Washington and Oregon are great places to live, and they have a very similar climate, but it's up to you to decide where you want to live. Washington has a better public school system, but Oregon has a lower crime rate overall. Washington State is a better retirement destination if you want to spend your golden years in a fast-paced city. The beautiful mountain scenery is a plus.
Oregon might be better for you if you want to explore multiple outdoor activities, such as cycling, skiing, golfing, and fishing. Washington residents, on the other hand, while paying sales taxes, do not pay income taxes and house prices are much lower than their Oregon neighbors. Which means that if you lived and paid taxes in Washington State, but did all your shopping in Oregon, you could save yourself a huge tax break by simply traveling between the two states. The relevant travel topic for potential Washingtonians who would work in Portland are the interstate bridges that cross the river between Portland and Vancouver.
The total cost of living in Oregon is higher than the national average, and you may notice it in housing, food, and transportation costs. Oregon is also the most economically dependent on craft beer and produces almost three times more than Washington. Perhaps this is why there are far more Google searches for “mail order bride” in Washington than in Oregon (that's a fact). I recently made my first trip to the northwest coast and was pleasantly surprised to find that there was no sales tax in the state of Oregon, so of course I bought all the new clothes I could bring with me to Colorado.
You mentioned the financial advantages of living and working on the Washington side and they are great (I save about 6k a year), but the culture in Vancouver is that of a very generic and conservative suburb, with lower quality houses or cookie-cutter houses with little or no character that are harder to sell and it's not a very city passable, with the exception of the center, which is on the rise. With more area to hide in Oregon, this also means that small forest creatures have a higher chance of surviving in Oregon. Thanks to the abundance of federal land, nearly 57% of Oregon is open to hunting in fifth place in the country. Anyway, by the time the tax money goes to Washington and returns to the local community, it's probably 10 cents on the dollar, so it's also very inefficient.
In a recent Gallup survey, 23% of Oregonians said they would like to move to another state, the fourth lowest in the country. Oregon law states that the public has access to every beach in the state, while Washington's beaches are a confusing patchwork of different owners. If you're moving to Washington from any of the five states that don't impose a sales tax, this may seem unusual to you. The river allows people to live on both sides in Portland, while, in Vancouver, it has only one side with river availability.
The average Washington resident would spend about 55 hours in their vehicles a year and is therefore ranked as the state with the ninth worst traffic situation.
