Thoughts About Home . . .

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In Depth: Best Places To Get Ahead

The counties on our list are geographically spread out and varied in industry, but they have one thing in common: They're all suburbs of big cities. But these aren't sleepy bedroom communities feeding off of urban spillover.

"The inner-ring suburbs look very much like their city neighbors," says Lawrence Levy (no relation to this story's writer), executive director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. "They look like it physically, racially, ethnically, and economically."

Behind the Numbers
To find the best places to get ahead, we looked at counties where the number of jobs had grown the most between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2009 (the most recent quarter for which county-level statistics are available), using data from the U.S. Department of Labor. We factored in the counties with the highest income growth as well, using median household income growth between 2007 and 2008, the most recent year that the data are available from the U.S. Census Bureau.

We limited our search to counties where the median household income was $75,000 per year or higher, to focus on places where you can earn a solid salary and move up quickly, rather than ones that went from low to average incomes. It's a sign of the times that in many of these counties, job growth was flat or even down, but they still placed high because the drop was more modest than elsewhere in the country.

Fort Bend County, Texas, a suburb of Houston, topped our list. Incomes there have grown 10% between 2007 and 2008, and that's not a fluke based on a small contingent of wealthy residents. The county has also added 5,913 new jobs since the second quarter of 2007, an increase of 5%.

Like the rest of Texas, Fort Bend gets a healthy chunk of its revenue from the energy sector, but it also benefits from a diversity of industries--including education and hospitality--that has fueled several decades of rapid population growth. Several companies on Forbes' 400 Best Big Companies list are headquartered there, including Texas Instruments , Baker Hughes and Thermo Fisher.

I'm making the announcement on my blog first:  I am no longer a real estate agent.

I am a professional Realtor! 

We've been having a wonderful training experience in my ERA office.  I'm not your ordinary real estate agent anymore. 

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I can honestly say that since I became a Realtor almost 7 years ago, this is the best time to sell your current home and buy a new one.

As long as you've lived in your home as your primary residence for 5 years, you most likely qualify for the new $6500 tax credit.  All you have to do is sell and buy under contract by April 30th, 2010.

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