Lately I’ve been feeling like a modern day nomad. It can’t help that I’ve moved eight times in the last five years. Granted, most of those moves were out of necessity, but sometimes I wonder if it will ever change. After my parents got married, they lived in their house in California for thirteen years, and then packed up and moved us to Arizona, where they lived in their house for another twenty plus years. So where do I get my nomad genes from?
After the divorce from my first wife, I moved back home where I rented a room from my parents. I ended up staying for four years. I think that it became too comfortable. The rent was very reasonable, so I had extra money to go out and do things, and I could come and go as I pleased. I was able to go on several cruises, go out drinking with friends, trips to Vegas or Laughlin… you name it, and I did it. Then came a big blow… in December 2003, I got arrested for DUI. I knew that I had to make a change, but didn’t know how to do it. After all of my fines, classes, and suspended drivers license was taken care of, I decided that it was time to move out. I moved into an apartment, basically taking over the lease from a girl that I was trying to date. She needed to move back home to save money and still had a couple of months left on her lease, so I decided that I would try to help her out. Nothing happened as far as the two of us went, which was good because she was way too young for me LOL, but it got me into a different environment.
Shortly after moving into the apartment, I ran into a few friends of mine from high school. They were married, and one was a real estate agent and the other did mortgage loans. I took this as being more than just chance and, knowing that my lease was going to be up in a few months, decided to try and purchase a house for myself. I found a nice little two bedroom, one bath fixer-upper and moved in November 2004. A month later, I met someone who would later become my wife. She had three children of her own, and so I knew that the five of us wouldn’t be able to fit into my small house.
Around March 2005, I moved in with my girlfriend. She had a large house that needed a lot of work. We stayed in the house for over a year, went through a refinance, and decided that we needed to move out when the housing market started crashing. We were overextended on this house and, with a newborn and three other kids and a new marriage, knew that we wouldn’t have the time or the money to stay there.
We moved into another house in September 2006 that we had purchased when the housing market was at its peak, and while we really liked the house, it took a failed business venture on my part to decide that we wouldn’t be able to afford it. We ended up losing both of these two houses to foreclosure, which has set us on a long path of renting.
In January 2007, we moved from a house where we were paying a $2,300/month mortgage to a nice rental that was supposed to be only $1,500. After falling in love with the new rental, the landlord decided that he was going to tack on an extra $100 per month because we had dogs. We stayed in this house only four months and decided that with my wife not having any luck in the mortgage industry, that we seriously needed to downsize.
We found an older four bedroom house for rent for $850 a month in May 2007 and decided to go for it. My wife was about five months pregnant with our second child (fifth total), and had just recently gone back to nursing. Times were pretty hectic around this time with the birth of our son and my wife’s oldest graduating from high school, but we were able to stick it out for a year in this house. Being a little more financially stable with two incomes, and not wanting to pay another summer’s worth of $450-500 a month electric bills by living in an older house, though, we decided to look for something newer.
Right after our oldest graduated from high school, in May 2008, we found a nice, newer four bedroom house for $1,200 per month. We stayed in this house for just under a year, and then decided that we didn’t want to keep living paycheck-to-paycheck anymore so went on a mission to find something cheaper.
Opportunity knocked after a phone call from one of my wife’s friends. It seemed that she had moved out of the home that her parents had bought for her, which was sitting empty, and they were looking for someone to rent it. We negotiated to move in at $800 a month, which was a bargain for a home with a pool, and only had to get rid of a little rodent problem prior to moving into the house in March 2009. Around this time, my wife started having some problems with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and a few months down the road knew that we desperately needed a change. We both hated the town that we lived in, and so decided that we were going to move out of town for good.
After a long search, we decided to move our family from Arizona to New Braunfels, TX in July 2009. Things started out great here, until we started having problems with ghosts or spirits in the house. Several of us have had experiences with something that isn’t of this world, and these “things” have also been documented on our digital camera. That, combined with the horrible Mountain Cedar allergies that we didn’t know about before we came here, has gotten us thinking about moving again. I’m not sure where we’ll end up, but I know that I have to get my family out of that house.
It’s a documented fact that people with certain blood types have certain tendencies, as documented by Dr. Peter D’Adamo in the book “Eat Right 4 Your Type.” It seems that Type-Os are known for their nomadic tendencies, while Type-As like to develop a sense of community. This dates way back to our ancestors. Ironically, my wife and I are both O+, so after moving eight times in the last five years, I guess it’s true when I say that we’re the modern day nomads.
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