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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

The numbers are shown in tables with Net Migration (taxpayers and dependents) and their Average Income of departing taxpayers.

So 75,386 (taxpayers and dependents) moved from IL to FL and their average income was $135K.

That seems to imply that they all took their high paying jobs with them somehow.

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This may be slightly skewed by the effect of retirees (people earn the most before they retire). Illinois has high taxes and terrible weather. A lot of affluent people leave the state and retire to Florida. I'm not sure if the article's analysis is really concerned with these nuances.

> Illinois has high taxes and terrible weather

Illinois has a flat income tax; at $135k income you would only be beat by the states that have no income tax (like Florida). Most of the states on that list also have weather that is either terrible in the summer or terrible in the winter, so I doubt that weather is really a factor in people moving.

You'd be surprised; I've met plenty of people that talk about how much they like warm weather and want to move south for that reason. Personally, I lived in Arizona for a while and have no desire to live in a hot climate again.

I think it's the snow that really gets people. It just interferes with everyday life in a way heat doesn't (ie, limiting car usage and driving safety until it's cleared). This mostly applies to car-oriented lifestyles though - since walking in high heat vs snowy or icy conditions are both quite risky.

Also, there is actually a pretty strong correlation between shoveling snow and heart attacks in older folks: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-shoveling-snow-put-y... . So it definitely makes sense to relocate if that is a factor.

These sound like good reasons not to live in a car-based, suburban lifestyle. People in Manhattan don't have these problems.

What about property taxes?

I had a talk recently with someone who moved from Chicago to Atlanta. He said it's the property taxes that really kill you there. Allegedly, by moving to GA he decreased his property taxes enough to put an extra 100k towards the mortgage for the same monthly payment. I don't know the hard numbers on that myself, but it was enough to convince me that buying property in Chicago was probably a bad idea.

It's not hard to get that data. The tax rates are public knowledge.

Cook county has just over a 2% per year property tax.

https://www.cookcountyclerk.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/201...

That document shows how varied the property taxes are in Illinois. Moving from "Chicago" to Atlanta for tax reasons is believable depending on whether the person is moving from the City of Chicago or the Suburbs of Chicago.

> On average, the 2018 property tax bill for a home with a market value of $200,000 would be: * City of Chicago: $3272 * North and Northwest Suburbs (Cook County): $4741 * South and West Suburbs (Cook County): $6268 * Dupage County Suburbs: $4556

My sister used to live out in Kane County and her house, which she sold for about 33% less than my downtown condo is worth, was almost double my property taxes. Nearly 1.5 hours driving from downtown!

Illinois has massive levels of debt, which mean ever increased taxes and decreasing government services for the next 20+ years. And they’re going to hit you hard if you’re upper middle class, since that’s who has the money.

Same situation with NJ and CT and KY.

If I was investing the next 5+ years of my life somewhere, I would check the reports below:

https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/financial-stat...

https://www.truthinaccounting.org/news/detail/2019-financial...

The data would be more interesting if it factored out people retiring. I'm actually a bit surprised that people from New York and Illinois seem to stay on the East Coast by moving to Florida for the most part. But, in any case, I expect that the Nevada, Arizona, and Florida migrations in particular are driven by retirement to a significant degree.

That said, anecdotally, I do know a fair number of people who have left California and essentially no one who has moved there absent a work-related reason to live there. The state has things going for it but also a lot of negatives--especially CoL in a lot of places.

So, the guy who sold RxBar ($600m in 2017) moved to Florida from Illinois (Chicago) in this time span, and I'm wondering thinking if that's partly why the Illinois to Florida avg income is so high compared to every other number on the state to state tables.

Edit for additional context, RxBar had no outside funding or venture capital, so that $600m went to the founders and maybe other early employees. https://www.inc.com/robbie-abed/this-chicago-startup-sold-it...

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