Why I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah from California.
Why in the world would you want to move to Utah? Well, today I’m going to talk to you firsthand about my experience moving from California to Utah and why I made the change.
Hi, this is Melissa Ballman and I am a real estate agent here in the greater Salt Lake City area. So what that means, if you’re looking at making a real estate move, I’d love to connect with you. Shoot me a text, send me an email, whatever you got to do, just get in touch, and I’d love to connect with you about your goals with real estate.
But first, today, I’m going to jump into why I moved from San Diego, California, to Salt Lake City, Utah. And I get asked this so often, how in the world, or why in the world would you leave San Diego to move to Salt Lake City? Okay. So first, let me tell you, I was raised in San Diego from the age of one year old, so San Diego was all I knew. And I moved to Salt Lake City in June of 2002.
Now I will tell you, I did live for about a year in Denver, Colorado area. And honestly, I could not wait to get out of that place. Denver was not for me, even back then. When I left Denver in 1999, the traffic was horrendous. It just, it was not anything that I enjoyed there. So I’m coming from experience, not just from California, moving to Utah, but kind of some differences I know about Denver all those years ago as well.
When I decided to make the permanent move to Salt Lake City, Utah from San Diego, like I said, it was June of 2002. And at the time, my son was about eight months old. And I had temporarily lived in Salt Lake City back in 1999, right after Denver, and I fell in love with it here. I was single. I worked all the time, but I just loved it. And I told myself if I ever had kids, I would be moving back to Salt Lake City. It was very family-friendly here, very family-focused here, and I wanted that. So lo and behold, I had my first son, and after that, I moved here because in San Diego all those years ago, my husband and I, at the time, we were working, oh, I don’t know, 50, 60 hours a week each. We had very little time to be with our son. And I just thought to myself, “There’s got to be more to life than this. I don’t want to have a daycare raising my son.” And so we made the move.
Now, granted, when I moved here in 2002, things were a lot less expensive, not just in Utah, but across the nation because, well, it was almost 20 years ago. So take that with a grain of salt, but things were definitely less expensive. One of the things it took me a while to get used to, but I love, is that it forced me to slow down coming to Salt Lake City. It wasn’t as quick of a pace as you find in San Diego and still to this day, even car dealerships are closed on Sundays, and it’s kind of nice. I can still go out to a restaurant. There’s not a huge impact of things being closed on Sundays, but it’s just enough to notice and force you to slow down a bit.
I hope you’re enjoying my video so far. If you haven’t yet, click the bell and subscribe to my YouTube channel. That way you’re alerted each week when I drop a new video. And if you’re on Facebook, jump on over to our group called Salt Lake Life, and it’s all things living in the Salt Lake City and greater areas. And one of the things that I always point out to people is I honestly do more outdoor activities here in Salt Lake City area than I ever did in San Diego.
Now, besides the obvious thing, which is there’s no ocean in Utah like there is in San Diego, everything else is closer to me, more accessible and much easier to get to. And I’m not a skier, because I grew up in San Diego, but my kids are. I made sure both my kids learned how to ski at very young ages. So my kids can take off and be at a ski resort in 20, 30, 40 minutes, depending on where they go. If I stayed in California, it was a couple of hours, if I was lucky with traffic. Dirt bike riding, we do that. We hike all the time. We’re outside walking. We visit the national parks, not just in Utah, but we’ve taken a one-day drive all the way up to Glacier National Park, Yellowstone. We’re always out exploring and doing things, and in California, I just don’t think we would have had those options and availability.
Okay. So a couple of reasons and things I did not realize until my son was older. I did not move here for the schooling. And what I mean by that is the public school system was not for my son. He goes to private school. We did try temporarily to put him in kindergarten for half the year, and we pulled him out just before Christmas break in kindergarten. So if school districts are very important to you, you definitely want to do your research on the school systems here in Utah. If you want information on private schools, after all these years, I’m very familiar with them. The nice thing though is Utah does have a lot of colleges and universities, so higher education, it’s probably more attended here in Utah than you find in most other states.
If you like friendly people, you see that more so in Utah. I think people in Utah are much friendlier and easier to get along with, and aren’t so focused and closed in. Of course, we have that, but I don’t think it’s nearly as much as you find in some other states, especially when I compare it to what it was like growing up in California.
Anyways, if you have questions about moving to Utah or real estate, even if you’re already here, I’d love to connect with you. Like I said, shoot me a text, send me an email, whatever you have to do, get in touch with me. I’d love to answer any questions that you may have. As always, make it a great day.