Why I'm Actually Leaving California

I've been waiting a long time to make this video. Here it is.

I love California. But lately a lot of people have been moving out of the state – whether it’s the cost of housing, crime, homelessness, taxes – whatever. And while my reason may be a little different than others, the time has come for me to leave California as well. So in this video, I’ll talk about why my wife and I are moving out of the state and where we’re headed to next.

Coming from a state like Indiana, I’ve always found California to be a warm welcome from the flat and landlocked city of Indianapolis. I first visited California when I was 15 and saw the ocean and mountains and redwoods, I fell in love with it. So I decided to move to LA when I was 20. This city is one of the few places to be if you want to work at a big recording studio, which is what I wanted back in 2008.

But I found living in California to be mildly less fun than I imagined, since I was working 45 to 60 hours a week at minimum wage. I had no time or money left over to enjoy any of the benefits of living in such a cool place.

So I moved back to the Midwest less than a year later to pursue other ventures. And then, I met Rachel, and we moved to Chicago. This is where I spent over 3 years cutting my teeth with unglamorous video editing and shooting weddings with Rachel.

The thing with the both of us is we tend to get antsy when we’re in the same place for too long. In Chicago, we lived in four different neighborhoods over 3 and a half years, exploring our surroundings at each new apartment.

But in some ways it felt like we hit a plateau. I didn’t want to be a video editor working on corporate and small business projects for the rest of my life, and Rachel didn’t want to shoot engagement photos at the same parks and weddings and at the same venues for years to come.

We knew we needed another change. And after taking several trips to LA to get a break from Chicago winters, we thought it would be a good fit for us, both for job opportunities for me and clients for Rachel.

So we moved into a sublet for three months to save up money. Then I quit my job and in August of 2015, we moved to LA.

Moving to California

We were now a few hours’ drive from the beach, mountains, forests, and deserts. We have Yosemite 5 hours away and entirely different environments within a two hour drive out of the city. You already know Southern California is known for consistently warm and sunny days, which to me have been one of the best things about living here. Remember, I grew up in Indiana where the land is flat, the summers are hot and humid, the winters are frigid, and spring and fall don’t last long enough.

For Rachel’s wedding photography business, we shot some really great couples in really cool places, which helped make the job a lot more fun. We also took road trips up to San Francisco, and even Portland and Seattle, which just served to renew our love of photography.

But it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. I was working remotely for my old job, but eventually, that work started to dry up. I was working on my motion graphics reel and delivered groceries for Instacart to make ends meet. And it was fine – but I definitely didn’t want to be hustling that hard to break even every month in my late twenties. After many applications and interviews, I finally landed a great job which ended up getting me started on Youtube which ended up changing the entire course of my career.

And living in LA while making Youtube videos certainly has its perks. Not only have we had great models to shoot for photography, but also videographers and stylists. Rental houses for fun projects. Not having to check the forecast before a shoot because you already know what the weather will be like.

But on the flipside, if you’re filming around LA, even for a little YouTube video, many places will want you to have a permit or just kick you out altogether. LA makes a killing off of permit money from Hollywood studios and they want YouTuber’s permit money as well. But, that usually just isn’t viable to do. So sometimes just finding a place where you won’t be bothered can be difficult.

Not only that, another drawback to living in LA as a transplant is it’s been hard to build or join a community of other people in creative fields. We’ve met a lot of nice and talented people out here, but there does seem to be this sense of others using you as a stepping stone in their career. They want to see what they can get out of you or how they can use you to advance. And not to say that everyone out here is like that and maybe the competition for work is such that being more singularly focused and ambitious is the way you’re able to thrive, but for us, we always think an open and collaborative community will better serve you in the long run.

And as two introverts, my wife and I may not be the best at meeting other people, we did try to start a co-working community, but it never took off. This varied greatly from the sense of community we found in Chicago, especially among photographers.

Cost of Living

So obviously, the cost of living in California is high – especially near any major city. The average rent in LA is over $2300 per month. And if you want to buy, the median home price is $650,000 – but it’s not going to get you a lot of house.

After renting for our entire adult lives – we’ve lived in 8 apartments as a couple – the time has come where we want to retire our command hooks and finally buy a home. Well, we still might use Command Hooks, but you get my point. We want to have a living situation that works well for us and also a studio where we can film and work. And while living in LA is great for having a lot of models and crew and weather to work with, it isn’t essential to our business, and we can improve our quality of living by moving out of state without decreasing the quality of our videos.

Taxes

A lot of high earners like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk and well, even Graham Stephan have moved to states like Texas and Nevada where there is 0 state income tax – which makes a lot of financial sense for them. But for Rachel and myself, we’d rather live in a place we truly love than purely moving somewhere to save money. But obviously, we’d love to save money where we can.

Where we’re moving to does have state income tax, but it’s a flat 4.95% compared to about 9% here in California. So that alone will save us thousands of dollars a year.

Not to mention, just having our business located in California (even though we’re registered in Delaware) means we have to pay $800 per year for just existing. This is much less just about everywhere else.

But on the flipside, we will have high property and sales tax – which we’re willing to deal with.

Other CA Issues

It’s no secret that California has more than its fair share of issues, and many have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

It has the highest rate of homelessness in the country, and they’ve yet to effectively address the issue. We’ve lived around downtown for almost our entire time here, and the amount of unsheltered people has increased dramatically.

We’ve had massive wildfires, earthquakes – we had one at 4:30 this morning that actually woke me up.

And the amount of noise pollution with LAPD choppers constantly flying overhead is enough to just drive me crazy – especially when we’re trying to film.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and obviously, every state has its issues, including where we’re moving to, so it’s not just one factor that made us want to move.

We’ve also felt more isolated living here than ever before, spending the past year here without seeing our families over the holidays, we wanted to be a little closer to people in our lives. A 2-3 hour drive as opposed to a 5 hour flight and an hour drive from the airport.

So now let’s talk about the house.

The House

I don’t know if it’s just me getting old, but I have been longing for some peace and quiet and achieving the Millennial dream of buying a yard for our dogs.

We spent much of last fall on Zillow looking across the entire country for our dream home. Since we’re fortunate enough to work from home, we didn’t limit ourselves to any one state. What we did want though, was a home with original mid-century modern architecture and lots of glass to let natural light in.

Since COVID was still raging, we just had to do home tours virtually, over FaceTime and rely a lot on wide angle photos making every room of every house look huge, when in reality, most weren’t.

We ended up finding a little gem of a house in Winnetka, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago and where the Home Alone house is located. This house was priced $460,000 which was very inexpensive for the area – and while it definitely was outdated, we loved it anyways.

We emailed the listing agent who put us in touch with another agent who gave us a FaceTime tour of the property. We then decided to put an offer in without seeing it for ourselves in person. We knew it was a hot property with a lot of activity on the first weekend it was listed, so we offered $90,000 over list price. Rachel also wrote a compelling letter to the seller… but unfortunately, this was an estate sale with a lawyer selecting the accepted offer. She actually chose an offer that was about $25,000 less than ours, but all cash.

So that sucked.

But a week or two later, Rachel found another house that caught our eye within a few minutes of it being listed. This one was even more impressive than the last and was under $600,000, which was under priced because it needed a complete $75,000 roof rebuild. This was located a little farther north of Chicago, but pretty close to Lake Michigan.

The listing agent had over 40 showings the first few days it was listed, but eventually, our agent was able to get in and give us another FaceTime tour. This was the architect’s own home and while much of it is original from the 1960s, it is just a beautiful and unique home.

Again, we submitted an offer and because we really loved the house and knew there’d be a lot of offers, we went way over ask – $122,000 over the ask price.

And then…

We honestly thought we had a good chance of getting the house with our aggressive offer, but yeah, we were out bid. That was extremely disappointing because it seemed like such a good fit.

So we tried to move on, looking for another home that’d catch our eye, but we never did see anything else we loved as much as the last home.

We did find one that was decent – not amazing, but had some nice bones. And the evening before our agent was scheduled to view the home, she actually emailed us about an old love of ours we thought was long gone.

The buyers of our dream home were walking away. So we stepped in.

What Now?

We worked the roof repair and a few other things into the purchase agreement, so after first seeing the house online in the middle of October, now almost 6 months later, we are set to close next week.

We have quite a few things we’ll be renovating like the kitchen and bathrooms, but we’re hoping that they will be close to completion by the time our lease ends here in LA this summer. Then, we will load the dogs up in the car and make the 2,000 mile drive back to the Midwest.

As for California, we do own 10 acres of land out by Joshua Tree and are still planning to build a house on it and spend some of Chicago’s bitter winters out here in the sun.