I moved my family to a tiny Wyoming town for 2 years to save money. Despite the drawbacks, our brief sacrifice paid off.
NEWS | 03 December 2025
Short-term living in a tiny town in Wyoming helped us save enough money to buy property in a different part of the US. Short-term living in a tiny town in Wyoming helped us save enough money to buy property in a different part of the US. Christian Allred Short-term living in a tiny town in Wyoming helped us save enough money to buy property in a different part of the US. Christian Allred This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. The moment my wife and I finished earning our college degrees, we were ready to leave Utah. We'd been living in Orem, a city with about 95,000 residents, while attending school nearby. Now that we weren't tied down to the area, we wanted to move elsewhere — ideally, someplace cheaper. I'd started working as a remote freelance writer, so we were flexible on location and interested in seeing where my modest income would stretch furthest. Most of all, we wanted to live somewhere that would help us save for a down payment on our first home. Eventually, these goals led us to a tiny town in Wyoming. Wyoming's Bridger Valley offered lower rent, taxes, and gas prices Moving to a smaller, more rural town was a great move financially, but it came with trade-offs. Christian Allred After learning about our moving plans, my wife's aunt suggested looking in Bridger Valley, where she and her husband lived. We're glad we did. Located on the southwestern tip of Wyoming by the Utah border, the area had a lot of relatively affordable rentals, and we settled on an apartment in its small town of Mountain Valley. Our rent was $650 a month — nearly half of what our existing lease would've renewed at for about the same living space. Both apartments were two-bedroom, one-bathroom units in a fourplex. Over the next two years, we discovered other financial benefits of living in Wyoming, such as not having to pay a state income tax or sales tax on most groceries. Even gas was significantly cheaper here than it was in Orem. As a result, we were able to save more of our income each month. But living in a small Wyoming town also had its drawbacks Mountain View has a population of just over 1,000, and many residents work at one of the nearby trona mines, making them a hardy group. I felt like an outlier as a remote worker, and I only met one other person who worked from home while we lived here. Meanwhile, though we were only a two-hour drive from my wife's family in Utah, it was far enough that we saw them much less — maybe five or six times a year. Compared to Orem, there were also fewer amenities: We had a gas station, a grocery store, a bowling alley, a tiny library, a handful of restaurants, and little else. However, we didn't mind much, especially since we made good friends at church and in the community. The hardest part was the cold. Winter weather in the area basically lasts half the year, from about November to April, and temperatures regularly drop below freezing. On occasion, the freeway connecting Mountain View to Utah was even closed due to dangerously icy road conditions. We stayed indoors a lot and missed Utah's milder winters. After 2 years, we'd saved enough to buy land in Washington, where we plan to build our first home There's a lot to like about small-town living, including how much we were able to save. Christian Allred Our move ultimately paid off. During our time in Wyoming, we saved $20,000 to put toward just over an acre of land near my family in rural Washington. Today, we own the land outright as we prepare to have our first home built on it. In the meantime, we're living in my parents' newly renovated ADU nearby. Looking back, those cold Wyoming winters and quiet weekends were worth it. We traded convenience and proximity to family for financial breathing room — and in two years, that breathing room helped us buy real estate. Plus, we came to love so much about remote small-town living, like its slower pace of life and the friends we made. For us, it was exactly the sacrifice we needed to make homeownership possible.
Author: Christian Allred.
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