Reply to I haven't figured out how people raise children in DC

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[quote=Anonymous]"There really isn't any way to have a short commute, reasonable hours, and good schools, unless you're incredibly lucky or bought into the market prior to 2000. "

I disagree.  We make $360k (not including rental property income) and live in Ft. Washington, MD.   I commute to Fairfax and my husband commutes to Reston....we both can get to work later in the morning so our commutes are about an hour.   We both work from home sometimes.  I consider an hour or less around here a decent commute....it can take that long to get from one side of DC to the other.    We both chose jobs/employers that offer flexibility...one of us is an inhouse lawyer.  We have family who live in DC, PG and MoCo and also had some family move here to be closer to us and the baby.  That helps us with the childcare costs.  We are in a large SFH on 3 acres that we got for $350k in 2002 and we built a small second home on the property for the main family member that helps with childcare.  Actually now is a better time to buy over here than pre-2000 due to all the foreclosures.  We have been considering relocating to our dream of waterfront property over here at today's prices...the most affordable waterfront property in this area.   
We are in a good middle class neighborhood with crime that is no worse than the stats reported across the bridge in Del Ray and Old Town.  We do have a public French immersion school nearby however if we don't win that lottery, we can certainly afford private schools which can range from $8k to $12k for nearby schools or we can drop the $25k+ to go to the ones in Alexandria or DC since we are saving on childcare and housing costs.   Frankly with budget cuts and the way school boundaries change and NCLB, I don't feel a ton of comfort with public school even if I was in an awesome school district.  Most of my colleagues live in the most desired districts and still send their kids private.
It can suck to not live near lots of high end shopping and dining but that can also be a good thing because that is more money we are not tempted to spend weekly.   Though we do work in more expensive parts of the area so when we need things that may not be sold over here we just buy it on our way home or at lunch (or just buy it online with free shipping and no we have never had a package stolen off of our porch).   
That is tolerable since shopping and dining within my zipcode are not crucial to living the way we want to live, what is more annoying is dealing with the negative perception about where you live that others who have never been over here have.  
It is doable to live well here and not be stressed out over money, but you have to be more openminded about where and how to live and I find most are not.  
We toy with moving sometimes (within the metro area) as we can afford to now (when we first moved over here we made much less than what we do now and we had more debt than we have now).  When we think about the tradeoffs, many just do not seem worth giving up much of the financial freedom and easy living that we have now. [/quote]

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