Our working lives have seen two progressive moves northward due to weather. Once from the Los Angeles area to Ventura, and once from Ventura to San Jose. We dislike heat and smog and dryness, and now add to that a dislike of fire season and smoke.
And so we’re going to make one more northward move when we retire: to Washington. We love cool, drizzly weather. I don’t know how we Californians are going to cope with a bit of snow, but that’ll be an adventure in itself.
My Wife and I live at very high elevation in the Colorado Rockies (11,200 feet). We love it here but man. Winters are long and brutal. Summers are lovely, if very short.
As we age, dealing with the amount of snow we get is harder and harder. And we have consider things like needing an ambulance. We’re going to probably move in about 10 years or so. We have no idea where though.
I went to high school in a place with perfect weather. It was never hot and never cold. I’ve been trying to get back there since and I’ve made moves close twice but in both cases it was much worse weather. There isn’t much good work back home and no way for my wife and I to make what we make now and the cost of living is about 50% more so that keeps us from actually moving there.
We’ve settled for the weather in Denver and at least it doesn’t have real winter and up here at 8,000’ we don’t get real summer so it’s a half assed substitute. Our next move will probably be driven by climate change and going in search of water for out long term home.
I seriously thought about it. My sister and her husband moved to Florida years ago, and back when I was still single I used to visit every winter for a week, right around late Feb, first week of March, when winter in Michigan was really getting old. They used to try to talk me into moving down there. I remember seeing people riding bikes, thinking, how come I haven’t ridden my bike in awhile? Then remembering, oh yeah, because it’s 20 degrees with a foot of snow on the ground back home.
Then, coming back to the cold and ice after a week in sunny Florida, I would really question why I put up with it. I was single and unattached, and my job wasn’t anything special at the time that I would regret quitting. Only a mix of inertia and fear of change kept me in the state I was born in.
I’ve never moved for better weather, always for work or school. Although it might have influenced some choices (I thought about Rice for both undergrad and grad, but Houston summers are a turn-off.)
Neither my wife nor I is enamored with the DC area and we’ve thought about where else we might like to live. Weather comes into that conversation but I’m not really sure what’s optimal.
I spent most of my life in California. At 21, I married a military man, and we did the obligatory moves all over the place. As he got closer to retirement, we fought tooth and nail to return to SCal.
In our travels, I discovered that I hate snow. In California, snow is somewhat of a novelty. The Flatlanders go VISIT snow. They stay long enough to collect a blanket of snow on the car while they get out and play in the snow until they are cold, wet, and miserable. That means it is time to jump in the car, drive back to the land of flat, where people will look and point at the snow on the car. “See that? They went to the mountains!” Then you go home, change out of the wet clothes and see what’s on TV."
During Mr VOW’s military career, we lived in Wisconsin, Germany (twice), and Kentucky. Once he retired, we were back in California.
California has its detractors. Smog, crime, muggy heat, deteriorating conditions. Since Mr VOW is an amateur astronomer, he wanted a place where he could “play telescope” to his heart’s content. We ended up here in NE AZ, out in the middle of nowhere. Both of us are deliriously happy here. It does snow occasionally, but you just have to wait inside, next to the wood stove, drinking hot chocolate. Soon, the sun comes out and melts the snow.
~VOW
I never have moved for weather. I was born in San Jose, CA, but my parents then moved us to suburban Chicago when I was 3 months old. Since then, I have always lived within 75 miles of the western coast of Lake Michigan (Green Bay, Madison, and various western Chicago suburbs).
15 years ago or so, when my mother-in-law (who lives near us) retired, she made a lot of noise about wanting to move somewhere “prettier, and where the weather is nicer.” She also, rather boldly, assumed that, if she moved, her two adult daughters (my wife, and my sister-in-law) would move there, too. When my wife informed her that, no, we would not follow her if she moved to Santa Fe (we like it here, we have friends here, and my job is here), she was stunned.
(She wound up not moving.)
I hate the winter. I hate wasting a large portion of the year on bad weather. I would much rather be hot than cold. If it was up to me I would retire to Florida yesterday.
But it’s not up to me. My girlfriend hates Florida. She hates the heat. She never wants to move out of state. So I’m going to eventually die in this miserable state while being bled to death by high taxes.
I moved from Santa Barbara to Bend because I wanted to live somewhere that I could ski easily in the winter. Since snow is a necessary part of that, I guess I moved for better weather, although probably a lot of people would consider Bend to have “worse” weather than Santa Barbara. Better for me, though.
I never have but my mother did 5 years before she met my dad, so I guess I’m here because of such a decision. She grew up in northern Montana and experienced brutal winters. Her dad said that he could always remember that she had been born in 1954 because that was the winter the temperature dropped to -54. My mom couldn’t leave fast enough. So she moved to southern Oregon as soon as she graduated college.
I like the climate here. Winters are gray and rainy, but a t-shirt and a windbreaker is all that’s usually required. As someone noted upthread, spending 10 minutes putting special clothes on just to walk the dog isn’t necessary, nor is shoveling the driveway in the wee hours of the morning or clearing snow off the car before going to work or worrying about icy roads or making sure your car has snow tires every September or any of the myriad of other things that cold, snowy weather brings. The worst thing that happens during winter here is I forget to wear a jacket with a hood and am forced to use an umbrella.
Recent summers have been smoky but there really isn’t any way around that anymore. We do have seasons, of a sort, with winter being “gray and rainy” instead of “cold and snowy.” East of the Cascades, in places like
there are more distinct seasons with winter being notably colder and snowier.
::waves from Roseburg::
Take your GF for a vacation to Santa Barbara, California, in late springtime/early summer. Drive along the beach. Play in the water. Go to The Lobsterhouse. Visit some missions. Eat tri-tip.
~VOW
Moved exclusively for weather? No. But that it was a factor? Absolutely. And I haven’t moved for the same reason…part of the factor was knowing how miserable the weather would be if I moved (back in this case) to some places.
A big part of the calculation for where I live these days is weather…and traffic is another one. The weather here is great, and the traffic here is light. Those two things are worth a hell of a lot of money. 
My MIL from Buffalo sounds like that, too. They moved to Phoenix I believe for that reason. That said, I, too, might be annoyed by 100F+ for three quarters of the year.
That said, I’m 46 and I don’t ever see myself moving for weather. I live in Chicago, and I actually love the seasons. Can’t see any other way for myself.
I want no winter. I’m also hoping for a lower cost of living not higher.
In 2004, my mother and I moved from Indiana to Virginia with our three cats, primarily to be closer to family, but Mom tells me the nicer weather played a big role, too. (“I’m sick to death of snow!” she tells me.) Eventually, my sister joined us when she broke up with her fiancé.
The “being close to family” thing didn’t really work out all that well. Nee-Nee and Pop-Pop in Pennsylvania only lasted a few more years, and we quickly became estranged from Grandpa, Mom’s dad. But I like the weather in Virginia much better than Indiana, except for the fact that when it rains, it floods.
Worth a try, but won’t necessarily work. A week on a beach in Florida in late spring, when I didn’t need to do anything but play? Sure, I’ll take that. Live there year round? Not if I get any choice at all in the matter.
– people thinking they’ll move for the weather should make sure to rent for a year first, and not to burn any bridges behind them. You can’t really tell what it’s like living someplace by taking a vacation there.
I’m probably going to be moving soon and climate is a big motivating factor. In fact living somewhere I loveis a big motivator for changing careers and having more flexibility in where I can live.
I spent my first 23 years or so outside of Cleveland right by Lake Erie. I loved the spring, summer, and fall there - I often go back to visit for extended periods - but I despise the other 7 months of the year. Conditions like this weren’t common but they happened and often it felt like that in the winter. Not just cold, but a wet, windy cold with ice everywhere. You would sometimes have to shatter the ice off your car by bludgeoning it with something because it was too thick to scrape off even from just one night of freezing over.
I’ve lived in Las Vegas for 15 years, which obviously is quite the opposite. And I definitely don’t miss the winters, but I’ve come to realize that I’m a water person and I’m out of place here. I’m probably going to have to move out of state soon enough for grad school anyway.
I think my ideal fit is somewhere north of LA in California, like Ventura or Santa Barbara. The weather is always in a fantastic temperature range, it’s right by the ocean, there are all sorts of cool road trips and places to visit - up the PCH, up in the mountains, through redwood forests, there’s just all sorts of cool stuff to do if you live there. But it’s too expensive to be practical, at least until maybe I have my career running pretty smoothly. There are also surprisingly very few grad schools with the programs I need, and almost all of them are in LA or SF, and I’d like to avoid massive cities and they’d be too expensive anyway.
I’m actually thinking about moving back to Northeast Ohio. I have friends and family there still, there are good schools that would work for me, and I can just flat out buy a cheap house there (whereas I might not even qualify to get a mortgage for a “cheap” house in California). I also think the area will relatively benefit from climate change (which is not to say that it will get better, but it will probably get less worse than other areas) and I think there’s going to be a water crunch in the future that’s going to make the great lakes/rust belt region more desirable again in the next few decades. I don’t know how depressing it will be to handle those winters again, though.
I’m actually giving some consideration to living in two places if I can swing it - somewhere cheap that I like in the summer like the great lakes region, and then somewhere like the Dominican Republic in the winter, if I can work remotely and it ends up being practical. Owning a home in both places is still less than half as expensive as owning a home in somewhere like California. I haven’t really looked in detail too much at the legal aspects of it, but I think something like Ohio half the year and somewhere cheap in the Caribbean half the year might actually work out for me.
Around here that’s known as being a “snowbird”; though most of them spend the winters in Florida, not the Dominican Republic.
When the snow flies, they fly south. We’ve got quite a few; some grew up here, some came from more expensive areas.
I moved here to be near family. Now they’ve all moved away except for dad, who is 92. I’m not going to desert him. But yeah, I’m moving back to Wisconsin when I can.
It’s part of the reason we are in Oregon now, instead of Alaska. We retired up there and felt that spending winters there without the daily work routine would not be good for our health. Since we didn’t move there until we were in our fifties, we never invested in things like a cabin or snow machines or other winter recreational equipment (like longtime residents had done), and investing in that sort of stuff after retirement just didn’t make sense.
Neither of us was the least bit interested in Arizona or Florida or other places where you spend most of your time inside in air conditioning, so we settled on the PNW. While it’s true that we get a lot of rain in winter, walking can still be done without risking a broken arm.
