Am I crazy to want to leave CA?

[Andrew M.]

I live up in the Bay Area, have a nice job and a wonderful house, but still with a wife and two young kids, feels like you can't get ahead here because its so expensive.  Also hard to do any real estate investing when everything is so pricey and low cash flows up here.

I'm thinking life would be much less stressful if I moved to the Midwest (ex. had an opportunity in Omaha that I passed up), got a similar job, a much cheaper house and cost of living and was able to take the cashed out equity on my house here and start doing some serious real estate investing that could allow me to retire 10-15 years earlier than I might here in CA.

Has anyone done this move out of CA, and how did it go.  Am I crazy to even consider leaving the beautiful weather and so forth in CA?