How to buy a house when prices are too high starts with an uncomfortable reframe. Kim, one of our regular live-show listeners, asked whether the housing market had simply passed her by, whether she would just never own. Our answer: she could buy a house almost immediately. She earns plenty of money. What she cannot buy is a home that fits her family in the Southern California market she lives in. Most people asking this question are in Kim's position, priced out of a place and nowhere near priced out of ownership. Once you see it that way, a set of real paths opens up, and the biggest one, the centerpiece of this episode, is moving somewhere housing costs less. It is also the path with the most fine print, so we are going to walk it honestly, trade-offs included, and then cover the paths that do not involve a moving truck.
Break a household budget into its parts, food, energy, transportation, healthcare, childcare, taxes, shelter, and ask which ones actually change when your address changes. Food and energy move a little. Childcare moves some. The two that move a lot are taxes and, towering over everything else, housing. When this episode aired (8/22/2023, with rates elevated; the price and rate figures here reflect that date and drift over time), a genuinely nice 2,000 square foot single-family home ran $200,000 to $350,000 in many parts of the country, while in our Orange County and LA County markets the absolute floor for a single-family home was about $650,000 and plenty of communities started at $850,000 or a million.
That gap lives in your monthly payment. Run the standard amortization math at an illustrative 7% on a 30-year fixed with 10% down: an $850,000 home carries a $765,000 loan and a principal-and-interest payment around $5,090 a month, while a $300,000 home carries a $270,000 loan at about $1,796. That is almost $3,300 a month before property taxes and insurance widen it further, which is why we said on the air that the real-world swing between these markets runs three to four thousand dollars a month. A move that cuts your housing cost by that much outearns almost any promotion you will ever get. In our experience, when people say they are relocating for a lower cost of living, call it 95% of the time they are really relocating for a lower cost of shelter.
Taxes are the second variable that truly moves, and the billboard version leaves half of it out. Take a household earning $120,000 in California, paying an effective state income tax rate around 8%, and move it to Texas, which has no state income tax: that is roughly a $700 a month raise. The other half: Texas property tax rates run about double California's, and they are not capped, so the bill climbs with your home's value every year you own it. California's property taxes sting at purchase but are capped afterward, which is why longtime owners here eventually shrug at them. (Tax rules and rates change; verify the current numbers for any county before you buy.) Miss that second half and the first reassessment letter turns your raise into a surprise.
Everything else mostly follows housing downward. Jeb grew up in rural North Carolina, where a night out that would read $300 in Southern California comes back as a $60 tab. But do not assume it: in the boom metros people actually relocate to, the big cities of Texas, Tennessee, and Arizona, restaurants and everyday staples price surprisingly close to California. Price the whole life, never just the house.
The reflex objection to leaving a high-cost metro is the pay cut, and the data say the cut is smaller than people fear. Gravy Analytics, which tracks relocation through anonymized cell phone data, found the net exodus from high-cost areas flows to places with a median home price of $279,000, about 38% below the areas people are leaving, while median household income in those destinations is only about 9% lower. A 38% housing discount for a 9% income haircut is a trade most budgets win going away. We ran the same comparison on Omaha and found homes around $200,000 that buyers spending $700,000 to $900,000 in Southern California would be thrilled with, against a median income about 80% of ours. A 20% pay cut against a housing cost that drops by well more than half still comes out far ahead for most households.
Remote work can erase even the 9%. Josh has closed 1,300+ loans, and lately roughly one a month is for someone moving away from their employer's area, with a letter in the file confirming the role is remote or the employee may work from anywhere. Carry a coastal salary into a $279,000 market and the arbitrage is enormous. Two cautions, though. First, employers keep pulling people back on site, so get the arrangement in writing before you list your house. Second, think in decades: a Wall Street Journal writer we discussed on the episode had left affordable Columbus, Ohio for a New York promotion, earning 30% more and, in his words, feeling 80% poorer, because he believed proximity to the prime assignments would multiply his income over the following decade. Know your industry's version of that math before you trade the trajectory for the cheap house. Qualifying with remote income, a new job in a new state, or self-employment income that moves with you is exactly the kind of positioning we work through on a free Roadmap call, ideally before you commit to a zip code.
Jeb's family stays in Southern California with open eyes: the weather, the beach and the mountains in the same day, and a life they have built outweigh everything they dislike about the state. Josh's family in North Idaho lives the other list: everyone has a boat and a side-by-side, weekends are hunting, fishing, and camping instead of concerts and restaurants, and when there is a funeral, a hundred people show up and every one of them knows the others. The trade is concrete. Big metros give you the symphony, the fine dining, every touring act, and the deepest job markets. Smaller, cheaper places give you space, a slower pace, and neighbors who know your name. Neither list is wrong. They are different lists, and you need to know which one is yours before you sign anything.
Distance from family and friends weighs heaviest, which is why the destinations Californians pick cluster within driving range: the Central Valley sits three hours from the beach, and Vegas and Phoenix stay perennially popular for the same reason. A State of California long-range planning study projects LA County will lose about 10% of its residents, roughly 1.7 million people, by 2060 while farm-country San Joaquin County grows about 25%. Those movers are chasing a $400,000 house instead of a $750,000 starter, with the beaches and amusement parks still a drive away rather than gone.
And the grass is genuinely not always greener. The couple renting Josh's neighbors' house had sold, moved to Tennessee, bought a home, and was back in California inside nine months. A friend of Jeb's bought the model home in a new Austin community and was back in six, and he is still renting because he sold his California house to make the move. Under our Dave Ramsey episode on YouTube (we took his housing rules apart separately in whether Dave Ramsey is right about buying a house), a commenter described the stalemate perfectly: the husband wanted out, to a cheaper state, a home, and a 40-hour week, and the wife wanted her friends and her life where they are. Neither of them is wrong, and that is the test. If both partners are not fully in, do not go; a move only one of you chose almost never survives. Jeb's family ran the test on a camping trip through Shaver Lake, a beautiful small mountain town in central California, and his wife's verdict was that if they had to live there, she would rather keep renting at the beach. Renting where you love can beat owning where you do not, and the rent-vs-buy framework is how you run that decision honestly.
If the relocation math works and the family is in, choose the destination like an investor would, because you are making the same bet:
Appreciation behaves differently across markets, too. A handful of coastal metros are cyclical, booming and correcting in waves, while most of the country is linear, grinding out low-single-digit gains. Remote work bent that pattern during the pandemic, when metros that had barely appreciated in 20 years jumped hard in two precisely because arrivals kept big-market pay. The American Enterprise Institute's ranking of metros for first-time buyers, which we walked through on the episode, drew the map cleanly: the worst list ran San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boise, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, and Denver, while the best list ran Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Omaha, Detroit, Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Columbus. The worst list hugs the West Coast. The best list is almost entirely the Midwest, where prices never left earth.
Anything on this list is workable. What does not work is the scarcity script, the one that says the system is rigged and ownership is just not for you. Almost every week we watch somebody trade that script for a plan, and the plan wins. Our free two-minute readiness quiz is a fair place to start: it will tell you where you stand today, whether your answer turns out to be your own market, a cheaper one, or eighteen more months of runway.
Find out if you're actually ready to buy, in 2 minutes
Most buyers wait months longer than they need to, just because no one ever told them they were ready. Answer a few quick questions and get a straight read: where you stand today, what's holding you back, and the fastest path to your own front door. Free, no call, no credit check.
Get my readiness score →You have four real paths: move to a lower-cost market and arbitrage the difference, buy a smaller property type (like a condo) in your own market as a first rung, rent deliberately while building wealth other ways, or spend two to three years building down payment and credit runway. The one non-path is waiting for your market to crash back to affordability, which has a terrible track record. Start by separating 'I cannot afford homeownership' from 'I cannot afford this zip code,' because they are rarely the same problem.
Financially, it is often a strong trade: relocation data from Gravy Analytics showed movers landing in markets with median home prices about 38% lower while earning only about 9% less, and remote workers can keep big-metro pay entirely. Whether it is worth it personally depends on what you give up, distance from family, culture, weather, and career trajectory. Both partners have to be fully in. We know people who moved and love it, and people who moved back within nine months.
Yes, routinely. Lenders document the arrangement with a letter from your employer confirming the role is remote or that you may work from any location, and your income then qualifies in the new market just as it did in the old one. Get that arrangement in writing before you commit to a move, since companies keep tightening return-to-office policies. If you are self-employed or changing jobs as part of the move, the qualification details matter more, so map them out before you pick the destination.
Betting on it is a bad plan. High-cost markets do sit near affordability ceilings and can go flat for years, but a crash requires forced sellers at scale, and out-migration alone does not create them; migration data even shows large flows returning to expensive states like California. Meanwhile the demand from people who want to own there remains enormous. If prices in your market feel impossible, the productive comparisons are other markets and other property types, both of which you control.
Look for growth, because growth is what sustains home values: employment gains, companies relocating in, hospitals and healthcare capacity, and visible redevelopment. Check that people are moving there rather than away, and think about proximity, since staying within a drive of family and the amenities you are leaving makes the move far more durable. Then price the whole life, especially property taxes, which in some low-price states run double the rate you are used to and rise every year.