{"id":40500,"date":"2025-12-10T14:21:44","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/i-sold-my-house-and-moved-my-kid-across-the-us-to-live-with-my-parents-im-not-sure-the-benefits-are-worth-all-i-gave-up\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T14:21:44","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T14:21:44","slug":"i-sold-my-house-and-moved-my-kid-across-the-us-to-live-with-my-parents-im-not-sure-the-benefits-are-worth-all-i-gave-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/i-sold-my-house-and-moved-my-kid-across-the-us-to-live-with-my-parents-im-not-sure-the-benefits-are-worth-all-i-gave-up\/","title":{"rendered":"I sold my house and moved my kid across the US to live with my parents. I&#8217;m not sure the benefits are worth all I gave up."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/692f6af37ecd1d1da662cf63?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Woman smiling with coffee\"\/><figcaption>Though I grew up in Maryland, it doesn&#039;t feel like home anymore and I miss the life I built for myself  in Washington. <\/p>\n<p>Emma Woodward<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>We sold our Washington house and moved across the country to live with my parents in Maryland.<\/li>\n<li>I&#039;m glad my child gets to spend more time with her grandparents and we&#039;re saving money on housing.<\/li>\n<li>However, I miss my life in Washington and am struggling to build community here. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I always knew selling our house in Washington and moving across the country to live with my parents in Maryland was not my dream.<\/p>\n<p>However, the practical side of me thought it might at least be a good idea.<\/p>\n<p>For several years, my partner and I had been struggling with the high cost of living in Western Washington. And, like many millennials, I&#039;ve struggled to juggle parenting, work, and a social life.<\/p>\n<p>By moving, I hoped we&#039;d feel less stretched financially and mentally, and that our daughter (who was 2 years old at the time) would have more support from and involvement with her grandparents. <\/p>\n<p>As much as we loved Washington and the friends and family members we had there, we decided to take a risk and pursue a different life across the country. <\/p>\n<p>I spent months hawking our things on Facebook Marketplace and our local &quot;Buy Nothing&quot; group. We sold our house, said goodbye to our community, and crammed the rest of our belongings into a truck and a small U-Haul.<\/p>\n<p>One week and many hours of driving later, we pulled up to my childhood home and moved in.<\/p>\n<h2>Moving in with my parents was a smart financial decision \u2014  but I&#039;ve lost a lot <\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/692f2b067ecd1d1da662c71c?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Furniture lined up in yard\"\/><figcaption>I lost my community and sense of home when I left Washington. <\/p>\n<p>Emma Woodward<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Living with my parents in Maryland has come with a lot of clear benefits. <\/p>\n<p>My daughter gets to have rich involvement with a lot of our adult relatives, including daily interactions with her grandparents. I get support from nearby family members who can often provide care for her when I need it. <\/p>\n<p>My partner and I no longer have a mortgage to cover or any of the other expenses that come with owning a home. We have a community style of living that means shared responsibilities for things like making dinner and taking care of household costs.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the support and financial benefits, there are many things I miss since moving. I&#039;ve thought of Washington as its own &quot;person&quot; in my story to mourn losing.<\/p>\n<p>I fell in love with our slice of the state, a small walkable city right on the Puget Sound. I treasured the environment where we lived \u2014 full of rich outdoor adventures, moody weather moments, magical sunny days when they came, and the best coffee culture.<\/p>\n<p>We left behind a small but mighty community, and moving back home meant starting over.<\/p>\n<p>A year later, I&#039;m still working to make deep connections, and I have many days when I feel lonely.<\/p>\n<p>The last time I lived in Maryland was more than 10 years ago, so I didn&#039;t have a group of friends here waiting for me. I&#039;ve had to dive into building a community from scratch, which can take a lot of time. <\/p>\n<h2>I&#039;m still deciding if the trade-offs were worth it<\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/692f2b0604d0f0a114f14212?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Empty road\"\/><figcaption>We&#039;ve been living in Maryland for over a year, and I&#039;m still not sure the move has been worth it. <\/p>\n<p>Emma Woodward<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Though I grew up in Maryland, it still doesn&#039;t feel like home as much as Washington did. <\/p>\n<p>I know we&#039;re in the right place for us right now, but I can&#039;t help but wonder about the life I left behind. Were the higher costs of living worth it? Should I trade this newfound financial stability for a scrappier, penny-pinching life with a fuller heart? <\/p>\n<p>Perhaps finding community and falling in love with the place I live now just takes more time than I&#039;m willing to give at the moment. <\/p>\n<p>Either way, for now, I&#039;m embracing the financial stability and family support this move has given me, even as I continue to miss our life in Washington. <\/p>\n<p>Maybe the real lesson is that financial decisions can&#039;t be measured in dollars alone \u2014 and sometimes the biggest cost is what you give up.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Though I grew up in Maryland, it doesn&#039;t feel like home anymore and I miss the life I built for myself in Washington. Emma Woodward We sold our Washington house and moved across the country to live with my parents in Maryland. I&#039;m glad my child gets to spend more time with her grandparents and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40500","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}