The Backstory
As you may know from previous posts, I loathe car commuting. It's expensive, time consuming, and bad for the environment, and I recommend you avoid it for the sake of your money and sanity. But what about when it becomes unavoidable? Our condo is a 3 minute walk from an LRT (subway) station and a 10 minute bike ride to downtown. We bought this condo for this reason, as short commutes are very important for us. For the past year and a half, I've been working downtown with an amazing bike or LRT commute, depending on weather. But, some things changed at my job and I started to look around. I was offered a job with the opportunity to learn very valuable skills, as well as a significant pay raise. The catch? It's either 45 minutes by bike or bus ride (assuming you make your transfer), or 17 minutes by car. As you can probably guess, driving, at least for the winter, wins out. I ended up accepting the job. Even with the additional cost of driving, I'm still getting a pretty large pay raise. I also feel like this job offers a very valuable opportunity to learn that makes it worth the commute, at least for now. Why not move? The housing market in our city is extremely slow right now, the condo market is in the toilet, and our particular area of the city has seen the greatest price drop. If we sold our condo right now, we would probably take a $30-40,000 hit, if we could sell it at all. A unit in our building has been for sale for 4 years, and they've already knocked down the price by $20,000 less than we paid. We could rent out the condo and rent a unit near my new office, but this comes with 2 additional problems: 1. Our cost of living is so low at our current condo that we would probably end up losing money due to the cost of renting. 2. My new job is located in an area that would make it difficult to rent close enough to walk in winter, and it would make it more difficult for Mr. Consumer of None to get downtown for work. So as much as this situation isn't ideal, I'm willing to accept it because: 1. My commute is under 20 minutes, and my work has flexible hours so I show up as early as possible (preferably before 7 am) to beat rush hour. 2. Mr. Consumer of None can still commute to downtown without a car. 3. The salary and learning opportunities make the commute worth it for at least a year. So, compromise has been struck. I'll let you know how it works out!
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May 2019
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