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

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

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

Idaho’s housing market has exploded in the past four years, with the state’s median home price jumping from $360,700 in September 2020 to $481,100 in September 2024, per Redfin. Meanwhile, median home prices in Boise jumped from $389,500 in September 2020 to $525,000 in September 2024, per Redfin.

The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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

I met my husband here, and he’s a police officer. We were blessed with triplets, but one of our sons passed away soon after being born. It was terrible, but it definitely clarified life.

We’ve always been outdoorsy people. Our vacations are usually geared around the beach or Disney. You can pretty much do that year-round here in California, which we love.

But the cost of living is so high, and our political affiliation is Republican. That became a problem when COVID-19 hit and they shut down the schools. Our kids were in second grade and struggling.

We’d already purchased land in Idaho in 2018. We planned to move once my husband retired, but the pandemic sped up our plans.

We moved to Idaho in December 2020

We listed our house in California, which sold in one day for $699,000. Zillow estimated that it’s now worth over $900,000.

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My husband wasn’t old enough to retire yet, so he stayed in California to keep working. We figured we’d just make do for a few years until my husband could join us full time.

We were a little nervous about how that would work, but he traveled back and forth to Idaho two or three times a month, and we would FaceTime.

We started building our Idaho house in Caldwell, a town that’s part of the Treasure Valley on the outskirts of the Boise area. It was still affordable at that time. If we were to move there now, we couldn’t afford the house we built, which cost us about $750,000.

It would probably cost twice as much to build it there now.

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 2 ½ acres out in a small subdivision in the country.

We wanted to live in the country, have a little more space between neighbors, and feel 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 was how clean Idaho was. You don’t see a bunch of graffiti or trash everywhere.

But we only stayed in Idaho for 4 years

We definitely thought our money would go further in Idaho. Certain things are cheaper, such as power and gas, so we thought the overall cost of living would also be lower.

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 to California for less than $150. But over time, round trips got up to $300 or more.

Our auto and homeowners insurance were initially cheaper than they’d been in California, but both nearly doubled in our last two years living there.

The weather in Idaho wasn’t conducive to our lifestyle either. You can’t really know a place until you live here. The wind is very strong for six or seven months a year, and the state gets a lot of the fire smoke from California and Oregon. We barely went outside the first two summers we were there because the air quality was so bad. The wind 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 was flooded at the higher end. We still managed to make a couple hundred thousand dollars.

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

We recently bought a house in Dixon, California, for $760,000 and plan to move into it in the next few months.

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