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I was scared to leave NYC — but I moved to Nashville, fell in love, and have been happily living here for a decade

10 July 2025 at 14:39
Woman with baby in carrier on her chest waiting for subway
It wasn't easy to leave New York City, but moving to Nashville has been a huge, great step in my life.

Amelia Edelman

  • I thought I'd live in New York City forever, but I hit my breaking point and moved to Nashville.
  • I could enjoy many things I love about city life and get more space for less. I even fell in love.
  • It's been about a decade since my move, and I'm happily living here with my husband and two kids.

New York or nowhere. It's a T-shirt and an Instagram, but it was also my personal motto for most of my young life.

I was born in the Bronx, got my first post-college apartment in Queens, spent nearly a decade in a fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan, and brought my first baby home to Brooklyn.

In high school and college, I spent time living in Connecticut, Poughkeepsie, and Scotland, but always felt the draw back to NYC.

By age 30, I'd spent most of my life in the city, and was living my own NYC dream working at a buzzy women's media company.

I had never imagined living anywhere else. Then, I hit my breaking point.

After a reality check, I gave myself permission to leave New York

Woman sleeping on bus with baby on her lap
Being a single mom in New York City came with challenges.

Amelia Edelman

New York wasn't just my city; it was a huge part of my identity.

However, I was burned out at my job, underpaid, and commuting hours on the subway between Manhattan and my shoebox of an apartment in Crown Heights.

I was paying a nanny most of my salary just so I could have the privilege of … not seeing my newborn.

After each day speed-editing dozens of articles and pumping breastmilk in a closet at the office, I would sprint to the subway at 7 p.m. in hopes of seeing my son while he was still awake.

I would never make it back in time. I'd kiss his sleeping face, pay the nanny, and cry.

By the time my son outgrew his bassinet and needed to transition to a crib, it became clear my tiny apartment was too small for us.

A crib and an adult bed didn't fit in the space, so I gave the latter away and spent the last six months of my New York life sleeping on a bedroll on the floor.

And I finally gave myself permission to consider the impossible: leaving. I just wasn't sure where to go next.

Nashville wasn't the plan, but it was the answer

Downtown Nashville skyline along water
Nashville seemed like a city I could really enjoy living in.

RudyBalasko/Getty Images

I knew I wanted to live in a city, but I needed somewhere cheaper (and way more chill) than New York.

I didn't want to relive my teen years in the Connecticut suburbs, or even that blissful but too-quiet year in college when I lived on the coast of northern Scotland.

I wanted my son to grow up in a real community: walking to public school and the playground and pizza parlor like I did as a little kid in the Bronx. I wanted to take him to museums and music venues.

Soon, Nashville was on my radar β€” once I factored in my other wants, it seemed like the biggest, most diverse, most affordable city I could afford.

I told my employer I was moving, and that I could quit or they could let me go remote. They let me keep my job. I bought a four-bedroom house in East Nashville with a monthly mortgage that was close to half my rent in Brooklyn.

My new block had coffee shops, bars, a pharmacy, a pizza parlor, a bodega, and a vintage store that was also an art gallery that was also a music venue. So Brooklyn! I felt right at home.

Kid walking down empty street in Nashville during sunset
My life moves at a slower pace in Nashville than it did in New York City, but I've gotten used to it.

Amelia Edelman

Sure, at first everything felt … slow. I didn't live near downtown, so the bustle dial was turned way down.

Initially, it was hard to sleep without sirens and shouting outside my window. But as the weeks turned into months, I started to notice I was breathing easier.

Nashville gave me more space β€” not just physical space (for a crib and a bed, imagine!) but space in my day that was no longer spent commuting, hauling a stroller up and down stairs, and rushing to the laundromat.

It gave me more accessible green spaces than New York had; my son and I could be out on a hike within 20 minutes, no Metro-North train ride necessary.

Without a long commute, I had time to make real dinners, to lounge on porches, and to get to know my neighbors. I made friends, joined a nonprofit, and started teaching yoga at the local studio.

I had the emotional space to date around casually and have fun.

When my son was 2 Β½, I met one particular musician. He was calm but passionate, goofy but grounded, Southern polite but also punk rock. He loved my son.

By year five in Nashville, we were married. Year six, he adopted my son. That same year, our second son was born.

Moving was the best decision I was scared to make

House with snow on its roof, lawn, and a kid out front
I've enjoyed raising my kids in Nashville.

Amelia Edelman

There's a common fear among people who leave big cities that we're somehow giving up. I definitely felt it.

I worried that moving to a smaller city would mean trading ambition for comfort. My work changed, yes.

I later shifted away from a traditional media job into freelance and consulting work, but I'm making more money now since I'm paid per project rather than being expected to work endless hours for an unchanging salary.

Now, I work smarter, not harder. I live smarter. I've stopped defining myself solely by my ever-climbing corporate media job title, or my precious 917 area code.

Nashville gave me the space to grow in unexpected directions. I have a garden, I volunteer, and I made friends who didn't care about who I worked for. I built a community that is unparalleled in its supportive and radically inclusive nature.

This city isn't perfect, but it's become home. At the time, leaving New York felt like the biggest risk of my life. Today, I think of how scared I was of the best decision I ever made, and laugh.

It's been nearly a decade since I left New York, and although I still visit my "hometown" often and miss it dearly sometimes, I don't regret the move for a second.

Well, maybe I just regret not leaving 10 years earlier.

Read the original article on Business Insider

2 Stocks Down 58% and 30% to Buy Right Now

Key Points

  • Reddit stock has slumped despite rapid growth and opportunities for better monetization.

  • Paycom stock is still reeling from its revenue slowdown.

  • Both stocks look appealing for long-term investors.

The stock market is carving out new all-time highs, but some individual stocks have yet to fully recover. Reddit (NYSE: RDDT) and Paycom (NYSE: PAYC) are still well off their respective peaks, presenting an opportunity for long-term investors. Both companies face risks, but solid growth stories make Reddit and Paycom attractive stocks.

Down and up arrows.

Image source: Getty Images.

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Reddit: Down 30% from its high

Social media company Reddit has become a key source of reliable information for internet users. Standard search engines, riddled with ads and content designed to rank rather than provide solutions, are far less useful today than they were in the earlier days of the web.

Reddit is now working to better monetize its more than 400 million weekly active unique users. Average quarterly revenue per unique user stood at just $3.63 in the first quarter, compared to more than $12 for Meta Platforms. That metric was up 23% year over year for Reddit in the first quarter, while overall revenue soared by 61%. Reddit has been launching new features for advertisers, including dynamic product ads in May and personalized guidance and insights in June.

Reddit does face some risk from artificial intelligence (AI) as people turn to chatbots and other AI tools for answers. However, Reddit's reputation for providing reliable information may be enough to overcome the AI threat. AI isn't particularly reliable or trustworthy, so many users may still opt for Reddit when looking for product recommendations and other information that leads to purchases.

Reddit stock has been recovering in recent weeks, but it remains down around 30% from its all-time high. The stock is pricey, trading for nearly 16 times the average analyst estimate for 2025 sales. That valuation may be tough to swallow, but Reddit has the potential to grow revenue at a strong double-digit pace for many years to come. For long-term investors, Reddit is the social media stock to own.

Paycom: Down 58% from its high

Shares of payroll and HR software provider Paycom began a steep descent in late 2022, and it picked up steam in 2023 as the company's automated Beti product started cannibalizing other sources of revenue. Beti is a breakthrough product that allows employees to manage their own payroll, and it can greatly reduce administrative overhead. However, in the short term, the product's rollout led to a sharp slowdown in revenue growth.

Paycom's revenue growth rate hovered around 30% in the years leading up to the pandemic, and while it took a hit in early 2020, it bounced back to those 30% levels soon after. The situation changed drastically with Beti. Revenue grew by just 11% in 2024, and it was up 6% year over year in the first quarter of 2025.

While the revenue slowdown is a concern, Paycom's willingness to disrupt itself to deliver superior returns on investment to its customers should pay off in the long run. Beti is an attractive product for companies looking to reduce costs, and customers who adopt Beti will likely churn at a lower rate. Once the dust settles, growth should accelerate once again.

One major risk facing Paycom is the state of the economy. Paycom is sensitive to the labor market, and there are some signs that it's starting to crack in the face of U.S. tariffs and economic uncertainty. An economic slowdown could delay Paycom's comeback, but the company is well positioned for the future with Beti. Trading at around 26 times forward earnings, with the potential for robust earnings growth in the years ahead, Paycom stock looks like a good deal for long-term investors.

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Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Timothy Green has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms and Paycom Software. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Ken Griffin owns NYC's priciest condo. Mamdani wants to hike his property taxes — and others'.

3 July 2025 at 15:35
A picture of a Manhattan apartment building
220 Central Park West

RBL/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

  • NYC's mayoral frontrunner has a plan to overhaul the city's property tax system.
  • It involves an analysis of billionaire Ken Griffin's 220 Central Park South apartment.
  • Here's what it could mean for NYC homeowners from Staten Island to the Bronx.

When Ken Griffin purchased the most expensive home in America in 2019, it came with a hidden discount.

The palatial four-floor apartment at 220 Central Park South, which cost the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel nearly $240 million, is taxed at about half the rate of the average condo in the city, data shows.

Now, Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old self-described socialist who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, wants Griffin β€” and scores of other wealthy homeowners in the city β€” to pay more. His plan, if instituted, could upend tax bills from Staten Island to Billionaire's Row in Manhattan.

In a policy memo published by his campaign, Mamdani pointed to Griffin's Central Park South apartment as an example of why he thinks an overhaul of the city's byzantine system is necessary.

Without mentioning Griffin by name, the memo called out the taxes charged for an apartment at 220 Central Park South that cost $228 million, what the memo described as "the most expensive home ever sold in the United States." (News reports at the time of the sale said Griffin bought the apartment for $238 million.)

Side by side photo of two men talking
From L: Zohran Mamdani and Ken Griffin

Getty images

The memo proposed taxing the apartment, and others like it across the city, closer to their actual sales values versus the complex formulas currently used by the city's Department of Finance, which valued Griffin's apartment at just $15 million on his most recent tax bill. Mamdani's memo said this change would lead to an annual property tax bill on Griffin's Central Park pad of $3 million β€” more than three times what it currently pays. Other New Yorkers could also see their costs rise β€” or fall β€” depending on where they live and the sales value of their homes.

A spokesperson for Griffin declined to comment. Records from the city's Department of Finance show Griffin's Central Park property was charged $841,000 in property taxes for 2025/26.

The $841,000 bill means that Griffin pays 35 cents of taxes per hundred dollars of the apartment's sales value. That's less than half the tax burden paid by condo owners across the city on average, according to a 2021 report by a tax reform commission tapped by the previous NYC mayor, Bill de Blasio. The average condo in the city pays 74 cents of taxes per $100 of sales value, according to the report.

Raising taxes on Brooklyn brownstones

Mamdani said the city's current method, which calculates values for condos and coops by comparing them with rentals, "heavily favors luxury and super-luxury apartments."

He said he would embrace reforms recommended by the 2021 tax commission, which suggested NYC use a "sales-based methodology to value all properties." That methodology, he said, would lower tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica in Queens and Brownsville in Brooklyn "while raising the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones."

Tax experts agreed that the current tax system tends to favor tony neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, Greenwich Village, and Park Slope. Poorer and working-class communities in the Bronx and Staten Island have historically paid more as a percentage of the sales value of their real estate, they said.

A photo of brownstone homes
Brooklyn brownstones

UCG/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Sebastian Hallum Clarke, a product manager at Google Maps who has studied the city's property tax system in his free time, highlighted that dichotomy in a blog post. Clarke detailed how a 96-unit rental apartment building in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights paid nearly six times as much in annual property taxes as a single-family Upper East Side mansion, even though the city's Department of Finance estimates similar values β€” $6.6 million versus $5.5 million β€” for the two.

"Every dollar in cost for a rental gets passed on ultimately to the renters themselves," Clarke said. It's "a broken system that is just completely unfair in terms of how much tax different classes of property are paying."

Part of the disparity is attributable to state-mandated caps that prevent the city from raising the assessed value on one- to three-family homes by more than 6% per year and 20% over five years.

It remains to be seen whether Mamdani, if he wins the mayoralty, prioritizes property tax reform in an agenda packed with bold promises, including free bus service, a rent freeze, and affordable housing development. Other mayors have pledged to fix the system only to punt on the complex and politically fraught issue.

"The Dinkins administration did a property tax reform commission," said Martha Stark, a former commissioner of the Department of Finance during Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty, noting how long the system has been under scrutiny.

"I just can't imagine that Mamdani would elevate that to the top of his priority list in the first term," said James Parrott, an economist who was on the 2021 tax advisory commission.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Emergence AI’s CRAFT arrives to make it easy for enterprises to automate their entire data pipeline

24 June 2025 at 15:00
Engineer works on laptop at desk below network of orange pipelines against blue backdrop in flat AI watercolor style illustration
EXCLUSIVE: New York City based startup Emergence AI, founded by former IBM researchers, previously made headlines for its impressive automated system that allows enterprises to type in a requested task in plain natural language and automatically create a fleet of agents to help complete it. But that’s not all the company has up its sleeve whe…Read More

Paycom Makes Solid Progress

Here's our initial take on Paycom Software's (NYSE: PAYC) first-quarter financial report.

Key Metrics

Metric Q1 2024 Q1 2025 Change vs. Expectations
Production-adjusted revenue $499.9 million $530.5 million +6% Beat
Adjusted earnings per share $2.59 $2.80 +8% Beat
Adjusted EBITDA $229.5 million $253.2 million +10% n/a
Recurring revenue $466 million $500 million +7% n/a

Paycom Moves Forward More Slowly

Paycom issued an upbeat financial report for the first quarter of 2025, even though investors had to settle for slower growth rates than they've seen in the past. Revenue came in up a bit over $30 million from year-ago levels, and that caused growth rates to fall from double-digit percentages in the fourth quarter to mid-single-digit percentages. Similarly, growth in adjusted net income was fairly sluggish, although adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) managed to post a 10% gain year over year.

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Founder/CEO Chad Richison's comments were generally similar to what he's been saying in past quarters. The leader emphasized the role that automation is playing in the business and pointed to measures to make Paycom's internal business more efficient as well as greater efforts to boost sales conversions.

Paycom also modestly boosted its full-year 2025 guidance. The company now expects between $2.023 billion and $2.038 billion in revenue for the year, up between $3 million and $8 million from previous projections. Adjusted EBITDA got a much larger boost of $18 million to $23 million, setting a new range of $843 million to $858 million.

Immediate Market Reaction

Even with the somewhat slow growth rate, Paycom managed to exceed lowered expectations among investors. It therefore wasn't surprising to see the stock climb about 2% in the first hour of after-hours trading Wednesday afternoon following the report's release.

Unlike many software stocks, Paycom has stayed relatively close to its highest levels from late 2024. However, the shares remain well below their 2021 peak, reflecting the reset in expectations investors have made as growth has slowed.

What to Watch

Investors will want to keep a close eye on future results from Paycom as the company's clients adjust to changing macroeconomic conditions. Many economists are forecasting a possible recession. If businesses need to cut back on software spending to make ends meet, Paycom could see further pressure on future sales gains.

In the meantime, though, Paycom will have to redouble its efforts to get its sales team to close deals effectively and efficiently. At some point, investors will want to see Paycom's growth accelerate considerably to get the stock moving more assertively in the right direction.

Helpful Resources

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Dan Caplinger has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Paycom Software. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Should You Buy Paycom Stock After Evaluating Its Risks?

Paycom Software (NYSE: PAYC) could be an interesting stock for investors looking to avoid tariff exposure.

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*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of May 1, 2025. The video was published on May 3, 2025.

Should you invest $1,000 in Paycom Software right now?

Before you buy stock in Paycom Software, consider this:

The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Paycom Software wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.

Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $623,685!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $701,781!*

Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 906% β€” a market-crushing outperformance compared to 164% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.

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*Stock Advisor returns as of April 28, 2025

Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Paycom Software. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

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