2k is definitely a savings, I am interested how close you are to the closest shopping/town that has all the stuff you need to buy.
Looking at things at a state level is tough, I know a few people in CLT area that pay more property taxes on a similar house than they did in NJ.
Me personally? I wanted to buy in the downtown but even if money was no object, the real estate market is hard down here. We really lucked out getting what we did and while it wasn't the area we were shooting for, we're really happy with it. The neighborhood wasn't originally on the radar but it's good.
Walking to town is far but the bike path is at the end of our street. It goes into downtown and into Pisgah.
Coffee shops - Closest within walking distance is Starbucks. The 3-4 that are in downtown are a 2 minute drive or 5 minute bike ride or 20 minute run.
Coffee Roaster - Downtown there's one, 10 minute drive is another.
Restaurants Downtown - 5 mexican, few American, couple breakfast type places, 2 bakeries, 1 Vietnamese, 1 Thai.
Restaurants near - Really good Japanese is a 3-4 minute drive. Everything else is probably 20-25 minutes if we go towards Hendersonville or 30-40 minutes if we're going up to Asheville.
Clothing stores - Downtown has a big outdoors store. REI is 22 miles away along with generic store shopping.
Hardware stores - Downtown there's an Ace Hardware. 1.5 miles is a Lowes where they probably know us by name. Home Depot is 30-35 minutes.
Within a few minute drive we have Walmart, 3 grocery stores, a food co-op that's like a Whole Foods except the food choices are better.
Mountain Biking - 10 minute bike ride to Pisgah or 5 minute car ride to there. Under 20 minutes to Dupont depending on which lot. Bracken in town is a 5 minute drive or ride there via bike path.
Hospital - Local hospital is 1.5 miles away. .25 miles if I could go through the woods.
Breweries - I think there's 4 in town. Two are on the bike path and are huge. Oskar Blues often has live music, food truck and anywhere from 10-100 people. Ecusta Brewing is always packed and only been there once. NobleBrau in town is good and they opened up a whole music venue there so it's nice to just into town and see good live bands.
Movie Theaters - Small one in town, near REI is the big 12 screen imax one or whatever.
The restaurants are funny. I keep joking I need to make a spreadsheet as to what's open as their schedules are all wonky. Especially Sunday/Monday/Tuesday.
We really hadn't needed to go far to buy stuff, except the one time we needed shelves at Home Depot that Lowes was out of, or we just bought an on-sale townie bike at REI. There's no regular staples we need to drive anywhere for that I can think of. If we need to go somewhere we tend to make a day out of it and hit up an oddball restaurant or something while doing so.
The one thing I'd say is it's way less stressful going places. We were probably 10 minutes from REI where we lived in Morristown but the drive there was stressful with getting on the highway, asshole drivers, etc. The drive to REI is 30 minutes and less stressful.
So far the only thing I really miss is easy access to Trader Joe's, that's like 45 minutes away and something we'd only really want to hit if we're in Asheville for some other reason.
