Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest and this is Sean with Everything RIA, and today we’re gonna talk about why we left California and moved to Dallas Texas. Now you guys are new to the channel welcome. I’m all about teaching how to build passive income become financially free and design your best life. So if you guys are interested in that, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified my latest videos and make sure to subscribe to Sean’s channel where he talks all about real estate investing. So we’ve actually been in Dallas for a few weeks now this is our first Dallas winner so if you guys see some footage here, you guys can see a bunch of snow right now this is like the first time we’ve ever woken up to snow unless we were in like Tahoe or Reno. So this has been very new to us. So you guys are probably wondering why we left California left the sunny weather there. A lot of people have been asking us this also asking us why we chose Dallas over Austin. So that’s kind of why we wanted to make this video today and talk about it a little bit. One of the main reasons why we left the bay or in the first place is because that’s where we grew up. And we’ve been living in California for our whole lives. For the most part. I know you had a two year stint across the world. I had live in Los Angeles for good seven years, but that’s still in California. So we recently got married. This is our first opportunity to live somewhere else before we have full obligations like having a whole family and all that stuff. Yeah, I don’t even know if we announced that we got married recently. So here’s a little announcement. We did get married in December of last year actually right after that we essentially drove to Dallas pretty soon after that, right?
We had a receipt for the holidays. And then we drove over I think this first week of January to Dallas.
So we drove for like four days we stopped at Bakersfield first then Flagstaff, Arizona, then Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And then we finished up at Amarillo, Texas, and then went to Dallas. Yeah, so quite a few stops. So
if you guys ever wonder how to get from the Bay Area to Dallas, like that was a pretty good road trip that we did go ahead and use that same plan if you want to. So aside from just like wanting to live somewhere different from California, there’s a lot of other reasons as well that we wanted to move here. First off, I’ve been wanting to do an Airbnb house hack because you know, Shawn has a place in the Bay Area that we potentially could Airbnb out and then live somewhere cheaper and then have the Airbnb possibly pay off the two mortgages. So that was just my plan from the beginning. And it’s actually working out right now very well, especially now because a lot of people are working remotely because of the pandemics I kind of expected now to work from home. So we thought why not live somewhere else right now where you know, our employers are okay with it that we are living in different places. We can also work on our side hustles and work on real estate investing, which is a big reason why we came here is kind of like the perfect opportunity right now. Especially, you know, we just got married, we don’t have kids yet. We’re young. We’ve only lived in California. Mainly, we wanted to try another
place. And we’ve actually thought about other markets to push you live in. We were looking into Las Vegas at one point, even Nashville. And then of course, Austin, Texas. You know, one of the best benefits of moving here is that we pay no personal income taxes while retaining our high bay area wages and be able to take advantage of the fact that cost of living here is a lot lower than is over in the Bay Area. So it really is like a win win situation all
around. When we think about Vegas. We actually really were possibly going to go forth with that because we started looking at homes on Redfin, we spoke with his friend who’s an agent and he was going to help us purchase a home
we’re actually putting some verbal offers for some properties over in Vegas, because we were actually serious about it. We thought hey, Vegas is great, too, because they also have no personal income taxes. And Vegas is a fun place to be right. Enjoy going there.
But one of the things was we weren’t completely sure about the Airbnb regulations. There are certain areas that you could Airbnb out others not so much because of the restrictions on like, where you can do it. I think they lifted some of those regulations now. But you know, at the time, we were like, Okay, maybe another market could be better. We are still debating about it. We decided not to go forth with that house. I remember that property we were interested in I think it was on the market for a long time. We weren’t sure about the area could be potentially unsafe. Yeah, we decided it might not be the best deal.
One of the criteria that we wanted to buying a place is that we will be able to rent it out either as a long term rental or as a short term Airbnb and the numbers sought to make sense. So that was another reason why we couldn’t really buy this particular property Vegas because if we were to move the numbers wouldn’t really make sense as a long term rental. And with the whole short term ordinances in Las Vegas being so strict, we thought, okay, this probably wouldn’t work out for us. If we would move out in two or three years
now, like moving forward to when we started thinking about Dallas, essentially, we were visiting our moldy House Project, if you guys haven’t seen it already, you guys can check out some of our previous videos where we talk about it, but we visited that area, and we’re staying there for like two or three weeks or so because we wanted to oversee the project. We wanted to start talking to contractors and mold remediators and kind of get that project going. But at that same time we were like what if we move to Austin or Dallas like we really started talking about it more as we were road tripping to Dallas, we visited Austin as well. And we’re just thinking about it a little bit more.
Yeah, but when it came down to it, Austin is a great place and we enjoy it a lot or the purchase price there is pretty high and the market is very competitive. So we think about it deals in Austin are going to be just as hard to find as if you were in the Bay Area. So us moving to Austin didn’t really help us in the sense of finding more gills however, she did have a really good friend who lives in Dallas and convinced us to come visit him on multiple occasions. So we finally did we realized, wow, this is pretty great. It’s a very suburbia type of neighborhood very reminiscent of the Bay Area. And deals are everywhere here. I mean, not everywhere, but you know, they’re plentiful. At least you can see homes that are for sale by owner can see there’s vocations that really need help from investors like ourselves, to renovate them and make them more beautiful. And of course, purchase prices in Dallas are a lot cheaper than they are in Austin is benefit. And on top of that there are no short term regulations, no short term ordinances in Dallas. So we can rent this out as an Airbnb as of this recording.
And to be honest, when we were visiting Dallas, I think we only did two day trips, right?
Yeah, we never we stayed at night. First time we decided to Yeah, so
we did a one day trip. It was just like a random idea. We didn’t even know the area that well. So it was pretty crazy that we decided to like pull the trigger so quickly, because basically a few months after that is when we like actually decided to put an offer and again like Shawn said the opportunity for Airbnb was there. So we’ve been more interested in short term rentals. If we moved out of this property, we could totally Airbnb this out and have it as a cash flowing rental property or if things change and they do implement some ordinances. We could do a long term strategy with this home because it can cashflow essentially, I think the numbers work better in Dallas than in Austin. I also personally wanted a bigger city life, I would say that Austin is kind of smaller in that sense. I also feel like Dallas is more they say it’s like the LA of Texas, I would say and then Austin is more like the SF of Texas, essentially. So I feel like I’m the type that likes to stay in but also go out. So sometimes I do like to get dressed up and go out. And I felt like an Austin they don’t do that as much. I would say it’s more like the bar life and not like the nice fancy outing life. You know, I mean, so I feel like Dallas has that opportunity that I could do
that more. So if you want to be bougie you can be bougie. Right? Exactly. I
want the option, even though I’m definitely not like a Bougie person, but like I like to have that option. I wanted to live like the bigger city life or the place that we’re actually at right now. It’s located really close to downtown. I mean, like 10 minutes away or so. But we’re also located in the suburbs, we are close to Asian pauses and we can eat good Asian food or close a mall or close to movie. So we’re really conveniently located and I feel like in Dallas, you can be close to a lot of things. And there’s a lot to do. So I’m pretty happy that we chose it here. I do have close friends in both Austin Dallas and they both love those cities. I’ve visited Austin way more than Dallas actually before and I really enjoyed Austin’s so we almost went to Austin. But because of a lot of these reasons that we’re talking about, we decided Dallas instead. So like I mentioned, we have been here for a few weeks now, whatever your thoughts been
so far has been pretty nice. Almost everyone that we’ve met has been absolutely super friendly and very willing to help us for anything without us even asking for it. So that’s been very nice. Everything that we want that’s in the Bay Area is actually here. So back in the day, we would go to like Dave and Busters, the movies, the malls, and they of course they have all that and more here prices for everything you want are a lot cheaper than they are in the bay area too. So everything just feels nicer. And we have this relatively new home it is 95% complete, I would say there are some things here and there that needs to be fixed. But for the most part, it’s a nice home. We have lost space. We’re basically starting from scratch. So for the first few weeks, we were just creating a new furniture and setting up the room so that everything looks nice. I mean, look at the studio. Hopefully you guys enjoy it.
Yeah, like you mentioned, honestly, it’s been pretty fun. So far, the first week or two, we’ve honestly been like assembling furniture a lot. So here’s some pictures and videos of our place is four bedroom, two bath, we essentially took one of the rooms and made it into an office space. One other one is this YouTube studio here we have our bedroom, and then one of them is empty right now that will probably make it into a guest bedroom. I would say because we lived in the suburbs in the Bay Area. I felt like there was not really much to do. I was bored. And I was feeling like why are we spending more money here when we could live a more exciting life somewhere else. So I really feel like grateful that we’ve been following our callings because I feel like this adventure is something a lot of people would probably be scared to do, right? It’s like out of the comfort zone. They’re leaving their homes that they know they’re comfortable with and going someplace new. But honestly, I feel like we are opened up to a lot more opportunity. I also have like a good amount of close friends here. Now I realize we maybe like four or five or so people to hang out with. So we’re lucky that we have those people because we have been like going out and like talking to people. And I’m also
part of several professional organizations that are nationwide and they also have chapters here in Dallas. So it’d be pretty easy for me to integrate once we start having more live in person events.
So yeah, the plan is to just be here for a couple years but honestly, who knows maybe we’ll love it even more than we thought and I personally have been enjoying it not just because of like being in Dallas but also that this home is actually really helpful for I think my productivity and my well being honestly like I really like just being around here because it is newly renovated. It feels nice. We have everything intentionally set up or the studio is separate from the office space where normally We had them together we had it in the converted garage which is kind of like downstairs and darker area in the past in the bay area so it kind of made me not want to be there whereas now I feel like it’s set up perfectly where I feel like I can be more productive I also have this little nick for like reading and writing which allows us to take calls in different rooms when we have like meetings and interviews and stuff like that everything’s just been more convenient also our kitchen is bigger and has an island so I’m more inclined to cook where like you know in the past we’ve always been eating out
and the dining room table is actually there in front of the TV so we can actually eat at the dining table was eating on the couch like we had in the
past. So that’s about it in another episode. I’m going to go over the numbers again with purchasing this home and giving you guys more of a tour of this place. So if you guys liked this video, make sure to smash the like button. Let me know in the comments below if you guys prefer California or Texas and make sure to subscribe hit the bell button to be notified of my latest videos and make sure to subscribe to Sean’s channel where he talks all about real estate investing. I’ll see you guys in the next one.Transcribed by https://otter.ai