Moving to Seattle...?

[M S]

Hey everyone... I am a recent college grad from the Minneapolis/St. Paul area looking to move out west, and I've heard so many great things about Seattle. I was just wondering if there are good opportunities within the financial services sector. My other question is regarding good Seattle neighborhoods. Where is a good place for a young professional to live? (maybe halfway between the suburbs and the city). How much snow does Seattle get? And is it hard to get used to the cloudy weather?

[Saul T]

i don't know much about the financial services cause i'm only in high school but its a really great place the clouds aren't too hard to get used to and it doesn't snow much but depending on the are probably 3-10 days a year. I'm not sure about good places to live either because I'm not very well informed on housing prices or anything like that but it seems to me theres a lot of that sort of housing so it shouldn't be too hard.
Hope you enjoy Seattle!

[the dufferz]

Originally Posted by M S

Hey everyone... I am a recent college grad from the Minneapolis/St. Paul area looking to move out west, and I've heard so many great things about Seattle. I was just wondering if there are good opportunities within the financial services sector. My other question is regarding good Seattle neighborhoods. Where is a good place for a young professional to live? (maybe halfway between the suburbs and the city). How much snow does Seattle get? And is it hard to get used to the cloudy weather?

You have to be able to afford seattle if you want to live in the city. The good news is that markablue moderator from City-data has never been here and if she was, she would suck at affording the homes around here. You can't make enough money in her job to afford homes that start at $500,000. It sucks.

[jabm67]

Originally Posted by M S

I was just wondering if there are good opportunities within the financial services sector.

To a certain degree, the financial services sector here is dominated by large locally-headquartered companies. Those include Washington Mutual and Safeco Insurance. Assuming you know about the ongoing mortgage industry problems, it should come as no surprise that WaMu is strongly entangled in that tar-baby, with ongoing speculations about buyouts & mergers (which are always associated with mass layoffs and hence murky employment prospects). Safeco's stock price is also near a 52-week low at this time, though I couldn't tell you why. Other outfits have significant operations in Seattle, of course.

If you're looking at the financial services sector nation-wide (which I am not), I don't know how Seattle compares; that whole sector is flying through turbulence lately, of course.

[jabm67]

... and in this morning's paper, it seems that the Safeco execs finally succeeded in selling off the company, something they've been working on for eight years or so. It's unclear how many of those 7,000 jobs will vanish, but I expect the answer is "lots", and that's another big hit to the financial services employment picture in this area.