I got paid $5,000 to move to a place I'd never heard of

When Brianna Beyrouti looks back on her former life in the city of Portland, Oregon, she says she had been financially "drowning".

"I was absolutely living paycheque to paycheque. Every time the smallest thing came up, it was like 'Oh, gosh, the kids need shoes, how am I going to afford that?' As a single parent, everything falls on my shoulders."

Last year, Brianna left Portland and its metropolitan population of 2.5 million people.

She and her two children moved 2,000 miles east to Muncie, Indiana, a small city with 65,000 people, a university and lots of open space, taking advantage of a scheme that contributed $5,000 towards the cost of the move to boost population growth.

The relocation has been a revelation for her finances. She continues to work remotely for the same bank, so her annual salary of $107,000 (£79,000) is unchanged, but she has been able to buy a home for the first time. And her mortgage is less than she used to have to pay in rent.

In Portland she was paying rent of $1,290 a month for an apartment, while the combined cost of her mortgage, home insurance and property tax for her detached home in Muncie is $1,100.

Add the fact that state income tax is lower in Indiana, and that her car insurance and energy bills have also fallen, and Brianna says she is $600 a month better off.

"I'm able to live my life more than I was before," she says. "When my kids want something, I'm much more inclined to say yes. My quality of life has increased dramatically."

Brianna is not alone in swapping a big city for a smaller one.

As the high cost of living continues to bite in the US, many of the biggest cities are seeing their populations fall, as people leave in search of cheaper property.

A 2025 report from the National Association of Realtors found that for people moving to a different state, affordability was their primary reason., external

As a result, big cities from the likes of New York and Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon have seen a dip in their populations, external in recent years, further fuelled by the greatly increased acceptance of remote working since the Covid-19 pandemic.

By contrast, some small towns and cities across the US, such as Muncie, are seeing their populations rise after decades of decline. The number of people who live in Muncie hit 65,466 last year, official figures showed., external This is up from 65,194 in 2020, but still way down on its population of 71,828 in 1990.

Free cinema tickets and wine

To help it stand out from the crowd, and encourage remote workers to move there from outside Indiana, Muncie's local council offers them $5,000 in cash to cover their relocation costs.

It does this via a website called MakeMyMove, which lists several such relocation support schemes offered by similar small cities and towns across the US. These pay MakeMyMove a subscription fee.

Other incentives locations offer potential new residents are complementary cinema tickets, restaurant vouchers, and even free bottles of wine.

Brianna and her children are one of around 100 families to have moved to Muncie through the MakeMyMove programme. She says she hadn't heard of the city before.

Across the US, MakeMyMove says it helped 1,000 people in total relocate last year, and is on target to increase that to 1,500 in 2026.

Scientist Elena Chrysostomou also used a relocation support scheme to swap a big city for smalltown US. In 2024 she relocated from San Diego, California, to Jacksonville, a town of 17,700 people in rural Illinois.

The move was backed by the Jacksonville Regional Economic Development Corporation (JREDC), which gave her $5,000 in cash, plus a "quality of life package" worth $4,000 that includes free gym memberships and golf passes.

The JREDC says that while the region is "already a great place to live", the support scheme helps to "sweeten the deal".

Elena was spending $3,000 renting a one-bedroom apartment in San Diego, but she now owns a three-bedroom home, with a mortgage of $1,868. At the same time, her salary has gone up 22% after she changed jobs, and her commute has gone down from a 15-minute drive to one of just one minute.

"I never thought that I'd be able to afford a house on my own, I always thought I'd need a partner, and even then, in San Diego, it would be so tough," she says.

"It's just more freeing. There's more security and independence."

While both she and Brianna have no regrets, they do admit to some drawbacks to their new lives. These include the narrower range of activities and restaurant choices, leaving behind friends and family, and for Brianna the difficulty of settling her children into new schools.