We don't have much in the way of traffic here. Matt's commute to work isn't bad at all.He actually enjoys it on his motorcycle.
It really depends what part of the state you're in. I have to drive like 45 minutes to hit actual freeway traffic and even then, I've never had anything too terrible outside of when I was driving around LA and San Fran. Living in the mountains/desert has its perks
All the property taxes we are looking at for different houses we might buy aren't bad either, but that's because we purposely live outside of LA county (not by too much, but just enough for a significant tax difference lol). If you're not living in a major metro area, it's not that bad really, and we both get paid more for our respective jobs than we did before so it's not a huge difference. I'd like to get paid a tiny bit more, but I also negotiated myself working remote 95% of the time and only have to slog out to the LA area every few weeks or so, which kinda evens out the salary difference.
We had some younger "go getter, " types and they kept pushing us to spend like 100k over what we wanted because "you can afford it," and that's just not how that works. Our little old ladies are super funny and like to write directions down on post it notes. I love them. They've both been doing this for like 40 years, so nothing shocks them anymore and they are hysterically shrewd when it comes to dealing with owners/other realtors.
Last grizzly bear in California was killed in 1922, in the Sierra Foothills east of Fresno.