I finally have my IT set up to my satisfaction – laptop plus two 27″ high res screens.  I never bothered doing much with my home office in 2019 since (a) I as mostly doing management and didn’t really need large screens and (b) I was pregnant and felt like crap and “worked” lying in bed with my laptop half the time anyway.

Now all I have to do is do some work!  It amuses me that you can see evidence of my hobbies in the background – English paper piecing, cycling, and skiing.

Once again I’m pondering the eternal question: where do I send my kids to school?

How did I find myself here?  Well, I blame Blue.  My previous employer is located in a dismal school district surrounded by other dismal school districts.  I have an aversion to commuting, and we bought our current house two weeks before B was born as a compromise.  Living here gave us access to all the amenities of Belle.vue, including preschools and extracurriculars, except the schools.  To gain access to the schools, we would have had to pay a lot more for less and live farther from work.  There are some excellent school districts in the area that are much cheaper than Belle.vue, but they were too far of a drive from my previous employer.  So we promised each other we’d move before L started school . . . and didn’t, and instead have been shelling out close to 20K per kid for private school.

Here are three facts:

1. We love where we live and we don’t want to move.
2. We are in a mediocre school district.
3. Private school gets VERY expensive in middle school.

Your typical private school of moderate quality or better costs 35 to 40K starting in grade 6.  I can maybe imagine spending 40K a year to send L to one of the best private schools in the area.  Not only would it help her get into a great college, but they have wonderful programs for the kids, and I think she would thrive.  However, I’m not at all confident that she can get into any of the top 5 schools within reasonable driving distance of where we live.  Here’s an example. Furthermore, that decision would commit me to working full-time for at least the next decade, which I do not want to do.   Also, what I cannot stomach is the idea of paying 35K to send her to a not-great school.

Next fall, we could apply to two or three of the top schools near our house.  Please note that the application process is a PITA.  It’s like applying to college.  I’m not sure if I’d want her to get in or not, given how expensive it is.  If she does get in, then we have to agonize over whether it’s worth it.  If she doesn’t, then we are back at square one.

There are lots of lovely places to live in the area.  It’s just that we like where we live right now.  We like our house.  We love our yard.  We love our neighbors.  We’ve built connections to extracurriculars and activities, both for kids and adults, that are near where we live.  Honestly, leaving our neighbors might be the hardest part.  Having had absolutely awful, ghastly, no good very bad neighbors at my old house, I know how important having awesome neighbors is.

Still, I don’t want to shell out 40K per kid for 7 years.  That’s 40*3*7 = 840K on top of the tuition we’ve already paid for elementary school.  (If we were to send S to the same school, which I’m not wild about doing given the crazy Covid measures, we will end up paying around 350K in total for the three kids.)  So, our current house is not really meeting our needs.  We could also use a little more space.  We will do just fine if we stay with 2600 sq ft and four bedrooms, but with both J and I working from home, we could use another room.  J does hardware work so he needs quite a bit more space than I do for his lab space and “bulk storage.”  (I accuse him of being a hoarder which he vehemently denies.  I’m not sure who’s right.)

That means looking at houses.  But have you looked at housing prices lately?  They are seriously insane.  To make things worse, there is a 500K exemption from capital gains taxes, which we would blow through by a huge margin if we sold our current house and then used the proceeds to buy another house of identical cost.  Our current house has appreciated about 1.1M.  There’s no way we could find something cheaper in a good school district.   So we’d be looking at paying around $100,000 in capital gains taxes.  Gone.  Vamoose.  Lost forever just because we decided to move from Point A to Point B in the same city.  We’d have to make up that money to buy a new house of identical value.

So yeah.  Not sure what to do other than send the kids to the mediocre public schools in the district we happen to live in.