I moved my family from Australia to New York City 12 years ago. It's led to some very expensive regrets.

Although I have some expensive regrets, I am ultimately glad I moved my family from Australia to New York City many years ago.

Courtesy of Natasha Silva-Jelly I grew up in Australia and always dreamed of living in New York City , so I moved my family there.

Living here comes with costs, like missing family in Australia and being unable to visit them often.

We've spent a ton on rent, and I've moved around the city a lot, but there's no place I'd rather be.

It was my lifelong dream to live in New York City .

Wild, given that I was born in a small rural town in Australia, where I grew up riding dirt bikes, not reading fashion magazines.

The Land Down Under was a big, beautiful place offering an idyllic, laid-back beach life, but I always felt a pull toward The Big Apple.

That lust further ignited in the '90s as I watched the city depicted in shows like "Friends" and "Sex and the City." So in 2014, on the cusp of turning 40, I dragged my husband, our Bengal cat, and our two sons — then 2 and 9 — to New York.

We told ourselves we'd come for a year, for an adventure.

Twelve years later, I'm still here.

It's certainly been one hell of a (ridiculously expensive) ride.

The rent we've paid feels astronomical, and we've moved so many times Some parts of New York City, including where we chose to live in Lower Manhattan, can get especially expensive.

Ultima_Gaina/Getty Images In New York City, rental costs are no joke.

We traded our beautiful 1890s cottage — three-bedroom, two-bath, front porch, huge yard, tree-lined street, 10 minutes from Bondi Beach — for a two-bedroom loft apartment in Tribeca that cost us $8,000 a month. (This is not unusual for a two-bed in this neighborhood.) By comparison, the monthly mortgage on our cottage in Sydney was, after conversion, less than half of that price.