So if you’ve been following the moving saga a little bit over here, you’ll know I’ve moved about an hour outside London to the suburbs, with my boyfriend. We have a ton more space and my rent went from £1125 a month for a severely problematic one bedroom flat that was in an excellent place for me related to both school and work opportunities to £625 for a three bedroom townhouse with a garden that is now a £20-30 round trip ticket and realistically 2 hours commute door-to-door each way from school.

And I was definitely aware that this month would still be an expensive one while we moved – (I will be using the word need loosely here) but we needed several things. There was no bed in the master bedroom. I needed a desk and a printer (which is wild to me that the printer was only £15 more than the ink costs, why does ink cost so much??), and about 80 bazillion little things to organize the place.

I’m also not the most patient human. People joked about us tripping over moving boxes for months.

Within 48 hours the full place was unpacked. I am a machine.

I also cannot stand when I can’t find stuff. I absolutely hated the two days my stuff was packed up in my flat and I had a minor mental breakdown on day two of the move when I couldn’t find my clothes to get dressed in the morning.

But this lack of patience comes with a price. Like I was seriously bothered just looking at a haphazard stack of towels in the bathroom, so I had to get something to organize them at b&m.

Also, we were sleeping in the guest room which did have a bed for the first week, so our future guests will be relieved to know it is not a very comfortable room, which we might have been uaware of how it’s actually got the mattress from hell in it if he hadn’t had to sleep on it for several days. Or how incredibly bright that room was before we put up our own curtains.

But that’s all to be expected with a move right (full damage on view to all in next week’s accountability post)?

The lifestyle creep alert I am most concerned about is a car.

As I mentioned… I’m not a patient woman. On foot, it takes 35 minutes to get to the train station. It takes about the same by bus, if you time it right for when the busses come.

But it’s 8-9 minutes by car.

As a matter of fact, nearly everything in Peterborough is 8-9 minutes away by car about 30-45 minutes by bus.

Every. Single. Time. I Google maps somewhere.

And cars, and car insurance, are not so high in the UK. I can a brand new little car that would be completely adequate for less than £10k. I was looking at used Toyotas (my car brand of choice as my Toyota in my dad’s driveway right now has lasted 17 years with minimal issues) for around £6k. …which is conveniently around/even-less-than the amount of money I have in my bank account labelled ‘new car’.

And insurance would be only around £900 a year.

Only. LOL.

But my goodness do I miss having a car. I am a suburban girl. The hours of my life wasted on waiting for public transit over the last 2.5 years is so crazy.

My current rule for myself is to first buy a bike and see if that will reduce the travel time enough that I can cope.

My second rule is that if I buy a car in the UK, I have to sell my car in the US and I am like… really emotionally attached to that car. Even though Mona the Matrix is absolutely on her last legs.

The third rule is that this must wait until after I make my last tuition payment in September to make sure I haven’t miscalculated something along the way. Nothing has ever gone smoothly with the tuition payments, so we’ll see.

My fourth rule is that I need to get a UK driving license. Which means retaking a driving test and, ideally, learning how to drive manual cars (I could actually get an even cheaper car if I do so).

So… there are many rules. This makes it unlikely I will buy a car before Christmas, as that’s the next time I would be home in the States after making the last tuition payment to sell Mona.

But…

So much freedom.

Suburban lifestyle creep at it’s finest.