Owning your own home

I'm a young family and live I Her Majesty's Socialist Republic of Trumpington. It's about 2 miles south of the City centre so 10 mins bike pootle along a traffic-free bike path beside the guided busway. 15 mins down Queen Edith's Way to your work, 5 mins to Addenbrooke's. Near enough to town to feel part of it but far enough out that £600k will get you a decent semi with a garage. It's a multi cultural middle-class paradise where everyone is called Dr or Professor So-and-so, has multi lingual kids, did their PhD at Copenhagen and has no driving licence, never mind a car. Any closer in and you'll be in a London-esque Victorian terrace with no parking and a small garden at your budget.

If you don't want to spend all that look at Chinton, or Cherry Hinton as non-locals insist on calling it. It's a bigger suburb with lots of 80s houses so you get more choice and therefore better value than the centre or Trumpington and it's 5 mins from your work. A modern 3 bed detached is about £400k, £600k gets you something very decent. There are more plasterers and fewer a neuro scientists, but there's only so many times you can be made to feel intellectually inferior before it gets tiring, so hanging out with a few plasterers can be quite a nice break. There's also an annoyingly twee craft pub in Cherry Hinton so as a London Fixie Hipster you'll feel right at home: http://www.rhodeislanduk.com

Norf of the river, Chesterton is good value and isn't too bad to Capital Park, nipping along Newmarket Rd and Coldhams Lane on a bike, but in a car it's an effing disaster as there's only one bridge over the water and it can take half an hour to cover half a mile.

If you don't mind a bit of village life, look no further than Fulbourn. It's right by your work, has pubs, shops and that and isn't too far from town. The only downside is that it's maybe 5 miles from the nearest station, so getting back to that there London is more of a faff than from Chinton or Trumpton.

Who will you be working for?