Day: October 26, 2025

• My husband and I live in a four-bedroom house with our three kids and two of their partners.
• Our household is busy and bustling; there isn’t a lot of extra space, but there’s always extra help.
• To stay grounded, I have incorporated self-care rituals into my routine.

My husband and I live in a four-bedroom, two-bath house with our three young adult children — ages 18 to 22 — and two of their significant others. This type of living arrangement has pros and cons.

The sink and trash cans are full every time you turn around, but there are also additional helping hands. Our driveway looks like a used car lot, but there is no shortage of people who can grab a gallon of milk on their way home. In many ways, it’s like living in a hostel where people come and go at all hours of the day and night. You share the same roof, but everyone lives very separate lives.

To be clear, this was never part of the grand life plan. But with the cost of living being what it is, my husband and I faced a choice: let our oldest son move out and live in his car with his girlfriend (which was their plan), or let them move in with us while they save for their own place. Then our future son-in-law joined the party so he could save dorm costs, finish college, and afford to tie the knot and move out by the end of the year.

In situations like this, where alone time exists only as a theoretical concept, self-care is no longer a luxury — it’s a matter of survival. I’ve integrated three self-care rituals into my lifestyle that, I believe, have kept me sane.

I get regular sunshine and movement

For me, sunshine and movement are essential. Daily walks are nonnegotiable as they reconnect me with nature and remind me that the world is bigger than my overflowing house. I find sanctuary in outdoor chores or carrying my laptop to the porch.

I have my smartwatch remind me if I haven’t stepped away from my computer in the last hour. When I get that buzz, I don’t just cycle the laundry — I step outside to water the plants, check the mail, or go for a walk.

Anything I can do to catch some extra sunshine is a good thing.

Off-duty nights and device-free breaks help me decompress

My second self-care ritual is setting intentional boundaries to safeguard my marriage. This includes weekly date nights that don’t bust the budget. We may share a homemade meal or lock ourselves away to watch a show together, and during these times, we consider ourselves “off-duty.” It’s just about disconnecting from the demands of the people living in our house and reconnecting with each other.

And, yes, sometimes life happens and we get interrupted by perceived emergencies, but we are more able to roll with the punches when we know another break is within reach.

As a special treat this year, we threw in a road trip. For six blissful days, we left our laptops at home, only checked our phones once each morning, and were otherwise completely off duty.

These breaks are not about ignoring family; they’re about protecting the partnership that will outlast our current living situation.

I find a safe place to vent

My third self-care ritual is releasing my own personal pressure valve by venting to someone. Without it, I get a little twitch in my right eyelid, and I get snappy. Eventually, something small, like a half-drank water bottle that was abandoned in the living room (again!), sets me off.

So I’ve learned to vent before that happens. This is often a conversation with my husband or a close friend around a campfire. Each session starts with a mutually agreed-upon question: Do you need advice, or are you just venting?

That simple question changes everything.

Having someone to listen releases the steam that is building inside me and allows me to breathe without the person listening feeling like they need to “fix” something.

I’ve built rest into family life

What all of these rituals have in common is that I intentionally integrate them into everyday life. I don’t hide that these things are requirements for my sanity. I say, “I can’t do that until after my walk,” or “I would love to do that with you, but tonight is my off-duty night. Does tomorrow work?”

The more I normalize these pauses, the more the household respects them. As a bonus, the consistent modeling of self-care encourages others to self-reflect on their own self-care needs.

In a busy home, carving out space for yourself is more of a mental game than a physical one. When I take these small but consistent steps, I notice that I’m calmer and kinder. I respond rather than react.

That’s not just better for me. It’s better for everyone.

• Annie Liao raised $1.75 million and moved from Australia to San Francisco to build her startup.
• She was attracted to the tech culture filled with ambitious and talented people.
• While she loves San Francisco, she said she has to leave every two months to ground herself.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Annie Liao, a 24-year-old startup founder based in San Francisco. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

After raising $1.75 million in the pre-seed round for my startup last year, I quit my job and moved from Australia to San Francisco to go all in as a solo founder.

The reality of being a solo founder has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. It can get lonely and difficult at times, but living with a built-in support system of other founders helps. We all uprooted our lives, left behind our loved ones, and moved here to build startups, so we think of each other like family.

Now I’m living in a hacker house, where our dining table is covered in laptops and monitors instead of flowers — and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

My biggest reason for moving to San Francisco is the people

After raising the pre-seed funding for Build Club, an AI learning hub aimed at democratizing access to AI education, I now have a team of five who work around the world, but I live in San Francisco.

I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco. It’s the beating pulse of AI, and there are so many insanely ambitious and talented people to be surrounded by.

You can literally walk into a coffee shop and end up in a two-hour deep dive conversation about AI agents or someone’s YC application. Everyone’s dreaming big, and you can feel that optimism in the air. It’s a nice place to build a startup.

There are pros and cons to living in San Francisco

What surprised me most about San Francisco was how generous people are with their time. It’s a real “pay it forward” culture, and people actually want to see each other win.

Of course, there are downsides. Some streets don’t feel safe, and the contrast between incredible wealth and deep struggle is hard to ignore. Plus, I think Australia has better healthcare and is just more chill.

Living in a hacker house has been really important

During a visit to San Francisco before I moved, I met the person who ran Mission Control, one of San Francisco’s oldest hacker houses, and she told me they had empty rooms available. I later moved there for my first few months in San Francisco.

I met three other founders there, and we decided to move into a more intimate place. We named our hacker house “The Stables” because it’s our place of stability in San Francisco and because it’s a breeding ground for unicorns. As a solo founder, I don’t have a cofounder to tell everything to, so living with other founders has been really important.

I’ve probably leaned on my housemates too many times, whether for emotional support or even to share an employee. We’ve had some really great moments together. The day before one of our launches, we stayed up late, and one of my roommates bought us food to celebrate.

What it’s like to live with other founders

We also cook for each other when possible or go out to dinner together. We’re all very time-poor and come home exhausted, so it’s convenient to be able to knock on someone’s door to ask if they want to grab dinner. Every Sunday, we even go on a hike together to step away from work and touch some grass, which is always a highlight of my week.

Our shared spaces definitely get messy, especially during busy periods, but we like to clean together. There’s also less privacy and quiet than if I lived alone, but it’s just nice to have people around.

Living with other founders has shown me that they have low moments like me

When I look at founders on social media, they often only show the highlights, but living with other founders has been very humanizing and comforting. For example, you might see online that a founder raised a successful pre-seed round, but in reality, they’re crying on the couch of the hacker house because an employee they really wanted said no.

I remember there was one time when all of us were having really rough weeks — one of us was fundraising their round, and everyone else was working until 1 a.m. every day. We were all locked in, and our laptops and monitors were everywhere.

I spend the day at a small office space or coffee shop

I usually wake up at 6:30 a.m. and spend my mornings doing deep work. My team is split across time zones, so my afternoons consist of calls with people in other regions. When I return home in the evening, I usually have more calls with team members who come online even later.

Then, my roommates and I might cook together or go for a walk around the park to de-stress. Most nights, we end by lighting candles in the living room, playing deep house music, and coworking until 12 or 1 a.m.

San Francisco pushes me to dream bigger, while Australia keeps me grounded

Most people in San Francisco are very tech-obsessed, so I don’t like to spend more than two months here at a time. I usually go back to Australia to spend time with my family and ground myself, or I go to a place like Bali, where there’s a focus on well-being.

The hardest part about being away from Australia is definitely the distance, both personally and professionally. Many of our early supporters and part of our team are still in Australia, and our customer base is split between there and the US.

My whole family’s back home. When my niece was born, I wish I could’ve just teleported back. However, the balance has helped me stay a bit more sane and appreciate both places more.

Do you have a tech relocation story to share? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

Althea McBride’s Georgia home is an “Afro boho” oasis.

Her living room and hallway walls are painted black, acting as a dramatic background to her many African sculptures and art. The dining room’s burnt orange walls are decorated with vinyl records like Aretha Franklin’s “Knew You Were Waiting: The Best Of Aretha Franklin 1980-1998” to Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX.”

It’s been a year since McBride bought her home, and outside a few hiccups, like a wasp infestation and disputes over property lines, everything is looking exactly how she envisioned it — literally.

“I used Canva to help design some of it before I even moved into the house, just by looking online at the pictures that they had on Zillow,” McBride told Business Insider. “I was able to download those and remodel it how I wanted. So my living room is exactly how I pictured it.”

What she couldn’t picture years ago was being a homeowner. Growing up in Los Angeles, homeownership was not something that she thought would be possible at 34 years old — and if she stayed in Los Angeles, it still might not be.

A financial incentive to move from California to Georgia helped McBride, now 35, decide to leave Los Angeles — although it didn’t take that much convincing. She was tired of the big city’s fast-paced lifestyle and slow-moving traffic and was looking for an out.

McBride applied to a remote-worker incentive program offered by Columbus, Georgia, a city in the western part of the state that borders Alabama. She received $5,000 in cash, as well as a range of other perks like a one-year membership to the Columbus Aquatics Center and a coffee date with the mayor.

Getting a little extra cash to move to a smaller city with a lower cost of living enabled McBride to become a homeowner for the first time. She’s enjoying decorating and living in her own house, and has grown accustomed to Southern culture and the area’s slower pace of living.

After following the ups and downs of McBride’s move in a series of interviews over the course of her first year in Columbus, she told me that overall, she’s pleased with her decision.

“I don’t really miss California — not yet,” she said.

Finally a homeowner

McBride didn’t expect to become a homeowner in her 30s. “I had the typical millennial experience: Went to college, had high student loan debt, and then I went through back-to-back layoffs. I was like, ‘What am I going to do?'”

At the time, she was working as a senior paid search manager for a marketing agency and living in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles — a neighborhood one exit shy of where the Kardashians live — and paying $3,400 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

McBride didn’t need to know all the intricacies of buying a house to quickly realize that it would have been hard to make it work in Woodland Hills, where the median sale price was about $1.2 million in August 2024. Still, she tried saving money for a down payment to buy in California, but it wasn’t enough — and she didn’t qualify for much assistance because her salary was too high. So she started looking for places to live outside California, such as upstate New York and Virginia.

Though McBride graduated from Spelman College in nearby Atlanta and has family in Columbus, Georgia, the small city with a population of about 207,000, was never on her radar as a place to live.

“I was talking to my baby cousin, DJ, and he kept saying, ‘You should come to Columbus, cousin,'” McBride said. “I’m like, ‘What am I going to do in Columbus?'”

It wasn’t until she saw the incentive program go viral on social media that she considered it.

“I looked at it and I was like, ‘Well, this is perfect,'” McBride said. “If it’s meant to be, I’ll apply and hear back from them — and that’s exactly what I did.”

That was March 2024. That May, she learned she’d been accepted to the program. In August 2024, she closed on a three-bedroom home for $175,000. Now, McBride’s mortgage costs her about $1,500 a month — less than half of her rent in LA.

The benefits of living in Columbus aren’t just financial. Her home has more space for her to enjoy her hobbies, one of which is growing her own food. In California, McBride made it work by growing produce on her patio using storage bins with holes cut in the bottom for drainage. However, if she ever wanted to expand that operation, she would need more room — and a bigger budget.

“In California, you’ve got to have the money. The homes are $500,000-plus, but you don’t get the yardage. You don’t get the land like that. So it makes it kind of hard.”

McBride never dreamed of having a greenhouse, let alone a place to put it. But in Georgia, she has plans to build one on her property. She’s already growing lettuce, blueberries, bananas, red and white onions, peppers, and eggplants, and hopes to plant even more.

If she has to put in a little elbow grease to make the home and the yard her own, so be it.

“I went in with the intention that I might have to put work into a home,” McBride said. “I may have to get in there with a hammer. I may have to get in there with some paint and fix it up the way that I want to, but at least I have that.”

Settling in to small-city life

For the first few months after moving, McBride frequently traveled to Atlanta — a nearly two-hour drive from Columbus — and used it as a crutch for social activities and shopping. (Her nearest Trader Joe’s, she noted, is in Atlanta). Although she still travels to Atlanta occasionally, now that she’s established her community in Columbus, she’s found more to do closer to home. She joined the Urban League of the River Valley as well as the Columbus chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.

“I’ve been doing all the community service events. We’ve been going to different galas. We’ve been going to all types of stuff out here in Columbus,” she said. “Every time I meet somebody random, they either know my family, they either all go to the same churches, or they grew up with each other. Everyone knows each other or knows of somebody, which is very helpful when trying to get to know people out here.”

The way McBride sees it, that $5,000 cash incentive wasn’t what convinced her to move 2,000 miles across the country, though it was a nice sweetener that helped cover her closing costs and moving expenses. It was more so the program’s promise of activities and community-building opportunities that helped lighten the social burden of moving to a new city.

“For me, the cash incentive is reimbursement — that’s like icing on the cake,” McBride said. “With this, you’re not just moving. Now it’s like there are some activities I can look forward to, there are things where I’ll be able to go out there and just meet completely different people with different backgrounds and really get a head start on my personal Columbus community.”

She’s attended program-sponsored events such as dinners with other program members and coffee with the mayor, B.H. “Skip” Henderson III, who mapped out a vision for what Columbus could look like in the future.

Now, McBride said she sees herself in that vision.

“I’m happy with my decision,” she said. “My goal is to stay here for a couple of years at least.”

• American Airlines’ first-ever Airbus A321XLR touched down in Texas on Wednesday.
• The inaugural flight is scheduled for December 18, flying from New York to Los Angeles.
• The premium-heavy plane has lie-flat business class and will eventually fly to international cities.

There’s a new plane in town.

American Airlines’ first Airbus A321XLR touched down in Dallas—Fort Worth on Wednesday after an 11-hour delivery flight from Hamburg, Germany, making it the first of its kind in the US and ushering in a new era of long-haul narrowbody flying.

The A321XLR — short for “extra-long-range” — will debut on December 18, operating American’s 11 a.m. New York to Los Angeles service and eventually replacing the carrier’s transcon-specific A321T fleet.

More premium than American’s other domestic narrowbodies, the A321XLR (and the A321T) features seatback TVs in coach and full meals in business class.

As of Friday morning, one-way fares start at $379 for basic economy. Premium economy and lie-flat business class on the inaugural are already sold out; the next-day one-way fares run about $1,050 and $1,850, respectively.

While its first flights will be domestic, the A321XLR is designed for much longer missions. An extra fuel tank boosts its range to roughly 5,400 miles — about 800 miles more than its A321neoLR (long-range) predecessor.

This allows airlines to link lower-demand routes — especially to Europe — that can’t support larger widebodies or are out of reach of existing narrowbodies, like the A320neo or the Boeing 737 Max.

American says it will put the jet on international routes in the first half of 2026, though it hasn’t yet announced which ones.

United Airlines is also expected to receive the A321XLR starting in 2026. It plans to use the jet both to replace its aging Boeing 757s and to open new thin transatlantic routes — including potential services from the US to Northern Italy and West Africa.

Several global carriers have received Airbus’ latest jet. The range of cabin layouts — from lie-flat business seats on American to the all-economy setup on Hungarian budget carrier Wizz Air — shows the A321XLR’s adaptability to various airline strategies.

American’s decision to offer lie-flat seats reflects the airline’s push to tap into the rising demand for premium travel — particularly among higher-spending leisure flyers.

“Premium seating is expected to grow at twice the rate of non-premium offerings, with lie-flat international seating growing by 50% by the end of the decade,” American CEO Rob Isom said of the airline’s overall cabin plan during its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday.

American’s A321XLR plane is premium-heavy.

Twenty suites have been fitted on the A321XLR in a 1×1 setup, taking up about 13% of the plane’s total 155 seats.

If you factor in the 12 premium economy seats, the overall higher-dollar seating jumps to roughly 20%.

Premium revenue is driving airline profits — especially across the Atlantic — as people remain willing to pay more for a better flight experience.

The new business class elevates American’s premium product.

The Flagship Suite Business Class debuted on a newly delivered Boeing 787 in June, as American follows the global trend of launching door-equipped suites.

Its cocoon-like setup is similar to the enclosed Mint Suites on JetBlue Airways’ A321neoLR. American’s old business class, still flying on most of its widebody aircraft, does not feature doors.

Customers get more than a door.

The lie-flat cabin also offers features like a wireless charging pad, a television, ample storage, and a multicourse meal.

“Whether customers are traveling from coast to coast or across the ocean, American’s newest aircraft demonstrates our commitment to providing a premium travel experience,” Heather Garboden, American’s chief customer officer, said in a press release.

Suite passengers get special airport perks.

American said its highest-paying customers get priority check-in, security, boarding, and baggage handling.

They also gain access to airport lounges, like the Greenwich Lounge at New York-JFK and the Flagship Lounge in Los Angeles.

Premium economy has a legrest and privacy wings.

Premium economy features two seats per row, instead of the 1×1 configuration in business and the 3×3 configuration in economy, ensuring that every passenger is guaranteed a window or aisle seat.

Instead of a bed, the oversized lounger has a deep recline, a calf and footrest, and wide headrest wings for privacy.

Customers are also provided with enhanced hot meals, a blanket and pillow, and an amenity kit.

The premium-ish cabin is a popular middle-ground option.

The premium economy section is like the Goldilocks zone of airplane cabins.

It’s more comfortable than coach but doesn’t have a bed. It’s typically hundreds or thousands of dollars less expensive than business.

Economy will keep its special long-haul perks.

There are 123 economy seats in a 3×3 cabin at the back of the plane. These feature headrests, “multiple power options,” and seatback entertainment screens — the latter is already on the route’s A321Ts.

Adding television to the A321XLR makes sense for continuity, and because the jet is expected to operate international routes, too.

Seatback screens are not available on most of American’s other domestic flights.

Domestically, American’s seatback TVs are largely limited to its special transcontinental narrowbody flights.

Instead, passengers can use a built-in tablet holder to prop up their device and access American’s streaming content. Americans’ widebodies already come equipped with personal screens.

Unlike American, most of Delta Air Lines and United’s domestic aircraft offer seatback entertainment.