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var text = $('#textareaID').val();

$('#textareaID').change(function() {
  text = $(this).val();
});

when ever you want text just reference it 🙂

EDIT:

If your using tabs UI please review the docs and the event management:

Place This outside of bound scope:
var text = $('#textareaID').val(); OR var text = '';

$('#example').bind('tabsselect', function(event, ui) {
      // Objects available in the function context:
      // ui.tab anchor element of the selected (clicked) tab
      // ui.panel element, that contains the selected/clicked tab contents
      // ui.index zero-based index of the selected (clicked) tab
      // INSIDE HERE IS WHERE YOU CAN PUT THE CODE IN THE ABOVE EXAMPLE
      $('#textareaID').change(function() {
            text = $(this).val();
      });
});

NOTE: $(‘#example’) would be the parent div that holds the tabs and content

Further optimization recommendation.

If you think $(‘#textareaID’) will be called often you may want to cache a reference to it so the selector engine does not have to find it on every instance, this would be done like:

var textarea = $('#textareaID');
 var text = $('#textareaID').val();

For this line:

var textarea = $('#textareaID');

Make sure it is inside of a $(document).ready(function() {}); Call and the element is exists

you could check for this by doing:

var textarea = $('#textareaID') || false;

And wrap the code above like this:

$('#example').bind('tabsselect', function(event, ui) {
          // Objects available in the function context:
          // ui.tab anchor element of the selected (clicked) tab
          // ui.panel element, that contains the selected/clicked tab contents
          // ui.index zero-based index of the selected (clicked) tab
          // INSIDE HERE IS WHERE YOU CAN PUT THE CODE IN THE ABOVE EXAMPLE

          if(textarea) {
               textarea.change(function() {
                    text = $(this).val();
               });
          }
    });

Hope this helps!