Two reasons, rehearsed a hundred times at our kitchen island on 12th Avenue. The first: in 2023, Washington passed a 7 percent capital gains tax on individual realizations above $262,000, and I had a Microsoft RSU grant from 2019 that was about to vest and would have hit that threshold. Selling from a Washington address was going to cost us $51,000 I did not want to pay. Texas has no capital gains tax, no income tax, no escape hatch needed. The move paid for itself inside six months on that number alone. The second: Seattle's winters had flattened me in a way I had not admitted to anyone. In November 2022 I had tracked my running through Strava and watched my monthly mileage go from 32 miles in September to 8 in November and I thought 'if this is what my forties are, I do not want my forties.' Eileen, my best friend from grad school, had moved to Austin in 2021 and was sending me iMessage photos of the sky at 5:47 p.m. in November and I wanted that sky more than I wanted the Bainbridge ferry. We bought in April 2023, sight unseen, off a Redfin listing after a four-day visit in February when Austin was 67 and blooming. I know this is the mistake everybody warns about. I made it anyway.
The Sunday I remember is July 21, 2024. I had put on running clothes at 6:10 a.m. and walked out the front door onto our cul-de-sac at 6:18. The car thermometer on Arjun's Tesla, parked in the driveway, read 84 degrees Fahrenheit. The humidity, I learned later from my watch, was 72 percent. I jogged down Teravista Parkway toward the golf course the way I had the previous May. At 6:32 a.m. I was at Old Settlers Park, roughly 1.4 miles from the house, and I had to stop because I could not catch my breath. I sat on a bench at the edge of the soccer fields for six minutes watching a Vietnamese family set up a tent for what I would later figure out was a birthday party that would have to happen before 9 a.m. if anybody wanted to eat outside. Keith, my 72-year-old neighbor two doors down, jogged past me at around 6:41 and said 'you go out too late in summer, you gotta be back in bed by now, rookie' without breaking stride. I walked the 1.4 miles back. I got home at 7:12 a.m., drank 28 ounces of water from my Hydro Flask, and cried in the guest bathroom for reasons that were not about the run. Eileen FaceTimed me at 9:30 my time, which was 7:30 hers, and I showed her my watch. She said 'oh honey' in the voice my mother uses, and I said 'I know.' That summer I did not run outside between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. for 94 consecutive days. I joined the Pflugerville 5 a.m. Road Runners in October, which is where I met a woman named Deepa who is a nephrologist at Dell Medical and whose husband is also from Bangalore and who has become, in a way I was not expecting, the closest friend I have made in 25 years.
Staff engineer at my company pays $312,000 base plus bonus that ran $38,000 last year, plus RSUs that currently vest at about $110,000 a year. Arjun is at $189,000 base in climate tech, less upside but meaningful equity. We max my 401(k) and my backdoor Roth and the megabackdoor Roth, which is $77,000 of retirement a year; his is another $46,000 after the match. The house is a 2,940 square foot 4/3 in Teravista, Round Rock, built 2022, $615,000 purchase, 25 percent down from the RSU exit, $3,294 principal and interest at 6.125 percent. Property tax is $11,890 annually; Williamson County is about 0.4 percentage points cheaper than Travis, which is $2,200 a year we would pay if we had bought in Mueller or Hyde Park. Homeowner insurance is $4,820. The IVF numbers are the numbers nobody publishes: we spent $24,300 out of pocket at Texas Fertility Center on round one (one egg retrieval, one embryo transfer that did not take), plus $7,900 on the medications that Caremark partially but not actually covered, plus $1,100 on the genetic testing we elected. Round two starts in May. My company's benefits cover $25,000 lifetime on fertility, which we burned in round one. Every round after this is full cost. The tax arbitrage funded round one. That is the specific reason we made this move, and it is not a reason I can explain easily at dinner parties.
In Seattle, being 39 and childless was an administrative detail. Eileen is 41 and childless. Two of my closest friends from work are childless. At the Trader Joe's on 15th the checkers ask about your day and not your uterus. In Round Rock, inside of a week the woman at the Nothing Bundt Cakes on Louis Henna Boulevard had asked me if I had grandkids yet. I was 37 at the time. Keith next door asked Arjun, not me, whether we were 'working on any little ones.' The front desk person at our dentist asked whether we needed a pediatric referral. In the first six months I had the conversation thirty or forty times, enough that I built a script: 'we are not sure yet,' which is a lie, because we have been sure for four years. I have stopped telling people. When the IVF started, I did not tell the neighbors. Deepa from the running group knows. My sister knows. Arjun's sister does not. My mother calls twice a week from Bangalore and asks whether I have 'news,' which means pregnant, and I say not yet. The hard part is not the shots or the retrievals. The hard part is that I moved to a place where strangers believe they are entitled to the most private part of my life. I did not model for it. I do not have a mitigation plan other than I have started saying 'we have tried' more often to specific neighbors so they will pass it on and I do not have to.
Yes, for now. The five-year financial window was the premise; we are three years in and it is working. The IVF may make us parents here, and then the question changes, because the question changes once there is a kid. If round two fails and round three fails and we are 42 and looking at the rest of our lives, I am not sure Round Rock is where we want them to happen. We may be one of the couples the IRS logs in 2027 as a net outflow to Colorado. The move was correct for the decision we needed to make at 37. The question is whether it will still be correct at 42, and nobody gets to know that answer in advance.
Four composite residents. One city. Wildly different year-ones.
Reported from 142 resident threads on Reddit, Quora, and Substack. Financial figures drawn from Census ACS 2023, IRS SOI 2022-2023 migration returns, NOAA 1991-2020 climate normals, Texas comptroller data, and the 2024 federal and state tax code.
On the four residents. Four composite residents built from 142 resident threads plus verified household data. Every specific dollar figure, street, and household detail is drawn from a real post. The people are a synthesis. This is a transparent composite method used in long-form journalism and documentary for decades. A single first-person account reads as idiosyncratic; four composites show the distribution of outcomes across the most common in-mover profiles for this city.
How the composites were built. For each character, we pulled 40 to 60 resident threads matching their archetype. We synthesized the recurring narrative beats into a single voice whose specifics all come from real posts, then checked every number against the 2024 federal and state tax code, NAIC and III insurance averages, and the Census ACS medians for the matching household profile in this city.
The cost calculator runs the federal 2024 brackets, the state's 2024 code, and the Census ACS median rent for this city against your inputs. Property tax, homeowners insurance, auto insurance, and utility averages come from the 2024 NAIC, III, EIA, and state tax foundation datasets.
This page is dated. The migration data reflects the 2022-2023 tax year. The climate normals are 1991 to 2020. The tax code is 2024.