Bob Giramma, 63, was done with San Diego and was looking for a quieter, cheaper place to live. After contemplating a few locations, he settled on a city with just over a tenth of San Diego's population: Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Murfreesboro, a city in the center of the state a one-hour drive from Nashville, may not have all the skyscrapers and tech headquarters of San Diego. But Giramma said his move, which he made three months ago, has surpassed his expectations.
He said he's found a vibrant business community in Tennessee with a slower pace of life and a lower cost of living that's allowed him to live easier with less stress.
"We weren't tied to any community, so we looked for a place that was more aligned with the forward path for us," Giramma told Insider. "California was not aligned with that. Tennessee is."
Many like Giramma moved away to escape crowds and high prices for everything from housing to gas— and have found greener pastures elsewhere.
The former California resident of 19 years owns several retail businesses and worked as a corporate engineer until leaving his job in 2018. With his kids grown up and moved out, he began planning to move away from San Diego because he can do his work from anywhere with WiFi.
San Diego, which Giramma called the "finest urban area of California," had become much more expensive and crowded because the city had not built much new affordable housing. He also said the city's politics also pushed him toward moving.
"We started thinking about moving a half dozen years ago, reading articles here and there and making a list of usual suspects," Giramma said. "People moving to Tennessee, Texas, Idaho, Nevada, North and South Carolina all came up quite a bit."
Giramma, who said he's semi-retired, operates a UPS Store in California and an independent convenience store in the Boston suburbs. He also works on projects with real-estate investors in the accessory-dwelling-unit space.
"To me, it's not even all those cultural, social issues that people like to fight about," Giramma said. "It's just the burdens of running a business and living became intolerable in California. It is helping that we're getting a lower cost of living, closer to family, and it's just a more pleasant place."