The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: whybe on August 10, 2015, 06:04:59 AM
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I live outside of North America, in a non - English speaking country.
DW and I are looking at moving closer to her job, near "town R". We are currently a 0 car household li ring in "town J". I ride the light rail for 2.5 km every late morning and from that station I have a van that drives me to my out of town job. All in all this takes about 40 minutes and the cost is 0 (negative if you count the 4 minute walk to the tram station and the job-reimbursed ride :-). If I had to drive the same route it would have taken about 20 minutes door to door in light to medium traffic of 11 am. currently Coming back is also 0 cost most days and takes about the same time. With a car traffic is even lighter at 20:00-21:20 which is around the time I finish work.
DW is working further out of town J, on the outskirts of town R, in the same direction as I, and takes a bus for 1hr going to work at 7 am or carpools with a coworker. Coming back is tougher b/c she always bumps into 3:30 pm standstill traffic which makes the ride last about 1.5hrs. Again she either takes a bus and tram or shares a ride. Cost is probably $25 /week.
We are looking to move closer to our jobs to spare her the time on the road. This would almost surely require us to get a car, maybe 2. reason is - she might be eligible for a ride to / from work if we live closer. But I won't - our potential new area in town R will be outside the pickup route of my job's pickup. While I would probably hedonically adapt to the improved mobility provided by a car, and would probably be able to duck out of work early most days by not being tethered to the van, gas and upkeep would make saving (And living) much much harder.
What to do? how to offset these costs?
Thought about switching jobs but don't know what to change to - I work as video editor for the news, and the area we're moving to doesn't have any facilities close to where I work (or at all...?). My current job does have another office in another town closer to R, but since driving there will be a nightmare every day I would much rather not, besides the office might require me to drive back towards town J to the main office, which would double the time I spend on the road every day.
Other skills I have besides editing video - rudimentary knowledge of code writing, English, French, scuba diving, sound editing, writing, some experience in sales, administrativr skills.
Really trying to solve this. Thanks for any help.
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What does your partner do? Is her job more portable than yours?
Otherwise, I know video editors that started doing weddings or corporate video events-- not sure if your area is already saturated with independent wedding videographers/editors though -- and they usually do both the filming and editing themselves.
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She is a lab tech at a hospital, working to get experience enough to get into pharmaceutical / biomedical research. Found this job 6 months ago and looking at at least two more years at said place.
While I could go freelance, not sure if DW will approve... She is a bit against the idea of not having a more or less fixed income to rely on. And since weddings have their own seasons, peak times and lulls, not sure how to go about the switch... I myself have contemplated the feasibility of this. Not to mention the mind melting absurdity of the wedding video... ;-)