Jessica Biel shares why she and Justin Timberlake left LA. They are part of a trend of wealthy families moving out of big US cities.
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- Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel moved from LA to Tennessee and Montana in recent years.
- Biel told SiriusXM's "Let's Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa" that the move was for their children.
- Moving out of big cities like LA has become a trend in the US, especially for wealthy families.
Jessica Biel said she and Justin Timberlake left Los Angeles in the hope that their children would have a better quality of life.
The couple had their first child, Silas Timberlake in 2015 and their second, Phineas Timberlake, in 2020. Since 2018, there have been numerous reports of Biel and Timberlake moving out of LA to properties in Tennessee and Montana.
More and more wealthy families have been ditching LA due to a combination of high interest rates, higher insurance costs, and a "mansion tax" of 4% and 5.5% on homes costing over $5 million and $10 million, respectively.
Meanwhile, states including Florida and cities like Dallas and Nashville, where Timberlake bought a mansion in 2015, have been main targets for relocation, partly because those areas have bigger, cheaper homes, warm weather, and lower or no personal income taxes.
However, Biel said on Wednesday's episode of SiriusXM's "Let's Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa" the couple moved because they wanted to keep their children away from the paparazzi. Biel said the media did not always respect their children's privacy.
"You get hammered on the East Coast, you kind of get hammered on the West Coast. That's why we don't really live there anymore," she said, seemingly referring to her former home of LA. "We're just trying to create some normalcy for these kids."
In 2021, Forbes reported that the celebrity couple put their Los Angeles estate on the market for $35 million, and in 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported Timberlake had sold his apartment in New York.
In 2023, realtor.com reported that Timberlake was trying to sell his property outside Nashville, though this has not been confirmed. Timberlake and Biel's are said to live near Big Sky, Montana, and People reports, citing unnamed sources.
Timberlake and Biel's representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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Biel added that she understands that the public will always be interested in their family because she and Timberlake are celebrities. But she said that her children, who are four and nine, are too young to be able to choose this lifestyle.
"I don't want to expose them in a way until they have an ability to make that decision for themself," she said. "This very social media world is where they exist and where they live, and that will be a very big part of their life and their reality. I just don't want it to be on my account."