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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

I live in Sweden and I did the same. Moved back to the community I came from when we got our son. Got rid of the commute and we got a house that's 2x as big for, I kid you not, 1/10th of the price.

In fact our expenses fell so much I could even start working 60%, and we had about as much money left as before.

There are trade-offs. There are no restaurants except fast food, there is no martial arts training I used to do, there are no boardgame clubs and it's much harder to get friends. But if you can get through that economically it's a ridiculously beneficial thing to do (given you can get a job of course).

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What about education and health ? I mean even moving out of the big city in UK you are going to see very variable schooling and hospital coverage?

In the U.S., moving from the city to the suburbs is probably the best thing you can do to ensure decent public schooling. For instance, a recent list of top ranked public high schools from US News and World Report:

    Academic Magnet High School, South Carolina
    Maine School of Science and Mathematics
    BASIS Scottsdale, Arizona
    Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Virginia
    Central Magnet School, Tennessee
    Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, Georgia
    Haas Hall Academy, Arkansas
    International Academy of Macomb, Michigan
    Payton College Preparatory High School, Illinois
    Signature School, Indiana

Be very careful with that list. Those are specialized, highly competitive schools. What puts them on that list as opposed to Oklahoma School of Science and Math or North Carolina School of Science and Math is that the latter are boarding schools that serve their whole state. These are schools that serve the same role but only allow people in from their county (e.g., Alexandria County for Thomas Jefferson).

Also, US News and World Report rankings are useless. They're a measure solely of prestige and brand, not of any actual quality of education.

I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just saying that this data doesn't support your point.

Unless things have changed, Thomas Jefferson lets in people in other counties as well (ie fairfax county).

They must have changed that since 2005 when I was dealing with their graduates. It certainly wasn't open to me earlier on when I was a high schooler elsewhere in Virginia.

I don't know where most of these schools are listed, but I do know that Payton is in Chicago proper and out out in the suburbs.

In sweden it really depends. You could move from a poor school in a big city to an excellent school in the country. Or the other way around.

Healthcare seems more or less equal but I have less knowledge about that.

Good question.

I'm not worried about education. Sure there might be more choices in the city, and the local education has it's problems, but it's still good enough. It might not be the best, but most schools in the city aren't either.

Health is the biggest worry (which I even forgot in my comment). Not because we'll get worse care here, but because the distance to the nearest hospital is very large (2 hours by car). Which is especially worrisome as we're expecting another child in about 5 months. A pretty big change as we used to live a 10 min walk away from one of the biggest University hospitals in Sweden.

Then again health care in the big cities, like Stockholm, isn't that great either. There's a lot of stories about understaffed hospitals, very long queues and how new mothers are sent home almost immediately after giving birth (otherwise you can stay a couple of days to get settled).

2 hours to a hospital. I am not even sure that it is possible on the UK mainland to be that far. Maybe parts of the Highlands.

I was surprised by your 1/10th if the cost comment but perhaps less so now.

thank you

I'll note that there are several smaller hospitals much closer (but they're not allowed to be called hospitals). There is light emergency care, nurses and doctors there but they often need to send us to the hospital 2 hours away. For example for our ultrasound we can go to one 1 hour away and for regular talks and checkups the local one is fine.

So maybe it sounds worse than it is in reality.

> There's a lot of stories about understaffed hospitals, very long queues and how new mothers are sent home almost immediately after giving birth (otherwise you can stay a couple of days to get settled).

Same here in the UK interestingly enough. Two hours is a while though, but unsurprising as generally the UK is pretty compact.

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