Deciding Between a Long Commute or More Expensive Housing

[TheFrugalCat]

I'm looking to move from my current rental at $1,000/month (~14% my gross monthly income)
The largest factor is my current commute of 35 miles, 45 minutes, all highway driving. (We are accepting face punches)
My goal is to move close enough that I can bike to work like a true mustachian.

Looking around, the town my workplace is located in averages rent around $2,400/month. (~31% my gross monthly income)

While I know I have options like roommates and the like I wanted to pose the questions:


How do you balance paying for housing against the commute?

Do you follow any rules of thumb when making this decision?

Any recommendations for me in my current scenario?

[ixtap]

We chose the roommate option, since the area near DH's work has so few one bedroom apartments that they are often only 10-15% less than two bedrooms. We also ended up renting a private condo, rather than in a large complex.

[Nutty]

Time - how do you value your time?

My limit was 30 minutes from the kids' school.  On busy days, that was too much because of traffic.  I am traffic averse.

Some people use the commute time to process and destress.  How do you use/value the commute time?

I went from a 5 minute commute to a 25 minute then back to a 15 minute.  Almost close enough for bicycle but no bike lanes and these people drive like city people.  Maybe I'll get brave or an ebike.  Hmm

[roomtempmayo]

How do you balance paying for housing against the commute?

Do you follow any rules of thumb when making this decision?

Any recommendations for me in my current scenario?

So the fundamentals are that you'd be paying an additional $1400 in rent to save 70 miles/day in driving costs and 90 minutes of your time (if you account for bike commuting as exercise then the time gain is 100%).

Costs: If you commute 20 days/month, that's an increase in rent per commuting day of $70.

Credits: At the IRS rate of 65.5 cents/mile, not driving 70 miles saves you 45.85/day.  You also will gain 90 minutes of time.

Outcome: The increased rent cost per commuting day ($70) minus the savings of not driving per commuting day ($45.85) means you're paying $24.15 per commuting day to save 90 minutes of driving.  That's a rate of $16.10 per hour to buy back your commuting time.

Bottom Line Question: Is it worth $16.10 per hour to you not to commute?

I could see the answer to that question going either way given the amount of traffic, the weather, the scenery, and the qualities of the particular rentals in each place.

Edit: I bet it is.

[bryan995]

always choose shorter commute. always.

[K_in_the_kitchen]

DH always knew he didn't want a long commute -- his dad commuted 4 hours round trip.  When we bought our house, we chose to be within half a mile of his employer.  For 30+ years now he's ridden his bike to work.  He leaves 5 minutes before he wants to arrive, it takes 5 minutes to get home.

So there are major time savings.  For our family, that has been incredible.  Our children saw him at breakfast, lunch (homeschool), and dinner.  Even in family where the children go to school, there would be more time with a parent who lives close to where they work.  Living close to work meant he could coach our children's various sports teams.  He has time for his own hobbies.  He has time to help his elderly mother.  He can duck out for an appointment without having to take a personal day.

But while time savings is the most important thing, there are also financial benefits.  We don't need him to have a car to drive to work, and currently share 2 cars between 3 adult drivers.  The cars we do have are driven less, which means they last longer and need maintenance less often.  He comes home for lunch, which is less expensive than taking lunch and far less expensive than getting lunch out.

The physical and mental health benefits can't be denied, either.  He isn't seated in a car for a couple of hours a day, causing back strain, etc.  He has time to exercise, which improves physical health.  Commuting is also stressful, not having time for pleasurable activities is stressful, not being home to share meals with your family is stressful.  There may be relationship stress if a non-commuting partner has to take on more house work or child care because the commuting partner has less time.

Before we had children I commuted 1 hour each way for 3+ years (no traffic) and hated it.  I put 25K miles per year on my car just commuting.  I was gone from 7:30 am to 7:30 pm.  We hired house cleaners because I was so tired.  We ate a lot of restaurant and convenience foods.  One reason I became a SAHM was because the math just didn't support me having that kind of commute.  I could stop working, cook real food, care for my own children (no child-care costs), clean my own house, etc.  And because DH didn't have a commute, I could do those things and not feel like a single parent.

[JLee]

Also keep in mind the transaction costs of moving (much more significant if you're buying vs renting) and how likely you are to change jobs in the future.  Buying a house with a commute in mind and then getting a different job a year later can impact the equation.  It looks like you're intending to rent, though, so it's much less of a downside if you do switch jobs.

[sonofsven]

Well, my partner just moved and now has no commute.
She had lucked into an extremely cheap apartment in a nice part of town, but she had to drive across town to where her clinic was, approximately twenty five minute drive in the city. She rented the cheap apartment for eight years.
It made sense financially, but she got really fed up with it for a few reasons.
Her friend group mostly live in the part of town where her clinic was, but she wasn't able to see them much because after work she needed to drive home to feed and care for her doggie. So she felt a little isolated. Also, just spending too much time in the car in the city traffic. Her old neighborhood was beautiful, wonderful old houses, but kind of dead feeling- not a lot going on.
She found a rental that wasn't advertised through her friend network (two of her best friends live next door!) and she's able to see her clients in her home (acupuncture) so she no longer needs to rent a clinic space.
Still, the new rental house is more than her old apartment and clinic combined, but she is much happier and her quality of life has improved. We see our old friends more, there's a Sunday farmer's market across the street in the park, and it's twenty minutes closer to my house.
The "savings" from the move are hard to quantify in dollars and cents, but the happiness is real.

[Dreamer40]

I’ve lived in both scenarios. The deciding factor for me comes down to where do you want to live? Where do you want to spend your weekends and evenings and how does each location fit your ideal lifestyle? You might prefer the far location if you want to spend your weekends with closer access to hiking and bike trails. Maybe you prefer the location closer to work because you want access to cultural events and restaurants. I don’t know which cities you’re comparing, but those are the kinds of questions to ask beyond just the financial costs of living in one or the other.

[honeybbq]

I live in Seattle proper and live <10 miles from work (not a WFH position).

I have never regretted having to over-pay for my close-proximity homes when I see the awful gridlock and traffic jams that develop on the interstates.
All it takes is one wreck and someone's 30 minute commute turns into 2 hours.

No thanks. But I also have a VERY expensive house. Worth it to me.

[Adventine]

I've had both long commutes to work and expensive housing close to work. I'll choose the expensive housing every time. You can always earn more money in the future. You will never get the time back that you wasted on commuting.

[LD_TAndK]

Relevant MMM classic: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/

I lean towards shorter commute, it's not black and white though of course. The area around the job might not be a good place to live, the price delta might make even the true cost of commuting a bargain, etc. Also consider if you can ditch a car if you live closer.

[Metalcat]

Check out the work of Dr. Kiron Chatterjee if you want to read more about the impact of commuting on mental health and general life satisfaction.

That said, this is entirely personal. I know people who absolutely love their long highway commutes, but can't stand even a few minutes of gridlock. Typically the people I know who like long highway commutes are folks with high stress jobs and kids at home. The time in the car is often the only solo, decompression time that they have.

Chatterjee has pointed out that the quality of the commute really makes a difference, which is just common sense, of course, but when someone says "45 minute commute" we do tend to all telegraph our own particular experiences onto that.

This is really a very personal decision based on a lot of factors.

When I was commuting people constantly asked me if I intended to move closer to work, but there was no way in hell I would ever do that. I lived downtown, but worked in the suburbs, where equivalent housing would have been infinitely more expensive because I live in a working class sketchy urban district. There was no way I was going to pay a premium in terms of housing, groceries, shopping, etc, to live in a cultural wasteland where nothing was walkable.

I worked only part time and off-hours, so thanks to driving against the typical flow of traffic, I rarely encountered gridlock. The trade off of having a reasonably pleasant drive where I could listen to French audio lessons and have my coffee was not at all a hardship compared to moving to the suburbs.

You really have to look at the big picture and all of the trade offs involved.

I personally despise gridlock, I remember reading Chatterjee's studies ages ago and committing to myself that I would never commute in gridlock, but I would sooner switch jobs or change cities than move to the suburbs to avoid it.

[alsoknownasDean]

I don't know about anyone else, but I can tolerate a slightly longer commute if it's via public transport as opposed to driving.

I'm about 55 minutes door to door from my workplace via transit, about half of which is spent walking to/from the respective train stations. It's not too bad, I can zone out on the train and decompress.

If it's in some car-dependent sprawl suburb where it's an hour and a half drive on the freeway...no thanks.

[Paper Chaser]

I'd choose the place that allowed me to live the life I wanted.

Housing obviously has practical and financial impacts, but at it's core you're talking about a lifestyle choice. A short commute is nice, but not if it puts you into a living situation where you're miserable (neighborhood, type of home, amenities or lack thereof, etc).

I see commuting as the price that I pay in order to live where/how I want. If you can do that without paying the price of a commute, then have at it.

[Michael in ABQ]

Our normal commute to take our kids to and from school and to our office is about 22 miles but it's almost all freeway. 25-30 minutes at an average speed of 70+ in the morning isn't too bad. I recently had to go to another location for work for about two weeks. It's about the same distance and almost entirely on one street. However, my normal commute has 1 stop sign and two intersections. This commute had 20-30 intersections to pass through. Needless to say, even with the best timing it still took 40 minutes and was way more stressful and aggravating constantly getting stuck at lights or not being able to pass someone driving slowly.

I don't mind freeway driving that much, but surface streets and getting stuck at lights is awful and I would never want to deal with that kind of commute on a regular basis.

[Askel]

One thing I did when we made our last move was to generate some isochrone maps based on our places of work: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Isochrone

I then made up a pretty much arbitrary cost of commuting based on total cost of car ownership, time, and future value of money. While it was mostly made up bullshit, it did provide some interesting insight into areas where real estate and commuting costs were cheapest.  Living very close to work and very far from work were both very expensive, but there were some anomalous areas in between and on the edge of bike commuting distance that had some really good deals.

End result, we get all the benefits of country living with a nice 6 mile bike ride to town.   

[Fomerly known as something]

My current commute is about 35 minutes in and 45-50 minutes home due to a weird road situation.  When I looked at housing, I was just not finding what I wanted closer to the office.  But I love where I live and it is almost perfect for me in my off hours, so I put up with the commute.  In the next 3 months my office is moving, and my commute gets longer to at least an hour.  But I’m going to only be there for about 1.5 more years much of which I will spend as a road warrior anyway so practically I’m thinking maybe 8 months of commuting to the new office.  It’s something I’m willing to put up with.  (Work pays for a vehicle to get to work so that is not an issue).

[Kwill]

I'm looking to move from my current rental at $1,000/month (~14% my gross monthly income)
The largest factor is my current commute of 35 miles, 45 minutes, all highway driving. (We are accepting face punches)
My goal is to move close enough that I can bike to work like a true mustachian.

Looking around, the town my workplace is located in averages rent around $2,400/month. (~31% my gross monthly income)

If $2,400 is the average, maybe you could still find something livable around $2,000. Then, using the math from @caleb it would only end up being under $5 a day after the cost of the commute. Would it make you feel better if you could find a better deal for the area? If you're in North America, then PadMapper could be useful for getting a sense of your options for price, distance, and space. What is it worth to you to have more free time outside of work?

I had a lovely bicycle commute on trails through meadows, 1.5 miles each way for the past 5 years. I just gave it up a month ago to move to a job in DC for a combination of family and career reasons. I'm now walking to the Metro and riding the train into the city. It takes me about 40 minutes door to door, with about half on foot and half on the Metro. I think that's considered a good commute here, but it felt like a really negative change to me, especially in the beginning. I need to find some good ways to use the time on the train. It's a tradeoff. I'm 3 or 4 miles further from work but more than 3,500 miles closer to my parents.

[314159]

OP, I encourage you to move to town. Others have given excellent calculations of the relative costs on commuting days. But what sticks out to me is that a town is likelier a much nicer place to live than a car-dependent place many miles away on your non-commuting days, too! (I'm assuming your current home is a car-dependent place of that sort, feel free to correct me.)

Please give @AlanStache 's excellent journal a read. Perhaps he'd like to chime in?

For my own part: I go in to the office two days a week most weeks. I usually bike, in which case it's ~22 minutes going in and ~35 minutes back (those darn SF uphills!). I can take transit too which is about 30-35 minutes each direction. My commute is fairly enjoyable.

For my previous job, when I lived in Minneapolis, I lived in the city proper and commuted out to the office in a suburb. (Thanks for the excuse to brag about this, I don't do it enough!) It was 11 each way which took me 55 minutes on average, but had only 3 stoplights and 90% of the trip was on a dedicated bike trail, which for most of the route was not even parallel to roads. When it was raining, or the paths had not been cleared of snow, or the temperature was under ~20F, I would take the bus instead which was a bit slower. This is a very long commute but I had the time, I benefited from the exercise, and you really couldn't hope for a better commute of that length. I in no way wish that I lived closer to work since I loved my carfree, walk+bikeable life in the city.

Admittedly that only lasted about 9 months before COVID hit and I became full time WFH for that job. No complaints about that either because again, my neighborhood was very pleasant.

[Zikoris]

My priority is always going to be eliminating the commute. I've spent the vast majority of my working life walking to work, and the quality of life upgrade is HUGE. It's a great wake-up in the morning, and a natural decompressor after work. It also guarantees a certain amount of physical activity every day, and is just a great experience.

With housing, I think the real trick is to stop seeing it as a binary close=expensive far=cheap and look into alternative housing options. What those look like is different depending where you are, but for example, in Vancouver there are lots of cheap homes in the most desirable locations if you look into co-ops, micro suites, shared places, old buildings, places slated for redevelopment with weird term-lengths, illegal suites, basement suites, and places where you do some sort of work for dramatically reduced rent (pet-sitting, etc). If you only want to rent a normal apartment in a normal building in a desirable location and pay market rent, yes, that lifestyle choice is expensive. But you can make other choices.

[AlanStache]

Thanks pi!

TheFrugalCat - please read the journal, but yeah I moved out of car dependent middle of no-where to a walkable neighborhood and am loving it. 

I find that the less I drive the happier I am.  I am also starting to see a second correlation; the more sun screen I use the happier I am :-)

Locations can be highly specific but even without getting to the higher rent districts look around at some walkability maps.  There may be places a little cheaper but that still function as mini-neighborhoods.  You my still 'need' to own a car but if you can reduce the use that may well be worth it for the mental health benefits. 

[Zamboni]

always choose shorter commute. always.

This.

[Just Joe]

Many years ago we made a choice to live in a small town with a short commute. Meanwhile some friends we knew had matching 1+ hour metro commutes in different directions so two cars racking up big miles.

I can't tell you how many cars they have worn out over the years. Also oil changes, tires, transmission rebuilds, and other repairs. They've moved several times but their suburban housing choices have generally included a commute. 

Meanwhile we're still just ten minutes from work. And I can ebike it. Lots of hills though. We're still driving the same car after all these years too.

I don't think there is a right and wrong here - just choices.

[Jakestersquat]

I would definitely look into getting a e-bike that can extend your commuting range an incredible amount. I’m an average bike rider and was physically capable of doing a 30 mile commute on a regular bike but the time it took just wasn’t worth it. I bought a class 3 e-bike which has pedal assist up to 28mph. I’ve since switched show up locations for my work but still have a 20 mile trip which can be done in about 45 min. Taking my motorcycle ( which is a possibility that maybe you haven’t considered? Great mpg!) is faster but as others have stated upthread my mental and physical health drastically improve when taking the e-bike.