California On Our Minds

I just returned from a six-day silent retreat. What in the world could that have to do with retirement and financial life?  Maybe nothing or maybe a lot.  I’ve been going on silent retreats for more than 20 years, ever since I became a minister and they were part of my spiritual and professional development. These days in my semi-retired lifestyle they are still part of both.

One of my goals for the retreat was to write a draft article about moving to California for Humble Dollar. As I wrote last year, we had the unexpected gift of our first grandchild being born in November 2023. We decided when we visited her last spring that we would leave North Carolina and move to the Bay Area in California, which was our home until 2001 and is where our son and his family live. 

If you read articles about the best places to retire, North Carolina is near the top and California is near the bottom. Selling in California and buying – or even renting – in North Carolina makes smart financial sense. Doing it the other way? Not so much.

We found a manufactured home last July that was in our price range and close to family. We made an offer below asking price. After some back and forth the seller said no. We soon found another home in the same neighborhood.  This time we made an offer above asking but we were outbid. The first home we had bid on ended up being sold for less than our offer! 

We get daily real estate updates and went back to California in November to celebrate our granddaughter’s one year birthday and to look for houses all over Northern California.  We decided to wait for the next house that comes available in the neighborhood we can afford and love.

Waiting has been torture. We are waiting to put our house on the market until we can buy a house in California which means half of our stuff is packed in boxes in the garage. Thankfully, we get lots of pictures of our, now, 15 month-old granddaughter, but pictures and video calls can’t replicate holding her, watching her eyes sparkle when she realizes who we are and rolling around on the floor playing with her.

I promised Jonathan I’d write an article about moving to California hoping it would have a happy ending with us living in California. I don’t take promises to dying men lightly but I haven’t been able to figure out what to write until now. Silent retreats can teach a lot of wisdom but waiting is right near the top of the list.

Back in the days when I would have an occasional job interview I always answered the same way when asked what is one of my faults/weaknesses/growing areas. Impatience. I answered because it was true and because impatience was as helpful as it was harmful to me in my professional life. I often got things done sooner than others. But sometimes I rushed too quickly and that would get me in trouble.

Three things I have learned about waiting in the last few months that apply to buying real estate, investing, or deepening my spiritual awareness.

1. Doing nothing can be better than doing something. – Many of my investing mistakes I have made over the years has been doing something before/when I should have, Selling in a down market, buying in a rising market, or selling a stock when it went up. Searching Redfin and Zillow for houses can be addictive, time-consuming and not very productive. Since my wife and I decided we would wait for a house in one neighborhood, there has been a relative sense of peace. While we are tired of waiting and want to be near our grand daughter before she starts driving, this feels like leaving an index fund alone no matter what the market does.
2. Trust the process. – Steve Jobs gave a wonderful commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. Among the wisdom he shared that day was that life usually makes sense when we look back and connect the dots. I have no idea when, or if, we will ever move back to California. But I do know that trusting the process of life, of investing, of personal/spiritual growth works. Do the best and rightest things you can do and things generally turn out okay. At least they almost always have for me – even though I may not have realized it for years or decades.
3. Accept the things I cannot change. – I have learned this from being in recovery and investing/saving for most of my life. Luck and timing have more to do with my financial security than anything else. I have no power to change the economy, the market or when someone will put a house up for sale that checks all our boxes. I can do lots of things to force the situation (bid more than we want for a house, try to figure out the direction of the market) but most of that is beyond my power and control. When I make peace with that life seems smoother. But it doesn’t mean I like it.