New job, double salary, but moving family out of state.....

[Robert Arquilla]

Hello everyone!

  My wife and I and our 2 young kids currently live in Ohio.  My wife is very family oriented and her family as well as my family is 10 minutes away from where we currently live, except for her sister who lives in Florida.  Well over the past couple months I wanted to explore other job opportunities with a recruiter just to see what else is out there and what the market would pay me. Well the recruiter sent me an opportunity but it mentioned 10-15 years experience so he said yeah that would probably be an issue for me as I only have 6 years so I didn't go through with it.  

About 2 weeks later he called me back and said they wanted to meet with me anyway.  I ended up doing well in the interview and now they want to fly me to Savannah GA to do a site visit and additional interview with that team so I'm assuming that I am probably in a good spot to get the job. My wife wasn't too happy about it and her having to move away however the job is almost double my current salary so she wouldn't have to work anymore and we would be within driving distance to her sister. Needless to say she's warming up to the idea because she can quit her job which has been stressing her out over the last couple years as a teacher.

We would be saving more money each month even with her not working and the increased house payment.  On top of that I'm hoping to rent out our primary residence mainly to have an exit strategy if this job somehow didn't work out we would have a place to come back to and wouldn't have to buy another house in this still somewhat inflated market.  But it should also bring in a decent amount of cash flow as well, and there is equity in it if we ever needed to sell.  My mother in law is a realtor so I'm hoping she can assist with renting out primary residence as well as the other rental we have and I can just pay her a finders fee. 

My long term goal is to build a real estate portfolio that would allow me to quit my job and go full time into real estate, while allowing my wife the flexibility to choose the work she wants to do or continue to not work.  My concerns are now she will not have a retirement through her employer which puts a lot of responsibility on me to make sure real estate works out and we can build enough for retirement.  I just feel like I'm behind as far as retirement savings goes because I was in the military and couldn't save much while in then got out and went to school so I missed out on 7-8 years of saving and market gains.  

While I think this can be a great opportunity I'm wondering what everyone else is thinking as an outsider looking in?  What would you do? Anyone have kids (4, 7) that they moved to a new school, how did that go? Anything I maybe haven't thought of? Anyone live in Savannah that could tell me about unexpected costs I might run into?

As always I appreciate everyone's input!