Why We Decided To Leave New York

Yinon and I have been living in New York for years. I’ve spent most of my adult life here after I moved to the States for college. This is where we met two years ago while waiting in line for a salad. We moved in together just a few months later. It’s also where we got our first apartment together and where we got engaged. But it’s finally time to move on. We decided to sell off our things, get rid of our apartment and travel the world for a few months while working remotely.

So we wanted to share with you why we decided to leave New York and what made our decision so easy.

Career

Both of us initially moved to the city in part because of job opportunities. I wanted to work in fashion and Yinon was relocated here by the Israeli tech startup he had been working for in Tel Aviv.

We both had high-paying corporate jobs, which provided us with security and a comfortable lifestyle.

But things have changed in the last few years. I decided the corporate life was not for me and started building a side business as an influencer on Instagram. It took me a while to get it to a place where I could afford to quit my job and pursue it full time. But it was all worth it. Yinon followed not too long after.

Now that we are able to make money from anywhere in the world, we can also choose to live anywhere else in the world. So we started thinking – would we still choose New York?

Quality Of Life

When you are just out of college, single and looking to meet people, New York makes a lot of sense. It’s the city that never sleeps! There are so many hip bars and cool restaurants to explore, the music and art scene is unbeatable, it’s a place full of young, smart, interesting people and it constantly feels like things are happening around you.

But what happens when you get enough of all the drinking, going out and going to museums and shows?

That brings us to our other big problem – the weather. We like being outside, hiking, fresh air, nature. In New York you only really get 3-4 months of good weather in the year, and the rest is either freezing or way too hot. Although it doesn’t snow a lot, the cold is bitter.

We noticed we were staying home a lot and not seeing friends often. We kept trying to get out of the city any chance we got but weekend trips from the city are not easy either.

Cost Of Living

New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world and the state and local taxes are some of the highest in the US. When you’re working for a company, you don’t have a lot of choice – New York is where you get paid the most. So on net, the high cost of living is worth it.

But when you have your own business that’s in no way tied to the location and you’d make the same amount of money whether you live in New York or in Costa Rica… things start to look a little different.

Instead of saving 10% of our income, for example, we’d save between 20-30%, just by picking another place to live.

Building A Family

We have been talking a lot about starting a family soon and that’s another reason why New York didn’t make sense for us anymore. Neither of us is into the idea of raising children in the city. We both grew up in nicer climates and with a lot of nature. We’d love to have a backyard and spend a lot of time with our kids outside.

Overall

It’s amazing how your whole perspective changes once you are not tied to an office. When we added all the pros and cons of living in New York, without having to worry about jobs, it became very clear that it’s time for us to move on. New York is a beautiful and exciting city and we loved our time here. But it’s much more important to us to live in a place with good weather and a lot of nature than having all the fun restaurants and bars in one place.

We don’t even need to live in a big city. Why not work from our sunny little backyard somewhere in rural Italy? Or by the pool in our villa in Bali? We could easily move to California and enjoy the sunny weather all year. Or even change the location every few months when we get bored of it.

So where will we end up? We have no idea yet. Maybe Florida, maybe Europe, maybe somewhere else. We are taking some time to travel around the world and figure it out.

We sold off all the things we don’t need and put the rest in storage. The two suitcases we took with us will get lighter and lighter with time. We are only booking one-way flights and figuring out our next destination as we go.

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