The writer makes a pretty big mistake assuming that upon moving from NY to FL, a person can keep earning the same income as he did in NY. This is the exception,

The writer makes a pretty big mistake assuming that upon moving from NY to FL, a person can keep earning the same income as he did in NY. This is the exception, not the norm. The norm is for people to get a paycut because of the (weaker) market in FL, and pretty significant ones at that, easily amounting to 15+ percentage points. This is true for software, but I do not know if it's the same for other occupations. I do have a healthy suspicion that it's true and perhaps more drastically so for other occupations, in which case the author's mistake is magnified in the general case. If you combine that fact with the fact that some expenses such as schooling and online shopping are actually quite uniform across the nation (private schools seem to cost around the same whether you are in the Bay Area or elsewhere, and public schools are free across the nation; ditto for Amazon/other online shopping which I assume comprises a healthy chunk of people's spending nowadays), the only savings come from housing (able to own a house vs not at all in CA and NY) and grocery (is gas much cheaper in the NY vs FL case? It certainly is in the CA vs FL case). Most people's retirement portfolios comprise ETFs and such that pay out the same whether you are in CA or FL, so I suppose people get more bang for their retirement buck by moving out of CA/NY, but that has been true even before the pandemic. So the picture is more complicated, and I do not believe people can expect to get 2 months earnings back in their pockets by moving cross-country. Any counterarguments to this line of reasoning?