Picture yourself landing in a new city to start a new job. Where should you live? Realtors are known for saying that a house sells on "location, location, location." But how should you go about picking the best spot for you? On a Fool Live episode recorded on March 5, Fool contributors Brian Feroldi and Brian Withers discuss advice from Peter Adeney, aka Mr. Money Mustache, on choosing a great place to set up your new home base.
Brian Feroldi: Double-click on something Brian said before, one of my favorite Mr. Money Mustache posts about this very topic. He says, "When you're picking a house, do three things; find where you work, find a source of food, and find a library or school or whatever thing you're going to be going to, pick the three most common places that you will spend your time. Draw a line between each of them, find the exact center, and that's where you buy your house."
Brian Withers: That's really interesting because that's almost what we did when we bought the house here in Chapel Hill. We wanted to be close to my wife's work. We even said, "Okay, how many days is she going to go to work and how does that work out?" Then we wanted to be close to community college for Zack and then we also wanted to be close to the rock gym. Those were the three things that we put together and it worked out wonderfully.
The transportation when we lived in New Jersey, we came down from New Jersey to move to North Carolina to be warmer and cheaper and we accomplished both. But what I didn't realize was our commute times cut in half. Things that would take 30 minutes to get to take less than 15 today. That's a tremendous savings both in time and money and wear and tear on the car.
