I commute about 47 miles one way to work. Some nights it's 35 minutes, others have been as much as 2 hours due to construction, trains and wrecks. Coming home it's almost always an hour. I work overnights and took that shift for a couple of reasons..
1. My mental health, I cannot stand dealing with much of our management and the stupidity level they have. The frustration with them vacillating on decisions, or simply
putting them off, makes me nuts. We find problems that often easy fixes now, but they wait til things crap out hard before fixing them and then getting all worked up over why we have the problem.
2. The wife's disability. She has enough problems, that she barely drives anymore. If it's not a local area that she is reasonably familiar with, she gets lost easily and begins to panic. She missed a turn going to the Dr.'s office one morning and drove nearly 300 miles in circles trying to figure out how to get back home.
3. I'm the backup caregiver for my elderly dad. He's declining pretty rapidly now, and my little sister, who is the primary, is probably going to be bringing in my help as things progress.
4. I work shorter hours... On 3rds, we are scheduled for 6.5 hours, but are paid for 8 as bonus for the weird hours. I get home in the mornings and put in another 5 hours or so on household or shop stuff.
We could move closer to work, but that would entail much bigger expenses, including nearly tripling our property taxes as well as putting my wife in a much more debilitating area to live. The closer I am to where I work, the decrease in average air quality. In our case, a move further out is planned as soon as we can get one of homes sold and the other ready for the market.
The distance is a bit of a problem for the wife's Dr. visits, but as she rarely can drive into the area of the office, due to traffic and construction, it's only a problem on the one day a month she has to go.
As to the kids, they are flexible and will go with the flow. My oldest moved 4 times between nursery school and 5th grade. The youngest will be changing schools at the end of this next school year anyway.
Even though we live in a small town now, it is getting crowded, They just started a huge development that will take up all buildable space between us and the city limits in two direction. That one development will be almost double the number of homes in town now. We will be going from less than 1800 homes to over 4000 by the end of next year. With that coming, traffic and simply being overwhelmed with people is on the near horizon. Couple that with the fact that every home that has been platted for construction, until the city is built out, will be more than 2.5 times what we paid for our home 8 years ago. We are already getting unsolicited offers on our house for almost double what we paid for it, and it need some upgrades before it's even ready for market.
My suggestion is to lay out the pluses and minuses of each option, rank each plus and minus for each possibility, and then actually go visit the other locations and see what they feel like before you make a decision. You and the wife have to both be in agreement on which way to go on this, or there will be a wedge between you forever on
