After 11 years at various tech companies in Silicon Valley, unwilling to spend a million bucks on a small house on a tiny parcel, I decided to leave early this year. So I left solid FAANG position and joined a fairly small but well established tech company based in San Francisco, but full time remote. I told them up front that while I currently lived in Mountain View, an hour south, my family and I were going to move to Washington State as soon as possible.

This was June, a couple of months into the Covid19 lockdown.

For 3/4 of the rent I was paying in Mountain View, we bought an big, beautiful home a few miles outside of Olympia, Washington on five acres of woods, where we enjoy stable, high speed Internet, privacy but also effectively more proximity to most things than we had in the bay area, where driving to Costco could take 30 minutes. Now we can get to anything we want in down time Olympia in 11 minutes, even though it's further away.

Yes, I took a pretty steep pay cut, but it's been largely offset by no state income taxes, lower monthly living payments, cheaper food, cheaper electricity, etc etc. Oh, and I'm finally actually building equity in a property that would easily go more than $20M in the bay area.

In the end, it was an easy decision.