If you buy a lot of your stuff second hand like I do, how much would you pay for this couch?

@ninalanyon me neither. I'm in a small town far away from any cities which I think is why people tend to go a little crazy over second hand furniture around here. I've seen people pay for some seriously used stuff. My friend paid 100 for this couch between 1-2 years ago and it hasn't changed since. We barely use it but it's just nice to have something there

@Notsimilarreally What counts as a small town? And how far is far? I live in a town of less than 7 000 people but I'm only 22 km from a town of 70 000. In that bigger town about fifteen years ago I paid less than 100 USD for a seven seater leather L shaped couch, including delivery at the Salvation Army charity shop (thrift store). It's a bit faded but has no tears and is very comfortable.

Norway is a great place to buy second hand because Norwegians have a lot of purchasing power and love to refurnish their houses and renew their wardrobes; so there is a steady supply of good quality used stuff.

For instance the laptop I'm using now is a Thinkpad T460s that I bought last November, it's in perfect condition. In the UK it would sell for double the 110 USD that I paid for it.

You can furnish a house complete with white goods for practically nothing if you have access to transport. In some cases literally nothing; my current oven and refrigerator were both free and are higher spec. than the broken items they replaced.

@ninalanyon 4 hours from a city, nothing in between. We are in the mountains. No salvation army here, smaller than your town. Canadian dollar. People sell their used items for over half original cost around here it's really ridiculous. Being from the states where second hand is cheap I've really had to adapt. Someone will probably buy this couch.

Norway is an amazing country eh? My partner is half Norwegian, and I have Norwegian from my mothers side. I try to talk him into moving there lol.

@Notsimilarreally Ouch, four hours is too far out for me! That makes sense of the value of second hand furniture though. Can't just wander in to a charity shop on a whim and buy something on the spur of the moment. There are parts of Norway that are quite remote too and also too far from the cities for me but, except in the winter, not quite that remote!

I can be in the centre of Oslo in just over an hour by car or walking in the woods in five minutes on foot.

It's amazing how often I encounter someone with a connection to Norway. So I guess you might be from Minnesota.

@ninalanyon exactly. People take what they can get.

For a moment I thought that wrote, you could drive to oslo in an hour or walk there in five minutes 😂

Minnesota? Nooooo never been. Don't know anyone there. I am from California.

@Notsimilarreally I always guess Minnesota (or the Dakotas, or Ohio) because that's where a lot of Norwegians emigrated to in the nineteenth century.

@Notsimilarreally I ended up in Norway by accident. How did you end up in the middle of nowhere in Canada?

@ninalanyon that's what I assumed. My fathers father came to California from Pennsylvania, where the population of Germans is huge and our somewhat rare last name is a common one.

Actually left California because of a stalking situation. Bad dating decision I made turned into a whole crazy nightmare right out of a movie. First I moved to a small beach town on the Oregon coast, had trouble there. Now I'm here, having trouble again. A police officer here told me I should move again, to a smaller town, in another province, a few months ago so....that's how that is going.

Where are you from originally and why Norway? Was it easy to relocate there?

@Notsimilarreally Goodness me!
I'm English, from what we call the West Country. My wife was from an island of the north of Scotland. So when I decided to search for a new job we decided to try moving to half way between the two families which meant southern Scotland. I sent my CV to an employment agency in Edinburgh at roughly the same time that a company in Dundee sent them a request for an embedded systems engineer. I got a strange phone call one evening from the agency asking "How would you like to work in Norway?". I said what on earth are you talking about? They then explained that the Dundee company was a newly acquired subsidiary of a Norwegian company but hadn't mentioned this fact when they asked the agency to find a candidate. They told me afterwards that had they know in advance that they would have turned the task down because they had no experience in international postings. The company paid to fly me from Heathrow to Edinburgh for the interview and as the cliche goes, the rest is history.

As for relocation, that was easy. In those days, and now since Brexit, to work in Norway meant applying for work and residence permits but the Norwegian company told me exactly what to do and provided all the necessary documentation. Norway was quite restrictive then and a company wanting to import a worker had to demonstrate that they had tried for at least six months to find a suitable candidate inside the country so they provided me with a huge stack of paperwork demonstrating just that that I had to send to the Norwegian Embassy in London with my application for a work permit.

It's similar but less bureaucratic today. Essentially as a non-EU, non-EEA, citizen you have to have a job in Norway in order to get a residence permit. Unemployment here is low, under four percent and that is in fact higher than normal. So if you have some sort of qualification getting in to Norway is pretty easy.

One of the best things about Norway is that most things are simpler than in many other countries and that when you speak to someone in a government department they generally act like human beings.

The downside is that a lot of things are expensive here and salaries are not high compared to the US (don't know about Canada). The salary range is compressed compared to most countries so the poor are less poor and the well paid are less well paid. Housing outside the cities is reasonably priced (compared to the UK which is the only other market I'm familiar with) but luxuries are expensive.

@ninalanyon that is very insightful! Thank you.

You lucked out with the job, it sounds like. I wish I had qualifications that would help me relocate that far but I unfortunately do not.

@Notsimilarreally
Yes I was lucky with the job. But I did put my CV out there so the possibility existed.

I don't know what qualifications you do have but Norway and many other places have openings for all sorts of people, not just highly qualified scientists and engineers but also many other skills. One example here in Norway at the moment is a severe shortage of truck drivers.

And of course you are young enough to gain some additional qualification. Don't give up such ambitions without actually checking the possibilities. The world is a big place and distances seem great but sometimes you can find that things are actually easier than you think so long as you don't assume that things are impossible from the start.

@ninalanyon you're right, I really want to go back to school. But now with the baby and the other stressors I am dealing with it isn't possible, period. Change needs to happen. But hopefully it will, I'm trying

I'm a caregiver. Didn't do school for it or anything but I was able to work privately in the states and make a lot that way. Otherwise it wasn't super lucrative.

😊