Thank you Trudie for a sensible response. I cannot uproot my family to save money on gas.
I am considering a motorcycle.
If you're really opposed to making the obvious change, have you considered whether you can use mass transit (bus/train/etc.)? Are they any commuter programs at your work which will give you money for using public transportation? Can you carpool?
Sometimes I wonder where the hell some of the forum members live that they think "Oh it would be trivial to sell my home and buy another and not pay 5-10% in closing costs and also I will only accept jobs within 7 miles of my home but still get paid six figures!" Hmm... I live in the wrong town!
Have you even read MMM's post on the topic? Moving to a better place is a core MMM philosophy. Thinking that you're "stuck" as you are and that you can't change is the opposite of Mustachianism.
This brings up an interesting point. When that post first came out, I printed out the "cost of commuting" graphic and posted it at work and a few people thought I was targeting them (I wasn't). But I live in a place where it's really expensive, and affordable places are an hour away. A lot of people commute that distance.
I was thinking about it yesterday, though. When we bought our house, we bought a house between our two places of work. So we could both bike. We were much closer to my spouse's office, so he biked more often (5 miles each way). We were about 11 miles from my office, so I would only bike 1-2 days per week.
Fast forward 10 years, two kids, and two new jobs. Now we work 1 block from each other, which is 10 miles from home. Gee, it would be so much nicer to live near where we work. As it is, my commute is 10 miles in the morning, and closer to 15-16 in the afternoon when I pick up the kids at two different places. My husband's commute is the opposite. We cannot carpool due to the nature of school schedules - drop off/pickup times are such that you cannot work an 8 hour day. So we, like most parents I know, split drop off and pick up and unfortunately drive two cars. We had this system worked out when we only had one kid, where 2x a week I'd bike to work, husband would drive with his bike on the back, and then I'd drive home and he'd bike home. But we never started that up again this year after allergy season faded. That at least saves 20 miles of driving every day that we do it.
I've thought about moving. Of course, our house is worth less than we paid for it. We could probably "swap" our 2BR/1BA/no garage for a house closer to work for the same price, but it would be a 3BR/2BA/with garage, by nature of the age of the homes. But of course, that would cost about $40,000 to $60,000 in real estate fees for selling/buying. The tricky thing that I see, really, is that long-term, stable jobs aren't really the norm anymore, and the economy still isn't that great. So that job my husband had closer to our home - company went out of business. Now the job is further away, and there AREN'T any jobs closer. In my experience, where I live/work, you can buy your house to be close to your job, and that will be awesome and work well - for a certain number of years, and then it won't work anymore because you can lose your job and have to find a new one. The idea of quitting a job with a commute and taking a lesser paying job near your home is good, but only if there are actually jobs near your home. If you are a renter, you have quite a bit more flexibility.
I'm not trying to be whiny at all, it's just that you can only work with what you have - if you have a tendency towards a stable job, it would lead you in a certain direction. If I got a good government job at the local university, that would change my plans.
