We moved from California to Idaho with small-town retirement dreams but moved back after 4 years.

It was a big house, almost 4,000 square feet, with four bedrooms and five bathrooms. We had a fabulous view of the river and the mountains on two and a half acres out in the country in a small subdivision.

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

One of the major differences we noticed between California and Idaho is how clean Idaho is. You don’t see a bunch of graffiti or trash everywhere.

But we only stayed in Idaho for four years

We definitely thought our money was going to go farther in Idaho. Certain things are cheaper, like power and gas. So, we thought the overall cost of living would be less.

But it felt like prices really started to increase in 2021. Part of that was life in general becoming more expensive with inflation. But a lot of things in Idaho felt comparable to California.

When we first got to Idaho, my husband used to fly back and forth for less than $150. But over time, round trips got up to $300 or more.

Our auto insurance and homeowner’s insurance were cheaper than they had been in California at first. But in our last two years living there, both almost doubled.

The weather in Idaho turned out to be not conducive to our lifestyle either. You can’t really know a place until you live here. The wind blows really badly there for six or seven months a year. Plus, Idaho gets a lot of the fire smoke from California and Oregon. The first two summers we were there, we barely went outside because the air quality was so bad. The wind there just made it so much worse.

By the end of 2022, we started thinking Idaho was maybe not the place for us.

We talked a lot about maybe moving somewhere else. But the more we talked, the more we realized that California is home. Despite the politics and cost of living, it’s home.

We moved back to California in June.

I’m glad we went to Idaho. We don’t regret it at all. My kids got a great education there. We made the best of it and enjoyed it.

It took us a year to sell our house in Idaho because the housing market is flooded at the higher end. We still managed to make a couple hundred thousand.

Now that we’re back in California, we’re also paying less for car insurance than we were in Idaho.

We recently bought a house in Dixon, California, for $760,000, which we’ll be moving into in the next few months.

We’re just going to carve our little piece of happiness here in California.