I suspect the offer from Honeywell would not be large enough to offset the cost of living compared to IA disabling me to have the same lifestyle in both places.
You suspect correctly. As a former LA area resident I can say with some certainty that your quality of life and, perhaps more importantly, your ability to save in order to elevate your quality of life in the future will be significantly higher in Iowa than southern California. E.g., I'd expect a single family house on the west side in any neighborhood you'd want to live in to come in at probably a minimum of 3-5x the cost of the same home on a larger lot in IA.
That said, Los Angeles is a *very* fun town. It's a zoo but if you're into that sort of thing there's really no other city in the US that can compare. However all of those entertainment options come with a price. I'd say if you're planning to rent you can live in LA and have a hell of a time on as little as $120-150k/year; if you want to buy a house in a neighborhood where getting gunned down in your front yard is only a moderately remote possibility add another $50k/year minimum to that requirement or anothter 2-4 hours to your average daily commute (not kidding on either point).
If you have or plan to have school-aged children soon you'll want to consider the cost of private schools. Outside of a very few very expensive communities the public schools are dicey. I lived and worked in a fairly decent area and *all* of my coworkers had their children in private schools, typically at $20k/child per year because they didn't trust the public schools to educate their children or keep them save during the school day.
But you're not going to get rich in Iowa, I presume as an engineer given the employers mentioned. In LA there's more than a critical mass of that sort of business and you'll have orders of magnitude more chances to advance in your profession. The value of those opportunities is incalculable and pretty much the only non-entertainment justification I could come up with for living in the LA area. If the cost justifies the opportunity in your mind, go for it! I can pretty much guarantee you'll enjoy it for at least a while.
