So, thinking about where you are going to live should include consideration of its future affordability. Do not wait until gas prices are $6.00-$7.00 per gallon, or there are not enough hours in the day to fight traffic to shuttle your active family around in gridlocked traffic, and you see your investment value deteriorating due to these and other changing market conditions. You will be glad to have done your homework and made a better informed decision for your home’s location.
Hmm, still can’t decide? Before we go any further in choosing your location, we recommend that you take a few minutes to reflect on your life in terms of where the daily activities of your life occur geographically:
- Look at a map of your city and mark an X at the general locations where you and your spouse go to work. If you and/or your spouse works from home or is not employed, do not mark your home location. Only mark locations where you must commute to work. If you are an outside salesman and travel a territory, mark the outline of your territory on the map.
- Mark the location of each of your children’s schools. Again, if any of your children are home-schooled, do not mark the location of your home.
- Mark the location of other fixed-place activities that any member of your family is committed to. Only count places that, due to some contractual obligation, cannot be easily changed. Do not include the grocery, park, fitness facility, or shopping mall.
- Mark the proximity of any close family relatives that provide vital contributions to your families’ schedule.
Now it’s time to determine the best location for you to live. To do this, ask yourself these questions:
- Is there an acceptable location halfway between you and your spouse’s employment?
- Are there schools close to this better home location that would offer the same quality of education as those you marked in 2?
- Is this better home location more convenient to the extracurricular activities you noted in 3?
- Would moving to that better location negatively impact the family support you recognized in 4?
- Would the move to the better location have an overall positive effect on your family’s time and schedule?
- If it is a more expensive neighborhood, would the cost savings of less commuting (gasoline, wear and tear and time) be enough to offset it?
A couple of colleagues did this analysis, one with a 6-mile round-trip commute and the other with a 24-mile round-trip commute. At $3.50/gallon for gasoline alone, over a 5-day work week, 50 weeks/year, the latter pays $787 more in fuel at 20 miles per gallon. Based on that alone, the mortgage payment on the closer home could be $65 more per month and the owner would have an extra hour every day not fighting traffic. Based on a reasonable wear-and-tear cost of $0.50/mile on the automobile, the second colleague spends $2,250 more every year for their work commute alone, or $187.50/month that could go towards a higher mortgage payment and more free time. That adds over $253/month to a higher mortgage payment for an urban home.
To sum it up, here’s a breakdown of the additional costs for rural living versus urban living:
- Cost of building and maintaining roadways for commuting/connection from suburban to urban area
- Cost of installing and maintaining utility lines to rural development (phone, cable, water, electric, gas)
- Cost of gasoline for commuting and accelerated wear and tear on automobile from faster accumulation of miles spent commuting
- Value of your time spent commuting, mental and physical strain driving X hours per day
- Cost to build, staff and maintain fire, police, trash and emergency facilities to service rural areas
- Cost to build support services (convenience stores, gas stations, schools, childcare, churches, etc.) to service rural development
- Cost to build amenities (recreation, parks and green space, etc.) to support rural development
- Cost to install and maintain mass transit to service rural development (bus, commuter rail)
- Pollution related to high volume of commuter traffic from rural areas to urban areas, cost of cleanup, higher insurance premiums and healthcare costs
- Loss of valuable agricultural land, wildlife habitat, and nature areas to rural development
We hope that you have read this article before you begin your search for a suitable building site. If not, we suggest that unless you are retired, work from home or won’t be commuting daily to work from your site over 15 miles one way, you should consider postponing your build until you are in a position to do that. Or, if you could not pass up the current buyer’s market and low interest rates, you could still build now and rent it out to others who would be home-based until you yourself are able to stop the daily commute.
