Anecdote: This is exactly what my wife and I did, we bought a house 30 minutes away from where I worked in a smaller town because we could afford the quality of

Anecdote: This is exactly what my wife and I did, we bought a house 30 minutes away from where I worked in a smaller town because we could afford the quality of house that we wanted, and it was quite a nice house, but the town had basically none of the amenities that it turned out we really wanted. Turns out we'd much rather live in an apartment in a bigger city, despite having 3 young kids. As the kids get bigger we'll certainly end up in a house again, but our search criteria will be much different the next time around. We realized our mistake fairly quickly though and luckily were able to sell our house at a price so that we broke even on the whole deal, but it was definitely a valuable learning experience.