Ryan and Jami Wilson with their two daughters.
Courtesy of Ryan and Jami Wilson
Ryan and Jami Wilson moved from Florida to South Carolina with their two children in 2021.They were tired of the crowds, rising cost of living, and traffic.They are happy they made the move, and love their new home, but it’s been hard to make new friends.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ryan Wilson, 40, and Jami Wilson 37, who moved from Fort Myers, Florida, to Greenville, South Carolina, in 2021. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jami: We left Fort Myers in 2021 because we wanted to live in a more family-oriented place.
Ryan: When we decided to make the move, I was in the process of retiring from the Army, and I was doing my homework on schools for our kids. We weren’t really impressed with the ones in our area.
We’re Michigan kids originally. I went to Florida after joining the Army, and we didn’t want to go back to freezing cold Michigan, so we decided to go somewhere in the middle.
My sister lived in Asheville, which is about an hour away from Greenville. So we looked for homes there at first. The prices were just astronomical, so we said let’s spread our search out. Then we visited Greenville. We flew back and forth a few times to check it out and just fell in love with the downtown. There’s a river going literally through the middle.
So, we decided to sell our house in Fort Myers and move here.
We sold our house in Fort Myers for about $425,000, nearly double what we paid for it in 2016. It was a three-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot home, on a quarter acre. It was bought by an all-cash buyer for over asking price. He even paid us an extra $10,000 for the furniture.
We bought a four-bedroom, 2,400-square-foot home here for about the same price. My mortgage only went up by $200 per month. It’s on an acre of land, so much more than we had in Florida.
Jami: We don’t have a pool, though, and I do miss the pool. This was the peak of the homebuying frenzy in Florida. Every house that was in our neighborhood was a cash offer.
Florida got too hot, too expensive, and too crowded for us
Ryan: Southwest Florida was too hot, there were too many people and the roads were congested.
Jami: We stopped going to the beach because you couldn’t get there anymore because the traffic would be miles long. And you could never find a place to park
Ryan: …or they’re charging $30 to $40 to park for the day.
The Wilsons lived in Fort Myers, Florida, before moving to South Carolina.
Shutterstock/Jillian Cain
Jami: When we first moved there in 2009 the traffic wasn’t bad. The last four years we were there it got bad. People that would normally come down in the wintertime, they stopped leaving in the summer. They just stayed.
Ryan: When me and my wife would try to go out for dinner we would literally go out and around 8 p.m., and we’d tell the babysitter to show up at 7 p.m.
The cost of everything was going up.
Then there were the hurricanes. We got hit by Irma. My fence blew off on one side.
We love the South Carolina hospitality, but it’s been hard to make friends
Ryan: What we were most surprised by when we moved here was the hospitality of everyone in Greenville. People are just genuinely nice. That’s way different than in Florida, because they got a lot of New Yorkers.
Downtown Greenville, South Carolina.
DenisTangneyJr/Getty Images
The hardest part is we have had trouble making friends. We’re transplants so we’re kind of like the new kids on the block. l’d say about 60% to 70% of people are born and raised and stay here. So they have friends and they’re not looking for new friends, so that’s been hard.
Also, we have small children, so we have to find people with children that are compatible.
Ultimately, we’re very happy we made the move
Ryan: We love Greenville.
Jami: This morning, we just went on a bike ride right downtown.
Ryan: Yep, we’ll go five, six miles, get lunch and then go pick our babies up.
Ultimately, we want land or a lake house, so this is definitely a stepping stone in the right direction.