California parents who fled to Texas reveal depressing reason they can’t wait to move back after just four months

Two California parents moved to Texas to avoid the high cost of living in this liberal state. They can’t wait to leave the Lone State and return home.

Dannielle Price, 47, and her estranged husband, Eiman Monam, 45, are counting down the days until they can leave Tyler, Texas, where they moved in May.

“We have absolutely no intention of staying in Texas,” Price said Company Insider“We just want to move back to California next year when our lease is up in May.”

This is Price’s second time living in Texas and her experience there is still no better than the first time she moved there in 2021.

Her cost of living issues haven’t gone away as quickly as she expected and she’s struggling to find full-time work.

“I haven’t had many interviews here in Tyler,” she said. “It seems like a lot of the jobs are part-time. Plus, I went from almost $18 an hour in California to $11 here.”

“We have absolutely no intention of staying in Texas,” Price said. The couple lives in Tyler after moving to the state earlier this year. They moved because of the lower cost of living, but have struggled to find jobs and pay their bills.

Price and Monam, who are married but separated, moved their family from Riverside, California to Henderson, Texas to live with her parents briefly earlier this year. But after some tension between Monam and her father, they relocated to Tyler.

Although the mother of three struggled when she first moved to Texas in June 2021, she couldn’t afford to live with four people in a one-bedroom apartment in California. She said she and her daughter were “working constantly to pay the bills.”

“So I started talking about moving to Texas again, because I had a dream of affordable homes and apartments. I thought maybe life would be a little easier for all of us there,” she told Business Insider.

Monam agreed because he was homeless at the time and he saw the ‘opportunity to live somewhere cheap, save money and permanently solve my housing problems in the long run.’

“But that’s not what we got,” he explained. “We thought everything would be cheaper here in Texas than it has been.”

Unlike in California, they were responsible for paying “all of our utilities” and quickly fell behind on bills. Price is on the verge of losing her car, despite working two jobs.

She is currently unemployed, while her husband works as a receptionist in a hotel.

Price moved to Texas for the first time in 2021, after feeling the effects of rising costs in 2019.

Money became her “biggest stressor” and it prevented her from “really enjoying her life.”

Although she and Monam both worked—he was working two jobs at the time—they were both struggling to make ends meet. So Price picked up her daughters and left. Monam and their son couldn’t follow.

Price’s mother lived in Henderson, where she discovered that “houses there were very cheap and huge!”

“Everything was really cheap,” she said. “My goal was to be able to buy my own house someday.”

Although they were initially “overwhelmed by the beautiful scenery” Texas had to offer and both she and her daughter found full-time jobs, her oldest child “began to get depressed,” so they packed their bags and moved back to Riverside in the fall of 2021.

The family can’t wait to leave Texas (pictured) for all the comforts of California, even though they know it will hurt their wallets. ‘It’s home’

When they returned, they hoped that Monam had found an apartment for the family to live in, but he had become homeless.

“So we stayed with his mother on and off for a few months,” she said. “But that was hard too, and my youngest daughter and I ended up in a shelter.”

In the spring of 2022, Price was able to get her old job and apartment back in Riverside, and they lived there for two years, until recently moving to Texas.

Now they’re willing to trade Texas for all the comforts of California, even though they know it will cost their wallets.

“We’re excited to get back, but we’re also concerned. We want to make sure we have enough money to start over,” Price said. “But we’d rather deal with the high cost of living and have the convenience.

“It’s home.”