It’s Not All About Dollars and Cents
Free Money Finance recently had a post about a reader who was trying to balance salary with his commute. Briefly, the reader was weighing whether to take a job that offered a 21% higher salary and long (one hour) commute or a lower salary and short (15 minute) commute.
There were a lot of comments (22 at last count), almost all of which focused on the trade-off between money and time spent commuting. Many commenters did some calculation that boils down to hourly rate, more or less.
I think there is a serious omission in this thinking. Besides the time spent on commuting, there is a very real physical and psychological cost to long commutes.
Few of us think about it this way, but commutes harm us physically. Studies have shown a positive correlation between long commutes and increased blood pressure, increased incidence of lung cancer, and elevated cholesterol levels. There’s also evidence that heavy commutes reduce productivity immediately after arrival at work and result in behavioral deficits when returning home.
Then consider the fact that long commutes increase your chance of dying or being injured in an accident simply by virtue of being in the car longer.
Long commutes have been equated with exposure to loud, intermittent noise. Such an environment causes extreme stress.
Then there are the practical considerations of a longer commute. The fact is, you never know when you’ll arrive at work or home. Accidents and other traffic interruptions make determining your arrival time with accuracy impossible. Employee effectiveness is reduced because of long commutes.
You could also throw in the effects of long commutes on the environment and your wallet.
My point in all of this is that you can’t always boil these decisions down to dollars and cents. Sure, you could do the calculation and determine that, from an hourly wage stand-point that includes your commute time, you’d be better off taking the high-paying job with a long commute. But unless you truly consider all the ramifications, your carefully calculated decision may be very wrong.
August 30th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Good points.
Also, if your commute is short enough and along a usable route, you can do something healthy with it — like ride your bike to work!
September 2nd, 2007 at 9:18 am
[…] Advanced Personal Finance talks about other tradeoffs than just money in a long commute. I agree, and I’m glad that neither my spouse and I have one any […]
September 3rd, 2007 at 5:06 am
[…] It’s Not All About Dollars and Cents Over at Advanced Personal Finances, KMC takes a long hard look at the nasty habit we sometimes have about basing our economic decisions entirely on money. […]
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Completly agree that commuting itself takes a toll on your health and you cannot compensate for that by any dollar amount.
The physical and mental strain is enormous when driving for long distances.
I used to drive back from Fremont to San Jose in evening and it was so stressful, Even here in india i have to drive for 1.5 hr daily to commute to work, which results in such emotional distress that when i return back home, i cant do anything for atleast an hour
June 1st, 2008 at 10:10 pm
In that case i will prefer a lower salary with 15 mins commute.