Pancho really hit it - Houston is a very comfortable place and it’s easy to get trapped with salaries that compete with coastal cities and a cost of living the significant beats them. That said, we took the plunge and relocated to SF a few years ago. As others have mentioned, natural geography is a game changer. And I’m not talking about “oh you’re just an hour from a beach with mud water and flesh eating bacteria” or “the Hill Country is just a few hours away!” - I can be on the Pacific in 15 minutes, the Marin Headlands hiking in 30 and the wine country in an hour. “A few hours” is Tahoe. Or Carmel. Or Mendocino. I can’t remember what we did in Houston besides golf and wait until it was an acceptable hour to find an air-conditioned bar. The Bay Area is, of course, staggeringly expensive. Outside of the cool parts of SF, Oakland and Berkeley, most of it is suburban, sprawling and scorching in the summers. And that goes for LA as well. When it comes time, NFW am I paying a million to live in some shitty burb like Concord or Dublin. We’re going back to Houston.