patrick.net

uh-huh... if you say so. You can have alllll of the Vegas you want. I'll take my home on the Cali Coast, thank you.

edvard2 says

uh-huh... if you say so. You can have alllll of the Vegas you want. I'll take my home on the Cali Coast, thank you.

Good luck with that I Lived on PCH for a year absolutely awful place.

Strategic Renter says

Good luck with that I Lived on PCH for a year absolutely awful place.

Thanks! Actually I bought a house almost on the water near the beach about 2 years ago. The mortgage is less than I paid in rent, its value has gone up about 30% since then, and I can easily walk to town. lovely weather too.

well, southern california real estate may be a lot more expensive, but i live near the ocean and NEVER use the heat or the AC. So i suppose I save hundreds a month. My electric bill comes to 8 dollars a month, my gas/water/garbage comes to only 25 or so each month. I probably save thousands per year over those living inland or in arizona or nevada.

casandra says

well, southern california real estate may be a lot more expensive, but i live near the ocean and NEVER use the heat or the AC. So i suppose I save hundreds a month. My electric bill comes to 8 dollars a month, my gas/water/garbage comes to only 25 or so each month. I probably save thousands per year over those living inland or in arizona or nevada.

My utilities costs are about $1000 more a year here than in California. Yet my taxes are $20000 a year less you do the math.

Too hot for me. I'll take mediterranean climate over the desert any day

drudometkin says

Too hot for me. I'll take mediterranean climate over the desert any day

Only hot for 3 months then 9 perfect months. Much better than the fog, pollution, rain, oily beaches and cold rough Pacific of Cali. If you want the beach lifestyle Florida is far superior in every way.

edvard2 says

Strategic Renter says

Good luck with that I Lived on PCH for a year absolutely awful place.

Thanks! Actually I bought a house almost on the water near the beach about 2 years ago. The mortgage is less than I paid in rent, its value has gone up about 30% since then, and I can easily walk to town. lovely weather too.

Hope it is not too close to the beach or soon it will be part of the beach erosion problem. For a window of opportunity you could have a fabulous view of the beach and sunset though. Soak it up while you can. ;)

In all fairness, the article also mentions Lake Tahoe. I do know of someone who moved there as a "tax refugee" over a decade ago. There could be worse ways to live...

Strategic Renter says

Only hot for 3 months then 9 perfect months. Much better than the fog, pollution, rain, oily beaches and cold rough Pacific of Cali. If you want the beach lifestyle Florida is far superior in every way.

Sounds like a bunch of sour grapes to me. You're going to have a hard time trying to convince anyone that Las Vegas is more desirable than California. Might as well tell New York city residents that Geary Indiana is absolutely fabulous and sooooo much better than those annoying tall buildings in NYC...

The sour grapes are the fact that I believed the Californians bullshit that it is a very desirable place to live, and moved there for two years . I should have gone straight to Vegas and Bought for a lot less than I eventually paid and saved myself $50k in Cali taxes.

Strategic Renter says

The sour grapes are the fact that I believed the Californians bullshit that it is a very desirable place to live, and moved there for two years . I should have gone straight to Vegas and Bought for a lot less than I eventually paid and saved myself $50k in Cali taxes.

I'm not going to try and make a judgment about you because I don't know you. But the overwhelming majority of those I've run into who moved here and then moved did so because they came, they couldn't afford it, became bitter, and told themselves that "XXX" place was better when really what it all translated to was that they just wanted a house to buy. Any house, so long as they could afford it and did so to justify moving out of the state.

Now- if you absolutely adore living in vegas, then good for you. What really matters in the end is if you like where you live. Not because it has affordable real estate, but because you genuinely love the landscape, culture, and character of where you live.Personally, I love California. It took me a long time to feel that way. I moved here 14 years ago and it took me about 11 years to save up for a decent down payment and to comfortably buy a house on my terms. I like the weather, the food, the professional environment, and the fact that I can go to the beach, mountains, wine country, desert, and delta in the space of 2 hours for any of those areas.

Did I always feel that way? No and I would be a hypocrite for saying that. I spent YEARS feeling very bitter about California. Mostly because I couldn't afford a house here ( at the time) because of the housing bubble. I too has these little fantasies about moving out of state... somewhere with cheaper housing. Well the bubble popped, all that hard work and saving money paid off, and now I'm pretty happy here and what's more, the level of satisfaction I get from having stayed the course, acted reasonably with my money, and got rewarded for those efforts is tremendous.

It depends . I have moved out of CA , mainly because of real estate prices. No way did I want to get stuck with a 500-800k mortgage. Now where I moved, it has been covered with snow for almost a month and we have had record breaking cold and snow- more than the last few decades. But I am happy and am getting settled down. i just don't wnat the stress of a gazillion dollar mortgage.

Now I am looking for either a small farmette or a nice house on an acre or two and buying additional farmland a little further away. Just thinking- it is cheap and I will get a lot more value. Now it isn't LA and there are no mountains and oceans- but no traffic jams and commuting endlessly and such. If houses were half of what they are now-I may consider moving back-but aint gonna happen and I am beginning to drop roots here and getting used to a slow pace of life. maybe I will retire in some tropical place!!

I just don't like being in debt -well 200-300 k is my comfort limit. Anything more than that in this economy of mobile jobs and changing trends is above my comfort level. For others it may differ.

RentingForHalfTheCost says

Hope it is not too close to the beach or soon it will be part of the beach erosion problem. For a window of opportunity you could have a fabulous view of the beach and sunset though. Soak it up while you can. ;)

According to the latest stats I will be about 137 years old by the time that happens. I'll probably not be around then.

lostand confused says

It depends . I have moved out of CA , mainly because of real estate prices. No way did I want to get stuck with a 500-800k mortgage. Now where I moved, it has been covered with snow for almost a month and we have had record breaking cold and snow- more than the last few decades. But I am happy and am getting settled down. i just don't wnat the stress of a gazillion dollar mortgage.

For us there was a very narrow window of opportunity where the interest rates were so low that suddenly mortgages became very cheap. That window seriously lasted about 6 months, maybe even a year or so and then the rates went back up. The result was that the house we bought wound up costing us about the same as we had paid in rent- which had actually been cheap rent at the time too. That seems to be the situation here in California. You have maybe a year or two of a window of opportunity where buyers and sellers are just slightly behind the curve, money becomes cheap, and suddenly a mortgage becomes somewhat more reasonable. If we were looking today I'm pretty sure we wouldn't buy because the payments would be 20%-30% more for the same house.

As for snow... I lived in the Northeast for a few years. I could not stand that weather. That gray type of atmosphere makes me depressed. Some people like it. I can't deal with it. If I were to move out of Cali, I'd move back to the South where I am from. Its still rather cheap in many places there and while it sometimes can get cold, its not nearly as bad as say- upstate NY.

edvard2 says

But the overwhelming majority of those I've run into who moved here and then moved did so because they came, they couldn't afford it, became bitter, and told themselves that "XXX" place was better when really what it all translated to was that they just wanted a house to buy.

Dude,

That sounds just like you before you bought a house here in the Bay Area about 2 years ago. Apparently you had an amnesia after you bought a house here.

E-man says

edvard2 says

But the overwhelming majority of those I've run into who moved here and then moved did so because they came, they couldn't afford it, became bitter, and told themselves that "XXX" place was better when really what it all translated to was that they just wanted a house to buy.

Dude,

That sounds just like you before you bought a house here in the Bay Area about 2 years ago. Apparently you had an amnesia after you bought a house here.

I see a lot of that here