Ah, just the prime of your life then.
Everyone has goals and plans for their Life. Mine just don’t involve waking up and owing someone else 8-10 hours of my day when I’m 50 (or 45 if i play my cards right), even if I only had a 10min commute.
You’re paying for those hours today though. 25 years of 4 hour commutes is 26,000 hours. That’s 13 YEARS of work. Just spent in your car. So yes, retirement comes 15 years earlier, but you’ve spent those working hours in your 30s in traffic (which is worse than working IMO). But to each their own.
Where are all the Californians in this thread? I know many and most of them commute at least 2 hours each way.
In 2008 I was driving 75 miles each way through Los Angeles. It was generally about 90 minutes each way, unless it was a Friday before a long weekend: then it could be 3 hours to get home.
Most people were quite upset when gas prices hit $4 per gallon; I loved it: the traffic had thinned out so much that it was 65 to 75 minutes each way.
Hours commuting in a train isn’t as bad as commuting by car. In a train, you can use your time to read, watch a movie on your tablet or post on AF. You have more productive options available to you.
Where I am, many of my married coworkers live in the suburbs and if they don’t wake up before the crack of dawn, it’s an hour + into the office. I live a 15 minute drive and love it. It’s long enough for me to drink my diet coke, listen to a few songs and be at my desk.
One of my ex-girlfriends, her dad said the only thing I can’t make more of is time and that’s why I pay a premium to live 5 minutes from the office. The man had a point…
I live 10 blocks from the office. If foot traffic is bad, takes me 10 minutes to walk door to door. If not, then 7 minutes. Oh, and I make a lot of money.
Villnius, I have friends who live in central jersey and work in NYC. They all take the ferry and swear by it.
Last Tuesday I left the office past 7 and got home around 10. Busses were late, of course.
Though I finally found a new place and am moving this weekend! Will cut my commute down to approx an hour each way (depending on traffic).
(I don’t want to live close to the office as the office is located in a sleepy community full of kids and Smug Marrieds).
ah yes rubbing it in. feels good don’t it?
AF and productivity go hand in hand.
I HATE commuting. Anything more than ~1 hour and you can guarantee i’ll be miserable and late every day. My current commute is about 30 mins by train (though I plan to buy a motobike in a few months which I may commute on once in a while), the longest commute i’ve had is 1 hour 25 mins travelling east to west right across central London. Managed that for about 3 months before resigning.
My commute to my office in Midtown is about 30 minutes door to door via walking / subway, so I think that is probably one of the longest commutes among the investment professionals I work with. However, I prefer not to live near my office because I like to have some space between my work and personal life, not to mention that I like some peace and quiet when I’m at home.
I did the whole 3 hour/day commute thing for about a year. It was ok for a good while, then i read something that your commute time to work is inversely related to your happiness a couple months after i moved closer. inception.
I’m actually considering a job change that will take my commute from an amazing 7 miles (10 mins) of suburban driving to 80 mins of train and subway. The commute is the only draw back since its for a big pay raise, much better growth potential and more fulfiling career. My feeling is that if the commute is the only negative, I should just suck it up but is that sustainable?
^ could you not use the extra cash to move in a couple months? Switching up your commute like that also means you’ll be using your car much less.
Yes thats the plan, hopefully by next spring. The areas we’re thinking about that would cut down the time by maybe 20 mins to an hour.
I used to have a nice 7 minute commute from my house to my heated free parking garage. I started a new job last week and now I have a pretty gross commute based on total time. Parking near my office runs $200 a month, so I now:
Leave my house at 7 AM.
Wait at my son’s bus stop with him until about 7:33(We send him to a school with a program for Deaf/Hard of Hearing students and can’t be bussed from our house due to district boundaries. This was something my wife had done before, but her office moved and she needs to be on the road earlier than me to ever make it to work on time.)
Drive to a park and ride lot and hope to hit the 7:51 bus, otherwise I wait until 8:24
Ride a bus through traffic for 25 minutes
Walk the last 5-10 minutes to my office.
So, I don’t actually have a 90 minute commute, but it takes me 90 minutes from the time I leave the house to actually be at my desk. The extra money is worth it, but I enjoyed a 7 AM alarm, 13 minutes to shower and get dressed, 7 minutes of driving and still having time to grab a coffee and be at my desk by 7:30. The later start now means I’m downtown until nearly 6PM, with the last bus directly to my car at 6:15. Any later than that, and I’m riding the regular old city bus that stops every 4 feet and puts me at risk of catching something from the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Parking for me runs $500/mn. I want my next shop to be outside of the core where parking is generally free. Since parking is after tax, that’s a $10,000 benefit for me.
Damn. Even downtown here, most parking is like $100-120 a month and that’s at the high end, but most energy companies cover either parking or bus fare - your choice, since for some people in the burbs its more efficient to take the park and ride busses.
My company pays for parking/it’s included in our building rent because our building has a dedicated garage.