Hi everyone,
I would love your thoughts and advice about an upcoming Life Decision my family is looking at. As with everything in life, we all seek to find balance between optimizing our lives, and creating a life that we love and is sustainable in terms of happiness.
My husband and I have been on the MMM 'path' since around 2012. I discovered this whole ERE/MMM/FIRE world and slowly my husband has come on board. We now have a 3 year-old, and are trying for Small Human #2 :)
We currently live in Denver, and although we like where we live, we are very tired of living in a (relatively) big city. Denver is getting really crowded and traffic is becoming worse and worse. Luckily, we have optimized our commutes (mine is one minute, and husband's is 15-20 minutes). We keep our spending low (although not as low as some of you folks, we are still working on it).
So here we come to the Big Life Decision: we've always wanted to move up to Boulder. I grew up in a college town and love college towns. Husband loves Boulder as well, and it would be a great environment to be in given his work (he's in the tech start-up world). Boulder has amazing nature and really good schools (which is important to use, we refuse to pay for private school down here in Denver).
Perhaps most importantly, my husband's office will move up near Boulder within the next two years, so unless we move his commute gets horrible. If we move, I will commute down to Denver once per week, and work from home the rest of the week.
Boulder housing is crazy expensive though. No surprise that lots of people want to live there, and most of the land is parks/open space, so it drives up the cost of housing.
On the other hand, I think moving up there would increase our quality of life, boost happiness, facilitate bike-riding and raising happy kids who roam outside in nature rather than sitting in traffic on weekends to go to the zoo or museum or even a play-date as our friends are far-flung all over the city.
We are willing to down-size to move up to boulder, but still want a house (rather than an apartment) if we have two kiddos.
It comes down to this: moving up there is raise our annual housing costs by about $15k. All other costs will remain the same.
We will keep our current house as a rental in Denver, which will cash-flow about $600 per month, so let's say we get $6000 net per year rental income (accounting for some maintenance costs). I will manage it myself.
With that in mind, our Boulder housing cost is $9k/year over our Denver housing costs.
To me, that seems like a good trade-off, but what do you guys think?
Anyone done an intentional lifestyle inflation to increase quality of life?
As far as the rest of our finances, we have a 40-50% savings rate (variable because we own 3 small businesses, and the incomes vary month-to-month), no debt other than our mortgage, and have one other rental property that cash-flows $200/month.
Happy to answer any other questions!