dentist? What if you doctor moves, retires, suddenly stops taking your insurance or stops taking new patients before you move and get in to see them? It’s good to know in advance if you have multiple options or not.

I know how much work moving is, but if the area you are moving to has limited medical and dental options and especially if you have multiple family members you are trying to get seen – try to schedule appointments in advance. You are moving in 4 months and your new provider has a 3 month wait to get in, schedule something 5 or 6 months out with them. This gives you a month or two to unpack, settle in, get the kids on a schedule before tackling seeing a new doctor and dentist. If you have ongoing health issues then you may want to schedule an appointment sooner.

Get something on the books and keep the appointment. If the practice gets full up they can change their policy and stop taking new patients but will honor your appointment because it’s already made. If you try to reschedule, some offices will let you and others will use it as an excuse to take you off their schedule. That is a policy that varies from office to office

One more word of advice on this subject – don’t wait until you are in pain or are sick to try to get in and get established with a new provider. Like I said before – get your new patient appointments on the calendar. If you get sick or need to be seen before your new patient appointment you are more likely to get in when you already have something on the books. You don’t want an expensive ER visit because you cannot get in to see a doctor for 3 to 6 months. The same goes for getting in to see a dentist.

If you have found an area you are seriously interested in, do your homework. You can investigate quite a bit online these days. Not all small-town medical practices may have an online presence but so many do these days. It may give you an idea of how many practices and of what sort are available in the area. That online information does not get updated very often and policies can change rather quickly. If they are accepting patients, I would also ask them if that policy is in danger of changing anytime soon. The front desk may or may not know, but it never hurts to ask. Double check that they accept your insurance or what the prices are if you are a cash pay patient. If you are not super comfortable with the computer thing or you find only a couple of options say for dentists, then another research option is to call 411 which is the information line. Call 411 and ask for dentists in town name, state name. Just be aware that some phone carriers will charge you for out of state 411 calls.

Emergency Services –

It is easy to assume that fire stations, ambulances and law enforcement agencies run and react all the same from place to place. When people think of moving to “the country” or a small town they think less crime – not less funding, less staffing, less training or even that the area may be dependent on volunteer staffing.

Now most communities have some sort of paid law enforcement, but the staffing can vary from place to place depending on the allocated taxes that come in for that resource. You could live in a small city that can support its own police department, or you could live in a smaller community that is overseen only by the county sheriff’s department. Either way, they could be small departments with lean amounts of personnel.

You might be thinking “Great that is because there is less crime there!” This is often true, but just remember if there are six officers on staff at the police department and four are occupied with a planned drug bust on the outskirts of the east side of town and the other two have responded to a domestic disturbance call in the south side of town and you were just hit in a fender bender on the west side….you could be waiting around awhile before an officer can come and make your accident report. This concept works the same and even more so if you are dealing with a county department where the sheriff’s personnel can be up to an hour away from you and they may cover hundreds of miles. There may be limited resources to investigate who threw a rock through your car window at 2 am.

People are often surprised by how many of America’s firefighters are actually volunteers. I have family in California where the state pays for the professional firefighters who fight forest fires, but the small community where they live is protected by a strictly volunteer staff.

Not only are firefighters often volunteers in these communities but EMT’s and paramedics can be as well. We live in a rural county, and I believe there is actually only one ambulance company in the whole county that has paid employees. The rest are all volunteers. Now some towns will pay a small stipend to their volunteer emergency responders for the calls they go out on, but these are still volunteers who are at home in their beds at 3 am when an emergency call comes in. Emergency response times and resources may not be what you are accustomed to or what you are expecting in these areas (they could be better, or they could be worse).

Volunteers usually mean limited personnel and resources. While EMTs and paramedics have specific training and certifications in order to perform their duties, volunteer firefighters not so much. With increased Federal grant incentives, local firehouses are working on increased standards of training. Their knowledge, experience, training levels and standards can vary greatly from community to community and firehouse to firehouse. Some areas may only have one or two firetrucks and one or two ambulances. Most areas will also not be equipped with the latest in gear or technology. They instead rely on local fundraisers for replacement and upgrades in equipment. Therefore, I encourage you to watch out for your town’s next Firefighter BBQ fundraiser or raffle and buy your tickets.

I cannot give enough praise to the men and women who volunteer their time, energy and risk their wellbeing for the sake of those in their community. You should to. Just remember when these individuals do not show up as quickly as you think they should have to put out your kitchen fire (and saving the rest of the house from burning) that they left their family, a hot meal and missed their son’s baseball game in order to be there for you. Remember when they trample your prize-winning begonias, track mud across your carpet and broke a window in order to get into your house and perform lifesaving CPR on your husband at 5 am that they are getting paid minimally if anything at all to help you, their neighbor.

Some smaller communities may have the benefit of mutual aid. That is where multiple small communities or agencies make agreements to work together and cover for each other in times of need. So, your town may only have two fire engines which are both controlling a burn from a road accident just outside town when the neighbor kid accidentally sets their garage on fire – it may then be the fire engine from the next town over that responds. In our area the highway patrol may show up to respond to a call if our city officers are all occupied on other calls.

Some small cities may have one or two fire stations for the whole city. Areas outside the city limits could be covered by county, state, or federal fire stations instead of city. My friend lived in an area like this and if you lived in the city, you paid taxes that covered this service. If you lived outside the city limits and were in the county fire department area, your taxes were lower but if you ever required fire or EMT services then you would be sent a direct bill by the county for them. These services are not cheap.

Crime, drugs & safety –

Here are two assumptions that are not always true. Small town = small crime. Small town = less drugs. That may often be the case but not necessarily. Drugs are everywhere. It is sad but true. Where drugs are there will be drug related crime as well. You think you are going to move to the country and get your kids or grandkids away from drugs – good thought, just don’t be naive or unaware. You might be escaping gangs, drugs and violence in the city, in the country it may be boredom because your area has fewer activities or programs for kids and young adults. Your teens/pre-teens may come in as the outsider’s seeking acceptance and unfortunately often the most accepting kids on campuses are the ones doing drugs. If you are moving for a better life for your kids, do your homework and see what kind of school, sports, arts, programs and activities are available for them. Maybe the area has a very active sports, 4-H or FFA (Future Farmers of America) program. Are you willing to take on raising animals or drive long distances for games in order to keep your kids involved?

The truth is not all small towns and rural communities are the same or have the same issues. The other truth is that even great communities can have serious drug issues. My bestie years ago moved to a nice smaller city that turned out to be the Meth capitol of the state. On the flip side this community cared about and invested in it’s kids. It had sports programs, music and theater programs, community events for families and even specifically for children. I have another friend who lives in a very small town in a lovely valley and it has one of the highest crime ratios in America which he believes is due to the drug and homeless issues they have.

No town is completely problem free. Here again, you can break out your computer and check out the town/area in which you spotted that “perfect for you” house on Realtor.com by going online. Try SpotCrime, CrimeMapping.com, NeighborhoodScout or CrimeReports. You might even be able to use MyLocalCrime.com. Family Watchdog is specifically for information on sex offenders. You can also try typing in your computer search bar crime or crime rates and then the name of the town and state that you are considering and see what your search engine finds for you. There may be a state or area website that may come up having relevant data. Check multiple sources. Depending on where each gets it’s sources, their info may vary a bit.

Look beyond just the overall crime rate. Try to find out the data on specific crimes. Rape and murder are much different than property damage or drunk and disorderly crimes. I don’t know if any of the above resources will be of any help in finding out if your town of interest is having major homeless issues or not. Again try searching on the web for homeless issues town, state. You can try calling the local sheriff’s office or city’s police station and talk to someone or try finding a local Facebook or other type of social media page where you can try to gather some firsthand info. Just be prepared on social media platforms you will find those who greet you with open arms and those who do not wish for more out of towners to join their community.

Insurance Costs & Coverages –

An issue people often forget to look at before moving to an area is insurance rates for your vehicles and home. Rates can vary quite a bit between states and even between areas within states. Talk to your current insurance agent/s and get some quotes. Your current insurance provider may not cover wherever you are wanting to move to especially if it crosses state lines. You may then want to investigate – look for a new company who will and get estimated quotes.

Another more recent issue is coverage in general. If you are looking at moving to an area prone to wildfires, flooding, tornados, earthquakes or hurricanes, is it even possible to get coverage on your home in case of those disasters? Most of us have heard about insurance companies no longer offering fire coverage or pulling out of California altogether making it harder or nearly impossible for those residents to get coverage on their homes. Many of the Palisade Fire victims had just had their homeowner policies cancelled right before the fire happened. If you cannot get insurance you want to go into it with eyes wide open, not after you’ve sold your house, packed your boxes and are in escrow on your new uninsurable home.

Utility Costs –

This one is easy to overlook. Aren’t costs for electricity and gas about the same everywhere? Far from. I have lived in places where natural gas was expensive and electricity cheap, but I have also lived in a place where it was the exact opposite. There are states like Oregon that are purposely pushing up energy costs trying to encourage all of it’s citizens into going green and the use of solar power. There are the states in the southeast recovering and rebuilding infrastructure from the destructive power of hurricanes and floods. Will that affect power and power prices in those and outlying areas? California not only has rolling power blackouts in the big cities in the summer because of past fires and lawsuits to the power company in more rural northern California there are now areas that experience year-round power outages. The power company shuts off the power when the wind kicks up to avoid accidental fires starting. If you live with a well then you not only lose power but your water as well. Find out what you are getting into,

Living in a small or rural town may also mean limited power resources which means electricity may be brought in from hundreds of miles away to be provided to the local citizens. Often you only have one company as an option for purchasing power from. Call and find out how much they charge per kilowatt hour and compare it to what you pay now. But don’t stop there remember when I said your electricity might have to come a long way to come to you? The electric company will have to pay transmission fees for it to do so and then most likely you will to. Ask them if there are additional monthly charges for that and how much that will run. Also, find out what other one time and monthly service charges or taxes you might be charged with for your electricity in order to get an idea of your totally monthly cost.

I have family who live in an area where in order to let the salmon return upriver, a local damn was taken out. Great for the salmon, the problem is that dam also produced power for the local area. No more local power so now everyone’s power bills in the area have doubled. What once was a $300 dollar bill in the winter is now a $600 dollar bill for a month’s worth of electricity. That can break a budget if you are on a fixed income or a really tight budget. You don’t want to move into a situation like that unaware or unprepared to pay that kind of money monthly.

Call the gas company and find out how much natural gas is going for. Talk to a realtor and find out if there are other common local sources used for heat or cooling. Some places it may be very common for oil monitor heating, woodburning fireplaces, or propane tanks stored and refilled on the properties.

A lot of this might sound negative and you might now be having doubts about moving to a more rural area. That is not my intent. I love living in the country. My intent is to make you aware of some very important issues that often get overlooked when you consider moving and costs to your future budget. There are more matters that I did not bring up in order to keep this blog from turning into a book. I will try to address those in a future blog post.

The point is you are trying to find out if this move will really be affordable or improve your life in the ways that you want it too. But things like lack of resources if you’re disabled or lack of resource programs for your autistic child, the inability to get home insurance, the outlandish price on rentals, the lack of specialists, the limited number of dental options, unexpectedly high utility prices or drug issues can turn your move to the land of milk and honey into a struggle you weren’t expecting. So do your homework before you begin packing up or purchase that new home in the country. It may save you a lot of headaches down the road.