...To Ask Him To Commute?

[StarryStarryNightShift]

NC - regular UN potentially recognisable. Cutted up pear, etc.

Background: DH main earner, 8-6 kind of hours. I work PT in a busy job involving shiftwork. My job is relatively transferable but I've recently (last 12m or so) found a team I like and I'd like to stay with. In order to transfer, the new workplace would have to be in/around a fairly major city. 2DCs, one in primary school, one in nursery. We've previously relocated a few times with DH's work, including overseas. I've not enjoyed the constant moving (every 2-3 years) but it's been right for our family to do it.

DH's company have recently announced they are moving a number of the regional offices to London. His choices are effectively:

1. Commute from current home - East mids, not far from East Coast mainline. Financial assistance will be given for at least a couple of years. Expectation would be 3 days in London office with the remaming two days from home or in a token regional office.

Pros: keep house, continuity for DCs/us, I stay in the same job/ Cons: Could be expensive if financial support withdrawn, tiring, isolating?, I'd need help with childcare when shifts fell unhelpfully.

1. Move to commuterville nearer London - one-off lump sum to help with relocation costs would probably be available.

Pros: closer to work/mates, would be a pretty much permanent move (though we hoped this last one would be too!). Cons: House prices would be significantly higher, I'd need to look for a new job. Uprooting DD1 again. I'd still need help with childcare given how far out we'd probably end up living (see house prices, above).

1. Leave the company. This terrifies him, he likes his job, the company (despite this move!) and his colleagues. Probably not an option we want to look at - and prospects locally are probably only best described as fair. I'd become the main earner and would have to step up to FT work, at least in the short term (not a problem).

I'm tired of moving house, and I really quite like our home, our neighbours here, feel like we're making friends at school, etc. We have people who like our kids enough to babysit them regularly! I want to put roots down. He's of a similar view, but is afraid of the commute - he's worried about damaging relationships with the DCs, interrupting his hobby (does 2x weeknights at present), general exhaustion...

So I'm looking for your tales of commuting - mostly successes (please ), but cautionary tales also welcomed. Thanks in advance...

"So I'm looking for your tales of commuting - mostly successes (please grin ), but cautionary tales also welcomed. Thanks in advance..."

I commute to London from north of Peterborough. Here is what that looks like and what it costs:

5.20am alarm, get up 5.30am, leave house by 6.20am (I am a slow morning person, others would do this bit more quickly).

Drive 30 miles to Huntingdon station. Parking is £5.80 per day (cheaper if you buy monthly I expect, but I tend to buy weekly on the app, also P'boro station is nearly twice the price). Plus fuel, c £10 per day I think.

Get the 7.10 Great Northern to KC. Annual season ticket is £5,012 (last year - c£1,500 cheaper than going from P'boro). Go back to sleep :)

8.00am, train gets in, wake up, shuffle to Tube, Tube to Victoria, £4.80 per day. Then ten min walk. At work make porridge in microwave, add berries and cinnamon, have with a green tea.

In reverse I try to get the 18.07 but don't always manage it - gets me home about 19.50.

Eat, go to bed.

Sundays - shop, prep all food for the week including chopping up fruit and putting in 5 little tubs, making five salads (or in fact, three, I do two on Wed night or they go too soggy) or potting up some leftovers (dahl and veg chili are favourites, though tuna/pasta/sweetcorn mayo is in the top 5 due to being really easy), portioning out berries for breakfast and weighing out some nuts for a snack.

If I don't do that I eat crap and spend loads of money in Pret.

I am constantly exhausted and bored witless. I do get to read a lot - though I sleep on the train I read on the Tube. Luckily for me I work short term contracts and this ends in Nov. My last job I was only in London three days a week, worked from home two and it made a massive difference - even just being able to get the laundry on before the weekend was good.

It is doable, people do it.......

Assuming you ask him to commute, please consider what you will do for child care when you are ill/have to work unexpectedly/want to go for a night out?

Will your DC miss seeing his father three/fours days a week?

OP, how long would the commute be? Door to desk, not just train journey?
Would you be happy to do it yourself?
I wouldn't and therefore woukdn't insist DH does it (either long commute or spending nights away).

OutToGetYou so the 7.10 gets you to London Kings Cross at 8am
That is a perfectly normal commute from most of London's suburbs.

i know you have the long drive to the station etc... which adds to the time/cost

I'd get him to stay in London. I've done similar (2-3hrs) and it's get dull, very quickly. It's better to try and rest and stay over.

Oh, OK readthethread was just trying to help put the OP by answering what she asked. Wish I'd not bothered as clearly my two and a quarter hour each way commute is not enough to have mentioned.

Fwiw, no one else where I work has that length of commute.

*out

Depends where you are now a bit and the location of the London office. Commuting from the wrong bit of further in can take ages and be faffy as hell while one long train journey where you're guaranteed a seat as you're early enough on the route is less effort than a faffy zone 3 journey. I personally found regular commuting Bedford to Liverpool Street offices easier in many ways than New Cross to Liverpool street because I could just plonk my ass in a seat and read for 1 hour then walk 5 minutes (loved Moorgate!) rather than 5 minutes walk, 20 minutes scrum on train, 15 minutes walking.

But SomethingBorrowed OP also wants to advance her career, they have dc settled, and she has friends and a support network in place. These things effect all Thier lives. OP has already ready said she's had to do this before, for him.

Her dh also has to put himself in her and her dc position. (Which in all fairness he sounds like he has, which is why this option is on the cards)

It's just a case of weighing up the pros and cons.

OutToGetYou was a good example of how a london suburb commute can be similar to a long cross country one... wasn't criticising your "input" to the thread

Do the commute with two overnights for a while, then tell the company he misses his family and ask to work from home five days a week. Even if they don't like it, it makes more sense for them to try it than to go to the trouble of replacing him. (There's no reason why most office jobs couldn't be done entirely from home.)

I'd go for option 3. Commuting is awful and if you move nearer London he will probably still have to go an hour each way.

If he gets a job near home he will have more time with the family and any decrease in earnings will be more than made up for by the savings on transport.

Alternatively he could try commuting for 3 days a week to see how he gets on but it wouldn't work for me

We have a similar situation and I have stayed at home in the north and he travels to London on a Monday and comes home on a Friday. It's not ideal by any means - the travel is expensive and we've ended up having to find him somewhere permanent to stay in London which is also expensive. He did the first two years living on his mate's spare room floor which was stressful and tiring - always having to pack and re-pack, forgetting things, etc.

However - he works extremely long and irregular hours so could never guarantee being home to see the kids or have dinner with me. All our family are within an hours drive of where we are in the north - our relationships with them would suffer. We have a really good local network of friends for emergency childcare and a lovely home. I REALLY don't want to have to build all this up again, so it made sense for us to do it this way.

Try the commute. If it doesn't work, look at other options. The only thing that would worry me is that the three days in London eventually creeps up to FT - that's exactly what happened to us.

I would do the commute. I've discussed this with DH as he may need to move work to London-based for his career to progress any further. IMO 3 days away/4 at home is a reasonable balance. I am not willing to uproot our DC and move to some teeny shoebox in the South East for the sake of my DH career and at the detriment to mine.

If he can stay in London 2 nights I think it is doable. My husband used to do it from Birmingham. He wouldn't have wanted the commute every night but the two night away are made up with the two days working from home when he can hopefully do shorter days. My husband used to do long days in London and on Fridays finish at lunch time.

Ebearhug, no typo the driver collects him from our house in rural West Sussex takes him to Southampton where he catches a direct train to Birmingham New Street. It's better than the faff of going via London.

It seems there'd need to be considerable sacrifice from you in order to allow DH to take the London job. Either yet another move with a change of school now, or you taking a lot more of the domestic slack as he is effectively absent for a lot more time due to commuting (and in fact would this even work with your shifts?).

I'll be honest, I'd be disclined to make that level of sacrifice purely so that my husband could stay in a job he liked. It would have to be extremely well paid and/or very minimal other options. We are very work life balance, though, more so than most people, but fwiw I reckon my preference would be option 3. If I thought the token regional office thing might be a permanent and reliable arrangement, I'd be more inclined to consider the commuting, but the way you describe things it just sounds like that's the sort of thing that would end up getting withdrawn over time gradually, before they shut the office entirely in a couple of years.

And there I was worrying about a commute from Bristol to Bath! Hats off to you commuters

Sorry only read the OP and not rtft.... my Dad did a weekly commute from the North East to London for about 14 years- train down Monday, back up Friday and he rented a room from a couple.
He managed but think it was tough, he would have preferred only being down part of the week and working from home part of the week

I commute from the West Midlands to Westminster. It's tiring but doable, although much easier admittedly now that DS is 16 and can shift for himself. I quite like the train journey but the cost of a travel card is nearly £10k per year so a huge chunk of my salary.

The cost is indeed a big consideration. In my last London job I stayed over, but I was contracting so could pay the costs from pre tax money and it made it possible. On an employed, taxed, salary, there is no way staying over would be economical.

A M-F spareroom type thing is c£600pm (but only 'saves', for me, £200pm travel cost, so net £400pm more) and that's literally living like a student. The last place I did it was pretty miserable. So it doesn't make for a nice life.

I couldn't afford a whole flat or anything.

I'd try the commute. East coast mainline is great. You can have a better and almost quicker journey from Yorkshire on the east coast main line than many do from "commuterville" - a table to work, a seat etc.

So many other issues with moving to the London commuter belt - expensive basically.

Thank you to everyone - interesting to read the variety of experiences. It would be ECML, probably from Grantham, so it's good to know he could work on the way in if that was possible.

To answer the few queries:

I'm the shift-worker, and yes my shifts would continue to be part of my job, that's completely unavoidable. Childcare, where we are, is reliable and my parents are both within an hour for illness cover and when I'm on nights/DH is away/etc. If we moved South that would no longer be the case, and as my job would still involve shifts, I expect we'd need a nanny/au pair to manage. He's done an overseas stint where we (me and DD1) stayed home for the first 4m due to my work commitments and it was tricky but manageable.

He runs - he would miss the midweek club night but could stay involved with the other nights. He can obviously run everywhere, so he wouldn't lose fitness regardless of where we lived. It's the social aspect he would be concerned about - he wouldn't join a London-based club.

The redundancy would only be on offer immediately. The relocation package would be a fixed sum that we could put towards a move, but I doubt very much it would cover everything. Interesting to think we could ask them to hold that, it would certainly be a worthwhile request. The commuter package would be for at least a couple of years.

Many of his colleagues are already commuters - from both London area and elsewhere. Those who are South/London-based will continue as they are, more local team members are unsure but the company is good to work for, so a lot will commute we think. Some of the more junior members of the team are unlikely to want to relocate or commute and so may well leave.

I've considered what I'm asking him, and I'd absolutely do it (staying two nights in London). But I like my own time and space and I appreciate not everyone would like that long term. I've done a 90-minute each way daily commute previously, and that nearly broke me (I got to know so many laybys following night shifts), so I've vowed never to have longer than an hour to drive home after work. Which in turn limits where we can live.

Not to drip feed, but we have a few good friends in London that I'm sure he would enjoy catching up with or even staying over with. His current office is quite rural so there's not much of a social scene after work - I think he would expect that to improve with a city-based office.

I think we will probably look into commuting for the first few months and review how it's working. In the meantime, he's going to be updating his CV - it's over a decade since he was applying for jobs!

If the 3 nights a week is serious it's not too bad really.

OP you said "I've done a 90-minute each way daily commute previously, and that nearly broke me so I've vowed never to have longer than an hour to drive home after work."

So, you know it's shit, and you wouldn't do it yourself but you tend to think your husband should have to do it?