Too many people don’t factor in the cost of transportation, and it’s such a big one, especially now. In the midwest especially I know I did. I got a new job that was an hour away by car, which is about 40 miles including navigating from my city, the interstate, and the destination city. I knew my old car wouldn’t make it that much, so I bought a new car to help (and stupid younger me thought I looked cooler with it). At the time, gas was about $3/gallon and I got 30mpg highway, and I’ll round down to account for city mileage. So about 2.5 gallons of gas per work day, so $7.50 a day, or $150 a month. That’s $1,800 a year gone to gas alone.

Then add in that new car payment ($500/month), and higher insurance (+250/month compared to previous insurance) and that’s $10.800 a year just to get to work, not counting anything else.

Then I think that I took the job because I could get 20k more than my current job in the same city thinking “oh that’s so much more money”. Only looking back do I realize I immediately lost over half of that just to driving there, plus probably ~6,000 to taxes. So my “cool” new job in the other city netted me about $3,200 additional in my pocket per year, which is an additional $250 a month. Was it worth the additional stress of driving 2 hours every day, 40 hours a month (an additional work week every month) just for $250 a month? Probably not.