[RareBreed]

Originally Posted by Dymphna

Yes, but working 1000 for free, so that you can be paid for the other 2000 pays the bills. If your hourly rate is $20, your argument is that a person would be better off working for $20,000 close to home as opposed to $40,000 with a 4 hour per day commute.

Another way of calculating it is since you work (including commute) for 3000 hours per year and get pay $40,000, you are in fact only making $15/hour even though on paper it says $20. Using those figures, a job that is close to home for $30,000 is equivalent to a $40K job up the road.

150 miles a day uses about 7.5 gallons of gas in your average vehicle. I'll round that up and call it $30/day....let's say $7500/year. At that rate you'd need an oil change per month, instead of every three months, so 8 extras, about about $20 each = $160

So, $7660 per year in expenses. Not including wear and tear on the vehicle. So, it may very well be worth it to take a $30K job near home if you are working for $40K up the road....

But if you are working for $80K up the road, ($40/hr on paper, $30/hr after figuring the commute) you are still only paying $7660 to do that, so it's better than a $60K ($30/hr) job down here.

You said it much better than me. I'd rather spend the extra time on the road and get paid more so that my family can live relatively debt free than to work close to home for less money and wonder if we're just one paycheck (or one major expense) away from losing what we have. What we've got isn't alot/extravagant but it's paid for and we owe nobody nothing except our mortgage which will be paid off in about 7 yrs.