• Jodi Wright, 56, moved to Idaho from California in 2020 looking for a quiet place to retire.
• Wright and his family built a custom home outside Boise.
• But they moved back to California earlier this year because rising prices.

This as-told article is based on a conversation with Jodi Wright, a 56-year-old stay-at-home mom whose family moved from Sacramento, California, to the small town of Caldwell, Idaho. 30 minutes west of BoiseIn 2020.

Idaho’s housing market has boomed in the last four years; The median home price in the state increased from $360,700 in September 2020 to $481,100 in September 2024. redfin. Meanwhile, median home prices in Boise increased from $389,500 in September 2020 to $525,000 in September 2024. redfin.

The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I was born in Washington state. When I graduated high school, I wanted a change of scenery and packed up my car and moved to California.

I met my husband here and he is a police officer. We had triplets, but one of our sons passed away shortly after birth. It was scary but it definitely made life clear.

We have always been outdoorsy people. Our vacations are usually to the beach or Disney. You can do this year-round here in our beloved California.

But cost of living is too high, and our political allegiance is Republican. This became an issue when COVID-19 emerged and schools were closed. Our kids were in second grade and struggling.

We had already purchased land in Idaho in 2018. We planned to move. after my husband retiredBut the pandemic accelerated our plans.

We moved to Idaho in December 2020

We sold our house in California for $699,000 in one day. Zillow estimates it’s currently worth over $900,000.

My husband wasn’t old enough to retire yet, so he stayed in California to continue working. We thought we could get by for a few years until my husband joined us full time.

We were a little nervous about how this would work, but he was traveling back and forth to Idaho two or three times a month and we were FaceTiming.

we started We’re building our house in Idaho It’s in the town of Caldwell, part of the Treasure Valley, on the outskirts of the Boise area. It was still affordable back then. If we moved there now, we wouldn’t be able to pay for the house we built, which cost us about $750,000.

Now it would probably cost twice as much to build it there.

It was a large house, approximately 4,000 square feet, with four bedrooms and five bathrooms. We had a great experience river and mountain landscape On 2 ½ acres in a small subdivision in the country.

We wanted to live in the country, have a little more distance between our neighbors, and feel less of the hustle and bustle we were used to in California. Our favorite thing about Idaho was how quiet it was where we lived.

One of the biggest differences we noticed between California and Idaho is clear idaho it was. You don’t see a bunch of graffiti or trash everywhere.

But we only stayed in Idaho 4 years

We definitely thought Money would get bigger in Idaho. Since some things like electricity and gas are cheaper, we thought the overall cost of living would also be lower.

But in 2021, I felt like prices were really starting to rise. Part of it was that life in general got better. more expensive with inflation. But many things in Idaho were comparable to California.

When we first came to Idaho, my husband commuted to California for less than $150. But over time, round-trip trips rose to $300 or more.

Our auto and home insurance were initially cheaper than in California, but both have nearly doubled in the last two years we’ve lived there.

The weather in Idaho was also not suitable for our lifestyle. You can’t really know a place until you live here. The wind blows very strong for six or seven months of the year, and the state receives most of the wind. fire smoke from California and Oregon. The first two summers we were there we almost never went outside because the air quality was so bad. The wind made the situation worse.

By the end of 2022, we were starting to think that Idaho wasn’t the place for us.

We talked a lot about the possibility of moving somewhere else. But the more we talked, the more we realized that California was home. Despite the politics and the high cost of living, this is home.

We moved back to California in June

I’m glad we went to Idaho. We have no regrets. My children received a very good education there. We made the most of it and enjoyed it.

It took us a year to sell our house in Idaho because the housing market was flooded at the upper end. We still managed to make a few hundred thousand dollars.

Now that we’re back in California, we pay less for car insurance than we did in Idaho.

We recently purchased a home in Dixon, California for $760,000 and plan to move into that home within the next few months.

We will create our little happiness in California.