You talk about these options as if they are selection dilemmas rather than an optimization problem, and discussing trading time and effort for price as if time and effort are unlimited resources. If you're going to pretend time and effort are unlimited, why not pretend funds are, also?
time is not unlimited, where did I say that? But you can commute 1 hour away and get much cheaper rents in almost any location on Earth. You trade off one extra hour each way for some cash.
