I'm looking for advice on a housing situation where my wife and I are moving from renting to potentially buying a house, which will dramatically effect our costs and commute.
Currently, I share a large 1 bedroom apartment with my wife, located on a busy street but close to commuter rail which can get me from door to door in around 20 minutes. We are looking at buying way too much house for us right now (4 bed, 2.5 bath), because we are planning on having kids in the very near future and we really like this place we found out in the far outer suburbs of Chicago. In this move, our costs go up significantly, our commute is a little crazy even considering we would still take the train where we can read books or do actual work on laptops, and we'd have to buy a car as well! The property taxes are also gobsmacking, over 3% of purchase price a year on a house we can probably get for $280k.
Since I just typed that, I realize how dumb this sounds, but it's not the whole picture. On the bright side, we go from busy urban street to wooded lot on a hill with a view, from having just enough room to having ridiculous amounts of room even with a large family, from crap school districts to quite respectable ones, from middle of a city to fresh air, and from modern conveniences to modern caviar/cubans/champagne level luxury.
Now:
1 Bedroom, 1 1/4 bath apartment with large living room
Rent : $1325
Utilities: $150 average
Commute: 20 minutes (3 walk, 15 train, 3 walk)
Do the move:
4 bedroom, 2 1/2 bath mansion on a hill replete with den, living room, family room, foyer, jacuzzi, hot tub, private forest
PITI: $1925
Utilities: $250-300 average estimate
Commute: 1hr, 15minutes (12 walk, 1hr train, 3 walk)
Additional expenses:
Train fares from further out: $200
Repairs @1% purchase: $250
Car insurance: $40
We would be going from $1475/mo to $2700/mo. The bright side is that we can easily afford this, as we're maxing out all tax advantaged accounts including HSAs and are saving an average of $6k/mo post-tax currently, and an overall savings rate of 60-70% depending on how you run the numbers. The downside is it feels really stupid and if we saved full-bore for around 3 more years without kids we could move, FIRE, to a more modest place, while moving here and having kids (wife stops working) adds a good 8 years to that timeline, but I do really like my current job and my idealized vision of what it would be like to live there. I don't want to leave my job, which ties me to the Chicago area and this house is better than I could have dreamed of.
So, am I commit-me-now delusional, does this move make sense, or should there be another angle that I should consider here?