A pair of California parents who picked up and left for Texas to avoid crumbling under the liberal state’s high cost of living can’t wait to ditch the Lone State and return home.
Dannielle Price, 47, and her estranged husband, Eiman Monam, 45, are counting down the days until they can leave Tyler, Texas, where they moved in May.
‘We are definitely not planning to stay in Texas,’ Price told Business Insider. ‘We just want to get back home to California once our lease is up in May’ next year.
This is Price’s second time living in Texas, and her experience there hasn’t been any better than the first time she moved there in 2021.
Her cost-of-living problems haven’t vanished like she thought they would, and she’s struggling to find a full-time job.
‘I haven’t gotten many job interviews here in Tyler,’ she said. ‘It seems like a lot of the jobs are part-time. Plus, I went from making almost $18 an hour in California to $11 here.’
Price and Monam, who are married but separated, moved their family from Riverside, California to Henderson, Texas to briefly live with her parents earlier this year. But after some tension between Monam and her father, they relocated to Tyler.
Although the mom-of-three struggled when she moved Texas for first time in June 2021, she couldn’t afford four people living in a California one-bedroom apartment, saying she and her daughter were ‘constantly working to pay the bills.’
‘So I started talking about moving to Texas again because I was dreaming of affordable homes and affordable apartments, thinking life there might be a little easier for all of us,’ she told Business Insider.
Monam agreed, as he was currently facing homelessness, and liked the ‘opportunity to live somewhere inexpensive, save money, and permanently resolve my housing issues long-term.’
‘But that’s not what we got,’ he explained. ‘We thought everything was going to be cheaper here in Texas than it has been.’
Unlike in California, they were responsible for paying for ‘all our utilities’ and quickly got behind on bills. Price is on the verge of losing her car, despite having worked two jobs.
She is currently unemployed while her husband works as a hotel desk agent.
In 2021, Price made her first move to Texas after she started to feel the weight of rising costs in 2019.
Money became her ‘main stressor’ and it impeded on her ability to ‘really live my life.’
Although both she and Monam worked – with him holding two jobs at the time – they both struggled to make ends meet. So Price picked up her daughters and left. Monam and their son were unable to follow.
Price’s mother lived in Henderson, where she found that ‘houses were so cheap and they were huge!’
‘Everything was really low cost,’ she said. ‘My goal was to be able to purchase my own home one day.’
Although they were initially ‘blown away by the beautiful nature’ Texas had to offer and both her and her daughter found full-time work, her eldest child ‘started getting depressed,’ so they packed their bags and went back to Riverside in the fall 2021.
When they returned, they were hoping Monam would have found the family an apartment to live in, but he had fallen victim to homelessness.
‘So we stayed with his mom off and on for a few months,’ she said. ‘But that was difficult, too, and my younger daughter and I ended up in a shelter.’
By spring 2022, Price was able to get her old job and apartment back in Riverside and they stayed in there for two years before the most recent move to Texas.
Now, they’re ready to ditch Texas for all the conveniences of California, even if they know their wallets will suffer.
‘We are excited to go back, but we’re apprehensive, too. We want to make sure we have enough money to get started again,’ Price said. ‘But we’d rather deal with the high cost of living and have the convenience.
‘It’s home.’
