- Jayne Jordan, 61, and her husband moved to Azle, Texas, 30 minutes from Fort Worth, in August.
- The cost of their housing was so much less than in California that Jordan was able to retire early.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jayne Jordan, 61, about her decision to move from the Los Angeles area to Azle, Texas, in August. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
My husband and I knew we were going to move out of California to retire somewhere, but we weren't sure where.
My daughter is a teacher in the city of Irvine, which is an affluent area of California, and her husband works for the county. They could never buy a house in California — they couldn't even save up for a down payment because rents are so ridiculous.
Their plan was to move to Texas, and we just decided to follow along and we fell in love with it here.
She's coming in June when school's out, but we found a house the last time we came, which was in the spring.
We sold our house in Corona in four days for $850,000, and we purchased our home in Azle for $587,000 with a $10,000 incentive.
We made bank on our house, so we have a very minimal mortgage — we could have paid cash.
We're at the retirement age, so I was able to retire and not have to work anymore. I couldn't have done that in California for at least another couple years, so it was a win-win for me.
We left California because the traffic was too much, but Texas has its downsides too
We hated the traffic, smog, and crime. We were in an area in the Inland Empire where there were a lot of wildfires. We were evacuated a couple of times.
The scare of the fires and the traffic congestion — it was just too much.
There is traffic in Texas, but not where we live, so if we don't have to drive in it, it's not a big deal.
We were living in an 1,800-square-foot house in California and we really wanted more land. This one is 2,262 square feet, so the house isn't huge, but it's on an acre. It's gorgeous.
We want a nice big pool, so it was always in our little future dream to retire and get out of the hub of everything.
In Azle, there's a lot of trees and deer and everything all around. But if you drive out of our subdivision and go down the street you're in civilization with restaurants and stuff. So it's the perfect world.
There are a lot of bugs. The first thing we did when we moved in was get an extermination service that comes on a regular basis to spray for bugs.
And then one of the biggest things — which is driving us crazy — is there's these little stickers in the grass and they're really hard to get rid of. So when the grandkids were here, they had these stickers stuck to their clothes, and if you step on them, they really hurt. So we're trying to get rid of all these stickers.
We haven't had any snake encounters. The builders are saying they didn't see any snakes when they were building the homes, however, the guy across the street from us killed two copperheads in his backyard a few weeks ago.
Everything (except property taxes) is cheaper in Texas
Gas here is $2.53. In California, we were paying $5.89 up to $6 a gallon. So that's the difference in gas. Groceries here are cheaper, too.
There's no state income tax in Texas, so my husband already made $1,000 a month just from not paying state tax.
However, the property tax is higher in Texas than in California, so that eats a part of that away, but not hugely. It's not a ton more than we were paying in California, just a little bit.
We live in a great neighborhood, we've met a ton of our neighbors, and pretty much everybody that we have encountered in Texas are just super nice and friendly, as opposed to California's kind of snotty people. You get used to it, but people in Texas are just far nicer overall.
We do miss some of the weather. California had pretty good weather most of the time. When we first got to Texas, it was really hot, so we really got to experience the summer heat.
But I don't regret anything. Nothing at all.
It's been great. We haven't had a bad thought about it since we've been here.