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The Financial Benefits Of Leaving San Francisco
From a new Austin transplant.
My partner and I are recent transplants to Austin, Texas. We moved here from San Francisco and consider ourselves part of the growing millennial population that realized life in the city was way too expensive for any future-building budget.
Our combined income at the time exceeded 200k.
Our last apartment was in an area of the city known as Nob Hill, right up the hill from the Tenderloin, an area that is the center of San Francisco’s growing homelessness epidemic.
The unit we occupied was at most 500 square feet, with a dishwasher-less kitchen, tiny living room, bathroom, and bedroom. We should’ve known we weren’t going to stick around for too long. We never even finished unpacking all of our moving boxes there.
It was home for six months before we decided we couldn’t tolerate the city’s living conditions anymore. Not for what we were paying: over $3200/month with utilities. The apartment’s laundry room was in a dingy basement which could be accessed by a narrow staircase with protruding nails. There was a musty couch loitering in the building’s front entrance for some reason, and our unit was slanted, something that chewed on my nerves.
Overall, our financial health has…
