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 the family 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 last half-decade, with the median home price jumping from $360,700 in September 2020 to $481,100 in September 2024, according to data from Redfin. Meanwhile, median home prices in Boise specifically jumped from $389,500 in September 2020 to $525,000 in September 2024, according to Redfin data.

The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

I was born in Washington State. When I graduated 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. Any vacations we take 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 hit, and they shut down the schools. Our kids were in second grade and struggling.

We had already purchased land in Idaho back in 2018. We were planning to move once my husband retired, but COVID sped up our plans.

We moved to Idaho in December 2020

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

My husband wasn’t old enough to retire yet, so he stayed in California to keep working. We figured we would 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. Plus, we would FaceTime.

We started building our Idaho house in a town called Caldwell, which is 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 could not afford the house we built, which cost us about $750,000.

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

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 two and a half acres out in the country in a small subdivision.

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

But we only stayed in Idaho for four years

We definitely thought our money was going to go farther in Idaho. Certain things are cheaper, like power and gas. So, we thought the overall cost of living would be less.

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

Our auto insurance and homeowner’s insurance were cheaper than they had been in California at first. But in our last two years living there, both almost doubled.

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

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

We recently bought a house in Dixon, California, for $760,000, which we’ll be moving into in the next few months.

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