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[Estellex]

There are people that actually commute from Sacramento or other cities that are two hours away to San Francisco for work. I was wondering if it is worth it.
According to this article: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article190050994.html (I encountered this article and found it interesting because I am from San Francisco and surprise to see people commuting to the city from faraway cities.)

I decided to do some budgeting: (This is assuming someone works five days a week)

Hypothetically let's say you commute from Sacramento to San Francisco for a month:

1.I am guessing toll is usually around $4 x 5= $20 a week. $20x4= $80. I just got information that there is a toll to get back to Sacramento so it would around $160 round trip for a month.

2. According to gas buddy a round trip from Sacramento to SF cost around $12.26. $12.26x5 = $61.3 x 4 = $245.2/ month in gas usage. I would add in about 10-20% to that amount since you would want to factor in fuel consumption for stop-go traffic. (I used a 2014 Honda Civic automatic for the calculation)

3.Also account for wear and tear on the car. Round trip is 176 mi. So it would be 3,520 mi/month in wear and tear. This might not seem too serious for a newer car but for an older car the wear and tear will start to add up in the form of oil changes, tire replacements, and maintenance check ups.

4. Car insurance on average is around $164 in California. This is assuming you will not be bringing your car and/or driving in San Francisco so that's why I put in the cost. SF has good public transportation and Muni offers pretty good logistics around SF so many people just opt to use Muni.

4. Account for the mental stress and exhaustion from driving about 3.5-4 hours a day and then dealing with traffic.

5. Factor in parking which can be free if you are lucky or you would have to pay.

6.Account for the 3.5-4 hours/day loss. Assume you work 9-5. Most likely you would wait up at 6:00 AM and leave the house at 6:30 AM. When you leave SF and get back home it would be around 7:30 PM. After you get home you would need to make dinner, prep for breakfast and lunch for tomorrow, take a shower which would add about one hour. It is now 8:30 PM and you can either spend like one hour relaxing till you sleep or just knock the fuck out because you too damn tired to do anything.

Is it worth it in the long run? I got around $569.2 in cost for around a month for the commute not factoring for wear and tear of the car.

A standard room in SF can go for $1,000-$1,100. So I don't know if people think saving $550 approx. a month would be worth the mental exhaustion and stress. If they can tough it out then all the good to them.

 

[LincolnSixEcho]

For my own sanity, a daily 4 hours commute would not be worth it to me for any price for a permanent type job. I'd either move closer no matter what or not take the job. Heck, even 1 hour one way in no traffic is likely hitting my personal limit.

 

[Rawker]

quality of life.

you can also doc your wages for those 4 hours of travel. So if you make 40/h than you actually make 26.5/h because your gone for 12 hours.

 

[knaverysoul]

There can be quite a bit more to this. Wife and I live in Sacramento and I commute to the Bay Area for specific reasons. The Salary+bonuses is far greater than anything offered locally which allows us to have a much nicer home and lifestyle in Sacramento because it is SOOOO much cheaper. I work 4 10hr shifts, get mileage reimbursement, holidays off, have a car with fantastic gas mileage, and commute opposite the general traffic since I work at night.

The downside is absolutely time spent in a vehicle, but when I worked in Sacramento we lived damn near paycheck to paycheck with the exact same employer and job. Now we own a home, both have weekends and holidays off, nice newer cars, and savings that allows us to not worry about every penny we spend and enjoy time off because of the salaries offered in the Bay.

For us, and a lot of people I've discussed this with, very much worth my 140+ mile round trip commute 4 days/wk. in order to have the lifestyle we do. Moving to Bay Area would be far too expensive and we'd end up having to penny pinch again. Thanks but nah.

 

[Estellex]

There can be quite a bit more to this. Wife and I live in Sacramento and I commute to the Bay Area for specific reasons. The Salary+bonuses is far greater than anything offered locally which allows us to have a much nicer home and lifestyle in Sacramento because it is SOOOO much cheaper. I work 4 10hr shifts, get mileage reimbursement, holidays off, have a car with fantastic gas mileage, and commute opposite the general traffic since I work at night.

The downside is absolutely time spent in a vehicle, but when I worked in Sacramento we lived damn near paycheck to paycheck with the exact same employer and job. Now we own a home, both have weekends and holidays off, nice newer cars, and savings that allows us to not worry about every penny we spend and enjoy time off because of the salaries offered in the Bay.

For us, and a lot of people I've discussed this with, very much worth my 140+ mile round trip commute 4 days/wk. in order to have the lifestyle we do. Moving to Bay Area would be far too expensive and we'd end up having to penny pinch again. Thanks but nah.

What's your line of work?

 

[knaverysoul]

What's your line of work?

I'm a multi-unit Merchandising Manager. Similar to a Retail District Manager, but at night and don't directly interact with customers (thank goodness). Manage 150+ direct reports that work across the Bay Area doing retail "sets". Product introductions, small and large scale visual merchandising, holiday and spring, etc. I work directly for the Suppliers/Vendors to ensure their product lines are correctly set-up.

 

[highrider]

It’s really common in my area, people commute from West Virginia to work in DC and the surrounding area. I get the sense there just isn’t any work options at all locally when people do that, I’d go batshit having to drive anywhere near that much.

 

[plasmasd]

I did this via train in 2008. It was 7-8 hours of commute each day. Wake up at 3:30am get home at 9pm. I was able to last around 10 months before it was badly affecting my health.

 

[rokkerkory]

I wouldnot be able to so it. Kudos to those that can!

 

[blitz64]

Here is a 6 hour round trip article

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-commute-cherry-20171216-story.html

 

[Estellex]

Here is a 6 hour round trip article

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-commute-cherry-20171216-story.html

whoa 0.0

 

[womfalcs3]

I had a job once that was a 1-hour drive from my house. It got old driving to work daily after 7 months.

 

[MultiCore]

I'm not at that location, but my commute is 1.5-2 hours each way. The only saving graces are that it's not every day, and my work day isn't always 8 hours. Sometimes 5 days a week, sometimes 1-2.

At least I get to be home with my kids every night.

 

[Robot Carnival]

I used to have a job commuting to work on public bus for one hour each way. I'm kinda ok with it since I can listen to music or read something, maybe even take a nap on the bus. but I think 2 hours is pushing it too far.

 

[Helen Keller the Musical]

Back in college, I always disliked my commute which was only around 20-30 minutes.

Now for work it is roughly 10-15 minutes.

Anything over an hour is absolute madness.

 

[Hissing Sid]

At my last job during winter-time my car had only just started warming up by the time I was waving at security. Literally just around the corner. Marvellous.

None of this modern-day, dynamic-mobile-workforce bullshit patter, that’s trotted out to make the people feel better about their bondage.

Tried the whole commute thing once, hour and a half each way on the UK’s shitty motorway infrastructure.

Fuck. That. Never again. I’d rather take less pay or move than have to deal with that crap.

 

[MultiCore]

Back in college, I always disliked my commute which was only around 20-30 minutes.

Now for work it is roughly 10-15 minutes.

Anything over an hour is absolute madness.

I'm totally with you, but sometimes life gets in the way of what you want.

My job is pretty specialized, and it pays pretty well.

I could move closer to my job, but it's out in the middle of nowhere. The real estate in the area happens to be twice as expensive as the area I'm in now. This wouldn't be much of an issue, except I've got 6 kids. The last house I saw that was close to the one I have now was $700k.

So, it's either commute, or downsize my family's lifestyle, and get into a house situation that is much less flexible than what I have now.

All things considered, I chose the commute. It's not just me either. I have 4 coworkers that have up to 45 minute longer drives, and they all meet at my house. At least I have carpool buddies.

The third option is to be gone 50% of the time, but that's a much worse option, even with a $45k pay raise.

 

[Syriel]

There are people that actually commute from Sacramento or other cities that are two hours away to San Francisco for work. I was wondering if it is worth it.

...

Is it worth it in the long run? I got around $569.2 in cost for around a month for the commute not factoring for wear and tear of the car.

A standard room in SF can go for $1,000-$1,100. So I don't know if people think saving $550 approx. a month would be worth the mental exhaustion and stress. If they can tough it out then all the good to them.

Sacramento is way more than two hours away once you figure in traffic.

I worked for an amazing company that was a 90+ minute trip from SF. It was great at first, but that commute eventually kills you.

I wouldn't count on doing it for more than 1.5-2 years at most if you want to keep your sanity. Losing 3+ hours a day to a commute gets to you over time.

 

[Eye for an Eye]

Traffic backs up to Tracy on the 120 heading to San Fran earlier than 5am. I drive a van pool for work, and one of the stores we were headed to was in Brentwood. The amount of traffic I was driving against was astounding.

There’s plenty of people all along the 99 that work out in San Fran. San Fran couldn’t even house its own population of workers.

 

[dc3k]

That commute is only worth it if your free time is worth nothing to you and you live to work. I used to live in San Mateo and the hour commute each way was horrible. I'm <10 minutes now and it's so much better. Luckily I can afford it.

 

[yongeandcollege]

Not uncommon in the Toronto area. People coming in from Barrie or Kitchener or even London.

 

[Paradicia]

I commuted for years 2 hours a day back in forth to school and college as I lived so far from my nearest capital city where I used to live. I'm now living back in the city I grew up in and it still gonna take me 50 minutes to get into work. Some people like myself don't have the luxury of spending extortionate prices on renting apartments/houses. I'd rather spend a fraction of the price renting outside of town than I would be just barely scraping by living in it.


You can either be lucky and live near your job, or take it on the chin and start commuting. I actually value having the structure of having a routine when it comes to travelling a distance to work. On top of that, my job pays for my travel expenses as contractually It's not in my contract to work onsite.