A Wall Street Journal reporter has revealed that he takes a flight thrice a week to work in New York City as that works out to be cheaper than renting a home in the city that has seen housing rents soar in recent years.
Chip Cutter had move back Columbus, Ohio, from New York City, in beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, when his employer imposed the return-to-office policy, Cutter could not find a satisfactory accommodation in New York City within his budget.
That’s when he thought of the idea of flying to work instead of paying a huge sum in rent in the Big Apple. It takes a little over an hour and 40 minutes of flying time from Columbus to New York.
“I thought I could keep my expenses — rent in Ohio, plus travel costs — at or below the price of a nice New York studio, or roughly $3,200 a month,” Cutter wrote in the Wall Street Journal, and was quoted by New York Post.
Calling himself a “supercommuter”, Cutter said he sets his alarm at his apartment in Ohio for 4:15 am and rushes to the airport to catch a 6 am flight to New York.
“When everything went according to plan, I made it door-to-door in three hours. If delays occurred, I scrambled to rebook on other flights,” he wrote.
Cutter said he uses travel miles and hotel points to book flights and hotels in New York. Initially, he stayed in high-end hotels in Manhattan, close to the Wall Street office, but soon realised that this was draining his hotel points. He then started booking cheaper hotels in the outskirts of New York City, in neighbourhoods like South Queens, near the JFK Airport, and the Van Wyck Expressway.
With no refrigerator during his travels, his late-night dinners often consisted of yogurt and fruit bought from 2-hour convenience stores.
“Needing to pack light, I stored shoes under my desk and left spare outfits on an office coat rack,” he wrote.
Such a hectic lifestyle of shuttling between two cities took a toll on Cutter’s social life and he started dreading the “Where to you live?” question at work parties.
“Friends teased me that I had embraced a life of chaos. They weren’t wrong,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
Cutter is not the first to be commuting to work in New York by flight to save money.
Last year, TikTok user Sophia Celentano said she would be traveling to New York one day every week after she received an internship at an advertising agency in the city.
She said that it was more convenient for her to live in South Carolina and fly to New York rather than stay in New York full-time.
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