Words I never thought I’d be writing, especially less than a year after moving here. Yet, here we are! The moving saga seems to be continued lol.

So for starters – this was definitely unexpected. As many of you know, when we first moved here, I felt like I was thriving. I felt like it was such a great fit and I was so excited to be here. And don’t get me wrong, there’s still so many things I love about Denver but there were multiple factors that led us to this decision, some having a greater impact than others. But here’s the gist:

1. Freeing up cash for our businesses & lowering our cost of living. This is the main reason TBH. We knew that moving out here would be more expensive (for reference, the house we have here is 2x as expensive as the last one we purchased in Raleigh), and so we knew ahead of time that we wouldn’t have as much cash leftover every month. We were also putting down 20% so a lot of our cash was tied up in the house too. But basically as the year went on, we honestly just felt like we were burning cash with our mortgage and we weren’t able to invest back into our businesses as much (or at all). We wanted to hire someone to help with Parry, Stephen is getting Cumulus (the energy drink mix) manufactured and we were like – is the increased cost of living here worth delaying our long term goals? In short, we both agreed that it wasn’t. So while we were enjoying Denver, living here was coming at a cost (literally) and we both said we would rather prioritize our businesses.

So aside from buying a house in Raleigh that is 40% less expensive than the one we’re in now, we were also able to free up the majority of the cash tied up in our house and put that back into our businesses, pay off loans/debt that we’ve acquired from starting our businesses, etc.

I think this is important to talk about because entrepreneurship isn’t easy and sometimes you have to make some really tough calls. If we were both in salaried positions, didn’t want to invest in starting up other businesses, etc. moving back wouldn’t have been a conversation this soon after moving here. All that to say – don’t let your pride or ego get in the way of what you truly know is right for you and your goals. Like, people might think that we’re “crazy” or be like “I can’t believe they are moving again” but it’s what we want to do, and we know it’s best for us and our long term goals. We’re the ones that have to live with our decisions, no one else.

2. We were missing the east coast. So, this will probably be surprising to a lot of you since I did feel like I was thriving when we first got here. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things I love about Denver, and that I prefer here in comparison to Raleigh. We’ve also made so many close friends here so it’s not even about lack of community (I feel like that was something we were really blessed with moving here). But honestly, the east coast is just a different vibe and we were missing it.

A little more backstory, in January Stephen had told me that he just wasn’t feeling like Denver was feeling like home for whatever reason and honestly I was shocked at first because I was loving it still. But as the months went on and it was still snowing in May I was like okay, call me crazy but I may after take the awful humidity in NC over the summer over this haha. Another thing, which is going to probably sound weird, but it was a bigger adjustment being on MST time than I thought. I honestly always felt behind with work during the days because I knew the east coast was two hours ahead. Again, such a small thing and not a factor in moving back lol, but even just little things like that were on our radar.

All that to say, there’s definitely things we enjoy about the West more than the East coast, but overall we just started to feel like the east coast was a better fit for us overall. So that paired with the financial piece, we felt like it was definitely the right decision to move back.

Some of you have asked why Raleigh vs trying somewhere new? A few reasons:
– Being in Denver made us realize how much we actually missed certain things about Raleigh that we took for granted.
– Raleigh has been growing and building up so much more even in the year that we’ve been gone. We feel like it is getting more of the “bigger city” things that we were looking for in the past.
– With me doing real estate, it made most sense to be in an area that I was super familiar with.
– We already have great friends/community/network there plus my parents and sister are in Wilmington and Charleston so Raleigh puts us back closer to them.
– With everything else we want to focus on right now (Real Estate and Cumulus mostly), we didn’t want the added “stress” and time it takes to acclimate to a new place. Not to mention, we just want to be settled for a while at least. This will be our 4th move in 6 years and we just want to go somewhere that we know we will feel good about and want to stay in vs. experimenting with a new place.

While this wasn’t an easy decision, we know it is the right one. Moving wasn’t seriously on our radar until we went over our finances around tax season and that morning we just looked at each other and we were like – this isn’t making sense for us long term. We knew that moving back to NC would put us in a much better financial position, so that paired with the fact that we had be missing the east coast, we made the decision in that moment to move back and haven’t second guessed it since.

I think sometimes in these situations we can feel like we don’t have a choice. Like it would be very easy for us to say “We just moved here less than a year ago, we can’t just move back!” We may not want to but want is different than can/can’t. I say that as a reminder, that you are very rarely stuck in a situation. It may be uncomfortable to make, it may not be what you expected, but there are very few times that you are “forced” to stay in something.

Anyway! All that to say, we’re really glad we moved to Denver. If we hadn’t, we would probably always wonder “what if” – so it definitely gave us clarity on what is most important to us. On top of that, we’ve made some really close friends in the short time that we’ve been here, and those are friendships that we will still have when we leave. So, lots of visits will be in our future! And, as always, thank you for being a part of this whole journey with us!! xx