While your story presents a lot of emotional context, you haven't really presented a lot of actual physical context.
Regarding the commute:
Commute: 90 mins a day per person, or 3 hours per day. 40 miles a day per car, or 80 miles a day all together.
How many days a year do you work? Commuting 5 days a week all year, that's 260 days, but that doesn't account for holidays or vacation. Regardless...
3 hours * 260 days =
780 hours spent driving per year, or
32.5 24hr hour periods. You're literally spending
1 month of time
per year just driving.
What do you guys pay yourselves, in an hourly format? Using MMM's baseline of
$25/hr, you're losing (
780hrs*
$25=)
$19,500 in
time every year you commute this far.
Going more towards the general cost of commuting:
The IRS says it's $0.51/mi to drive. MMM's Ultimate Cheap Driving estimate in the True Cost of Commuting is $0.17/mi.
According to the IRS, it costs you
$40.80 per day to make this commute. That's
$204 per five day work week. If you're working the above mentioned 260 days a year, that comes out to
$10,608 per year.
So far, the grand total of your commute in
value of time +
actual costs =
$30,108For perspective, that's more than I make in a year. That's about as much as most people plan to FIRE on, yearly, and certainly more than MMM's yearly expenditures.
Over ten years, if invested, that's a whopping
$473,139. After 25 years, it's
$1,865,577 .
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/retirement/roi-calculator.aspxHave you actually researched the mixed neighborhood and inner city schools that are nearby to your clinic? Because the real solution here, as your thread title suggests, is to move closer to work. You might find that mixed neighborhood isn't as bad as you think it is, and you will probably also find that the inner city schools have good programs such as IB or AP.