Reply to Stay at TT or Retire to Suburbs

Forum Index » Metropolitan New York City

Reply to "Stay at TT or Retire to Suburbs"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We're currently at a TT and are debating whether to make a significant lifestyle shift to the suburbs. Kids are still young in LS so transition won't be too tough for them. We've fortunately saved enough and accumulated enough passive income to be able to retire, do passion projects, travel etc. and be fine for the rest of our lives. We'd also like to have additional kids which would be both cost and logistically prohibitive in the city. Both me and my spouse would prefer this move but the fact that we'd be giving up a great school and our kids' existing community makes the decision much more difficult. What would you do? [/quote]

This thread has gone all over the place so going back to the original post. I'm trying to figure out your choices. It seems like you have assumed a binary between move to the suburbs and "retire" - I assume this is in part driven by having virtually no K-12 school expense by sending kids to public (I think we have established that you are targeting Chatham?). Or stay in the city and send kids to TT but that might be cost prohibitive. Just trying to understand why you can't stay in the city, keep kids at TT, and keep working to make that affordable. I know private school is very expensive but if you have enough to consider retiring, you clearly have a decent bankroll - life in Chatham, even with public school, is not free. Not trying to be a jerk - I'm truly curious.

As some have put more eloquently and kindly than others, suburbia is a different lifestyle. It has pros and cons. Everyone has a different perspective on these pros and cons. Note that most posting here likely live in NYC so generally have an inherent bias (though there are those who live in NYC who long for suburban life). I would spend time out there. Just "hang out" with people.

I grew up near Chatham. I now live in the city. I strongly considered moving back that way and sometimes wish I had, but for various reasons we stayed and are largely happy with our decision. But there were a lot of factors that impacted that decision, with the biggest one being that we both work in Manhattan and couldn't go to one income, so both of us commuting from suburbia was a non-starter. And we were fortunate to be able to do public for many years to make the math work a lot better. That being said, I still have lots of friends in various suburbs. I enjoy going to visit. The nature and tone of conversations is just different. Some find it better. Some find it worse. I think in general most hard core city people find it worse but based on their personal circumstances, it is not intolerable so the pros sometimes outweigh the cons. And sometimes they don't. But again, this is very specific to your finances, your kids, your needs.

Schools in Chatham are very good. They are not comparable to a TT. But your child will get a very good education and if they are meant to go to a good college, that opportunity will not be closed to them. Classes are bigger but not gigantic. There are plenty of parents who went to top schools. There are also kids who are less interested in learning. I assume the HS has tracking so for most academic classes that will be less of an issue. And it is good preparation for the real world. But again, it depends on your kid and their specific needs - TT schools in NYC do offer a lot.

Anyone who is 100% pro or 100% con is doing you no favors. They think they are simplifying things by giving you an answer but they are not. The world doesn't work that way.[/quote]

the whole premise of the question makes litte sense to me.  Is the difference in retiring really $2MM (over 13 years)?  it just doesn't make sense for someone as affluent as the OP.  [/quote]

No it's not on its own cost prohibitive but $2M is also not nothing and when invested it's really 2x to 3x more than that. Also haven't felt that LS has really generated any value from a learning perspective. [/quote]

We move from a wealthy public to private (in another city, not NY) in lower school.  It is hard to explain how little freedom public schools give their teachers over curriculum, everything was scripted down to which book or resource was to be used for each  unit.  It leads to unhappy teachers.  The push for equity led to our public dropping math and language arts tracking entirely in elementary school, it had previously started in first grade.  Afterwards teachers had multiple reading and math groups within a class and each group only got a third of the classroom time and were expected to work independently for the remainder of the class (guess how well this worked at the elementary level).  A kid with emotional issues tried to stab my dd in the leg with scissors in kindergarten.  There was one short recess a day and pe only twice a week.  The teachers used classroom time to walk around school grounds because the kids would get antsy from having to sit still for so long.

In sum, it’s easy to say that Lower school isn’t worth the money when you aren’t familiar with the alternative.[/quote]

Sorry about your awful experience and agree with your high level theme of "know the alternatives." Though feel compelled to present a sunnier experience. My kids went to public then switched to private. To your point, public was a mixed bag, though for us, the good outweighed the bad. Some teachers were largely collecting a pay check - none were awful but a few were not great. We found the biggest issue was that the largest portion of their attention was on the difficult kids. The second largest portion of attention was on the superstars. But if your kid was getting a 90 but capable of a 94 (so very smart but not top of class), they couldn't be bothered pushing them, because they were doing good enough. For one of my kids, there were very few difficult kids in their grade, which made life easier. And that was my academic superstar, so even better. For my smart but not as smart kid, there were also more difficult kids, so we had more ups and downs.

That being said, we also had public school teachers who were innovative, creative, thought outside the box, and found creative ways to keep very academically diverse classes all engaged and motivated. And this is what kept us in public for as long as we stayed, as we were fortunate that the good outweighed the bad. But I agree with the person I am responding to that this is often not the case. So you have to do your homework.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics