What Staying in Florence Actually Looks Like at 25

She graduated from Francis Marion University in May 2022 with a degree in business administration and three job offers — one in Charlotte, one in Columbia, one in Florence.

Two of them paid more. One of them was here.

She took the one in Florence.

"Everyone acted like I was making a mistake," she said. "Like I was settling. But I'd done the math."

The Math She Did

Charlotte had the higher salary. It also had rent that would have consumed 45% of her take-home pay, a car payment she'd have needed to afford the commute, and a social network she'd have to rebuild from scratch. On paper, the Charlotte offer was better. In practice, her Florence salary went farther than the Charlotte salary would have.

"I bought a house at 24," she said. "I could not have done that in Charlotte. Not even close."

She works in operations for a Florence-area company, manages a small team, and is currently pursuing a project management certification online through FDTC's continuing education program. She's been promoted once and expects to move into a senior management role within the next 18 months.

She is 25.

What She Built

Beyond the job, she has built something harder to quantify: depth. She has relationships with people at every level of her industry in the Pee Dee region. She has a mentor — a woman she met through a Francis Marion alumni event — who has opened doors she didn't know existed. She has a house with a mortgage payment lower than most of her Charlotte friends are paying in rent.

"People say there's a ceiling here," she said. "I think the ceiling is real for certain careers. If you want to work in tech or entertainment or finance at a high level, you probably do need to leave. But a lot of people leave before they've even figured out what they actually want."

What She Wishes She'd Known

She is honest about the trade-offs.

Florence does have a social scene, but it's not expansive. If you don't build your own community, it can feel isolating. She found hers through a young professionals group and through her church, and she says both were intentional choices — she had to seek them out, they didn't find her.

The city is also changing. New restaurants, new development on the waterfront corridor, the kind of slow visible growth that people who left in 2015 don't know about because they haven't come back to look.

"It's not perfect," she said. "But I'm not in debt. I own something. And I have a career that's actually going somewhere. That's not nothing."

For You

If you're a graduating senior or a college student weighing options — she's not telling you to stay. She's telling you to actually do the math before you go.

Look at what your Florence salary buys versus what the big-city salary actually leaves you after rent. Look at who you know here versus who you'd know there. Look at what you want your life to look like in five years — not in terms of the city's reputation, but in terms of your actual daily experience.

Sometimes the answer is still: leave. But sometimes the math tells a different story than the feeling does.

She ran the numbers. She stayed.