Sorry if this is a nosy question, but - I lived in Amsterdam; and needing that long of a commute sounds weird, since public transport is pretty good, and you can bike some of the way. Even farther from the center, where it's cheaper, it should still not be _that_ long... can I ask what was your commute route?
It might also depend on mental model. Some people don't count the actual door-to-door time. They just look at the time the train takes between stations.
Our office was in Amsterdam Oost and I lived in Almere Filmwijk. An hour and a half is the average door-to-door time. Sometimes odds played in my favour and I could get home in 1h10min. The commute started by taking the bus or cycling from Filmwijk to Alemere Centrum, which took roughly the same amount of time. Then I would take IC or Sprinter to Amsterdam Muiderpoort, take another bus or walk, which, again, took relatively the same amount of time. It was impossible to rent anything in Amsterdam itself with an academia salary of 45k, a non-working wife and two children. I mostly took the bike on days when the weather allowed, but my bike was in Almere. I purchased a cheap(stolen) bike in Amsterdam for 75 euros, but it got stolen the same day I left it at the station.
TL;DR
Yes, you can live right next to the office if the funds allow it. My budget for rent was 1200 euros per month, which makes renting within the ring almost impossible.
Ah, well, yes, with a wife and two children, it's a different story. As a single person or a couple you might have found something in, oh, I guess maybe Diemen, or maybe in the Bijlmer region somewhere.
As for the bike: The trick is that you need a lock that's at least half the bike's price... that deters the thieves, who will go for easier-to-steal ones.
I got my bike stolen twice when I lived in Amsterdam, and even wrote a post about it, asking for advice:
Probably working elsewhere in the Netherlands (e.g., Rotterdam, Utrecht, Arnhem, etc.) but landing in Amsterdam because that’s the only city in the Netherlands that rings a bell to most.
