Must-Have Home Feature: Short Commute Distance

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Is this your daily commute face?^

If you are like many who are on the road during rush hour between 7:30-9:00 am and 4:30-6:00 pm^ you are guaranteed to have the same drive five out of seven days of the week. What other activity can you reliably count with such high frequency– week after week, year after year?*

Nothing else?

How is that short commute distance, Peter-Man?

I present a freeing choice. Minimize the commuting pain: live closer to work. So, let’s buy a house around the corner!**

Once you decide to put down some roots and buy a house, condo, or townhome, one of the main questions you must answer is what is the best location. Given your expected frequency of trips, your checklist should include a few additional important questions:

• What is the distance from work?
• How much time do you want to spend in the car?
• Is the distance and time between your new potential home and work below your patience threshold?

A short commute distance gives you more options in your life by saving a boatload of money and time. I am totally utilizing Mr. Money Mustache’s basis and calculations of a 19 mile distance between work and home and 40 minutes of irreplaceable time each way at $25/hr. He sums up a 10 year cost of commuting to approximately $125K.

Of course, your mileage may vary (YMMV) … literally. Didn’t read MMM’s post? Let’s get YOUR figures, then!

Grab your current commute distance. Double that short commute distance. Multiply your round trips by the days you drive to work during the year. Take this sum and multiply it by $0.34/ mile (below the $0.535 IRS value for mileage in 2017, but above an ultra-Mustachian number). $0.34 is a guesstimate of the real cost of maintenance and putting gas in the car. Next, take that quantity times ten and come up with your 10 year number.

The other short commute distance factor is your time. Let’s calculate your figures for this, too. The daily commute time changes with the time of day you leave home or work, respectively. Discover your average time both ways (the most common/ regular intervals) and add them together. Then calculate like above for the week, year and ten year points to see your time “spending”.

Multiply the ten year amount of time by your hourly wage. Add this number together with the cost of the car to get your personal cost of commuting.

If you are actively looking to buy a new home, do the same calculations. Compare and contrast!

What are you willing to live with?

For the rest of this post let’s go with Mr. Money Mustache’s numbers (or insert your own personal numbers if you actually calculated your own numbers).

Do you know what you and I could do with $125K? Buy a 3 bed/2 bath townhouse in the next neighborhood from me and fix it up like a palace on the inside. Back in the foreclosure crisis in 2009 $125K would have bought a significantly larger 3 bed/2 bath house in my neighborhood with something left over for the remodel as well (or 3 of those townhomes).

The money you don’t spend at the gas pump, the mechanic’s shop, or a tire shop go right into the badly needed kitchen/backyard/bathroom remodel! If you are a DIY remodeler the money you save goes even further.

Perhaps DIY is not your style. You can still point and pay easier knowing that you are redirecting your extra car expenses and personal time opportunity costs into a new shower or kitchen remodel. Not only that, but since you have a fantastic short commute distance you can step out of the office over lunch to check in on the contractor while they are working.

The sum of money is staggering, but worse is the amount of time spent commuting. The MMM example above is assuming an 80 minute commute. 80 minutes a day comes out to 1.3 work years every 10 years.

My personal reason for buying my house 3 miles away from work*** was to bike to work every day and have excess time doing more projects around and on the house in the evenings. Both biking and DIY house projects are considerable forms of exercise. Likewise, both activities are both money saving opportunities to steamroll into the next house project.

Two months of stuccoing the outside of my house was “only” two months because I could stucco a couple hours in the afternoon after work before the sun went down. That is exactly where the 80 minutes a day translated into a real house project.

Now as a parent, I know choosing a house close to work allows me to spend more quality time with my daughter. Any given afternoon you’ll find us on the slides and swings at one of the four different parks in the 1.5 miles from daycare to our home. Riding on a mountain bike setup for two keeps us both more active and healthier from being outdoors. We also bring up neighborhood morale waving at the same cast of characters on our route: from the friendly stop sign lady at the grade school to the gentleman sitting outside his townhouse in the evening.

Of course, I’m relating my own experience from the last 9 years of living in a small footprint of sprawling, highly-populated Phoenix metro area. My entire lifestyle is based on living close to work which only happened because of intent and planning.

So often, a house purchases does not put the work commute high enough on the list of must-haves. An eye popping house jumps to the top of the list and a longer commute begins the minute you move in.

Stop before you sign the paperwork!

Step back from the ledge, take a picture of your dream home, and make it happen in the house around the corner from work with that $125K.

In light of your new found pay boost of $125k and 1.3 years of time EVERY 10 YEARS, reconsider that diamond in the rough listing right around the corner from work. You now have the time and money to transform that house into a jaw dropping show home.

*Perhaps I should say Home Depot. I only go there five times a day during rough-in stages of DIY remodels. By the final trip of the day, you are pretty pissed at yourself and the project, swearing you won’t go there even once the next day, even if their bathrooms are amazing. While it is my favorite store, I normally don’t go there five days a week. 😉

**It’s not to say there are perfectly legitimate reasons to buy further away. There is always the unfortunate event where you have to change jobs and your roots are too deep to move at the time. Life happens! Reconsidering at a later time is always an option too.

***I would have bought closer if I could, but due to the zoning around my workplace, age restricted neighborhoods and HOA’s in the area, my current neighborhood was the closest option for the lifestyle I desire.

^Office Space [Motion picture]. (1999). USA: 20th Century Fox.