Housing/in-law frustrations frustrations under the cut

So living with my mother-in-law isn’t that horrible for me, but it’s not a long-term solution, obvi. But like, in trying to make a plan to move forward, there’s a lot of obstacles. There’s the normal my-wife-is-still-in-school-and-i-make-$13-an-hour-in-nyc stuff, and the choice of moving to a cheaper city or staying. But the hardest thing to navigate is my in-laws, because they tend to have Strong Opinions and expect to essentially make the choice, and it’s hard to discern actual advice from their fear and control stuff. Especially since my parents’ attitude has long been that I’ll do what I want and my dad will only really say anything if there’s a big thing I’m not considering.

But all our options (aside from maybe finding roommates) involve either money stuff I don’t want to make calls on (my wife’s savings) or necessitates in-law involvement (my wife’s dad guarantor for a rental, because in NYC you either have to make 40x the monthly rent annually or have a guarantor that makes 80x, which neither I nor my dad qualify for), so it’s HARD to make any sort of call without my wife’s parents, or SOME sort of guidance.

I know it’s hard on my wife to go back and forth on plans, we said we were looking at Rochester, but got less enthusiastic when their dad said he would never be willing to go there, with us or not, and looking alone without access to a car would cost us ridiculous amounts of money, and more recently we considered Connecticut, but he has a house there and he’d push for us to live with him until we found local jobs (even though our plan for that was to have me commute for the foreseeable future)

Honestly staying would be the easiest option overall, even though unless my wife gets a damn good job right off we’d have to jump through hoops to rent. We’ve also looked at buying just outside the city,but I have no idea what to judge on if a buy is good outside of “Can we afford it now and monthly” so IDK sometimes I feel like we’ll be with my mother-in-law forever (she might be hoping that too, we pay more here than I did at my old apartment)