(This is my first post, I've been reading the MM blog for a few months.)
Could I have your perspective on getting close to work please?
Hubby commutes 3 hours a day by train. We live in town A, where the houses are very cheap. If I calculate the time he spends commuting, and add in the cost of train fares, it is well worth borrowing for a mortgage to get closer to work. No problem there.
We thought of going to town C, where the houses are affordable for us with no mortgage and the commute is 1.5 hours a day.
The complication? Town B houses, with a commute of 2 hours per day, are disproportionately cheap, and we could buy one close to the railway station and have about half the price of the house left in the bank compounding.
Putting it all together, if we move to Town B, the shift pays for itself in only 77 weeks. If we move to town C it takes 87 weeks.
If we lived in town B already, it would be worth paying $80,000 more for a house in town C in terms of fares and time saved. But the
houses in town C are actually $150,000 more expensive.
I have reasoned throughout that we can't get travelling time down below 1 hour per day no matter where we move, what with traffic jams and train delays. Hubby gets very stressed by bad traffic so the train suits him well.
Is this a no-brainer? Am I missing something? If I haven't expressed things properly, happy to clarify/rewrite.
Thank you :)