The Real Story
We're not selling you a fantasy. We lived it.
We weren't looking for a "change of scenery." We were genuinely unhappy in Texas, Niles felt stuck teaching in a small town with nowhere to grow, and Kim didn't see a real future in her sales job either. Every time we came back from a Florida vacation, we felt it immediately: this was the version of our life we actually wanted, and we were only getting a few days of it a year.
So we loaded a U-Haul, towed our car behind it, and drove through Louisiana overnight, twenty hours straight, dogs and all.
We won't pretend it was easy after that. It wasn't. We landed with new careers to figure out from scratch, the pandemic hit about a year later, and Niles learned teaching doesn't pay in Florida what we'd hoped. It took us three to four years to feel like we had real friends and real community, mostly because we were heads-down building rather than going out.
We even left once. Niles chased a PhD out to Arizona and we explored the Southwest for a while. We liked it, but we missed the green, the beaches, Disney, and the people we'd already built a life with here. Coming back to Florida for good is the closest thing we have to a "this is it" moment.
That's the honest version, not the highlight reel. And it's why, when we tell a client something's worth it, or worth being careful about, we're speaking from actually having done it, not from a script.
If you're not happy with the life you have where you are, take the leap. That's it. That's the whole advice. We're not going to push it on you.
