3 Greatest Advantages Of Working From Home- Live Happier

Telecommuting is on the rise. There are many reasons you should work from home. Today, something happened to me that inspired me to write this article, and I will tell you more about that later. Though there are many other perks to it, I wanted to talk about what the 3 greatest advantages of working from home for me were.

With an increase from 9.2 million people in 1997 to 13.4 million people in 2010 working from home at least one day a week in the U.S. It would seem working from home is happening more often now than ever before.

Experts have said up to 79% of people have increased in the telecommuting force in the last decade, and equates to about 9.5% of the American workforce compared to only comprising 7% of the work force in 1997.

As technology progresses, these numbers will increase more and more each year. At the moment it may seem unorthodox to work from home, but as you can see it’s becoming more and more common every single day.

Greater Flexibility For Those That Can Work Anywhere

When I worked at Domino’s Pizza as the store manager I was putting in anywhere from 50 to 80 hours a week. There was even a stretch of time where I ended up working a month and half straight without a day off. This was strenuous for me.

Commuting everyday in traffic, sometimes taking an hour and half to get to work for a 12 hour shift working open to close. Repeating this everyday, it just got old. All my family lives on the east coast. So, the only way I could see them was if I took a vacation. In the three years at Domino’s, I might’ve had just one vacation.

It was the time my mom got robbed. So, my boss let me go see her for only three days. That’s all I could get off. Just think about all the time and energy spent year in and year out and all I can get in that time is a three day vacation? If my mom wasn’t robbed I wouldn’t even gotten that time off.

Working from home gives you the flexibility of creating your own schedule. If you need the day off to run errands or attend a wedding you can do that. Want to watch your son play at his baseball game? You can do that. You can sleep in if you want, and you can take a vacation whenever you want.

Even if it’s for a month. You’ll just have to do some work while you’re enjoying yourself, but I’m fine drinking a martini on the beach while I do my work. Wouldn’t you be fine with that? Having the ability to spend more time with your family and doing the things you love. It’s an amazing feeling.

My dream is to travel the world and with the flexibility of working in my pajamas I can achieve my dream. What’s your dream?

You save Thousands Every Year

This shouldn’t come to you as a surprise. But ya, you can save quite a bit of money when you don’t need to leave the house. People can save from $2,000 to 7 or maybe even $8,000 every year by not commuting to work.  If the average cost of gas is $3.59 a gallon (which is typical where I live) and your car averages 25 MPG; you, on average, will save $1,120 from gas.

On top of that, you could save:

• $300-$400 on car maintenance. Plus, your car doesn’t depreciate as fast.
• Save $600-$1,000 from dry cleaning. Everyone needs to look “sharp” for their profession. Now you don’t have to.
• No more money spent on lunches. OK, there’s still cost, but you are less likely to go out to lunch.
• Save $600 on buying new clothes. If you don’t need to leave the house, you probably don’t need much new clothes

It’s not just money you save either. What about your time? If you spend 60 minutes round-trip commuting from your home to the office everyday, then over the year you would have spent 260 hours or 10.83 days just driving back and forth to work, which you don’t even get paid for (usually).

That fact alone could be costing you money. Think about it. Maybe you decided you wanted to redo the bedroom and paint the walls. If you had more time, you would probably do it yourself. Instead, since your too busy with work you decide to hire a professional painter to do your bedroom.

Over time with the different task that you outsource you could be spending thousands of dollars on something you could do yourself. How much money would you be saving working from home?

Avoid Car Problems

This is the story I wanted to talk about today. It’s the reason I’m writing this article in the first place. The vehicle I drive is a 2011 Hyundai Sonata. A few days ago I got a letter in the mail. It was a recall notice from Hyundai. This is basically what the letter said the issue was.

They must’ve timed my letter perfectly. My car wasn’t making any noise until after I read the letter. The noise did come, and was pretty obnoxious sounding. Today (more like yesterday), I went to a shop to get an oil change as it was time, and I thought because of the issue more oil in the car would make it easier to flow through the car.

Well, two minutes after I drove out of the lot my car stalled. I was about to pass through a green light, and right before I could do that my car died on me. Some people were kind enough to help push my car out of the way and others (mechanics) that saw the situation took a look under my hood.

They asked me a few questions about the whole situation and I then showed them my recall notice. As I thought, they too were telling me the car sounded like what the recall notice stated. I had to spend a few hours waiting until I could finally get my car towed to the Hyundai Dealership to be fixed.

Since it was Saturday, I will have to wait until Monday for my car to even get looked at. The way everything seems, the fix for my car would be replacing the old engine with a new one, which can cost$4,000 to $7,000 from my understanding if I were to pay for it.

My point to this story is this.  Everyone has their daily struggles. Sometimes you just run into bad luck like I did. But, unexpected things can happen. Most people depend on their car to get to work.

Without it, it would be very difficult to get to work and many times people will end up taking a few days off to get the problem fixed if they don’t have a spare car. Working from home keeps you from worrying about this type of stuff.

You can go without a car for a few days and it won’t affect your lifestyle. If you have to drive to work, now your lifestyle is completely messed up and the stress can become overwhelming. In this situation, working from home is a HUGE advantage. This kind of situation does happen time to time and instead of me getting super mad and complaining; I used it as fuel to write this article.

If I worked at a job that is 20 miles away, I probably would be complaining about this for the next few weeks. Daily struggles that other people have to deal with I don’t.

Employer Benefits of working from home

If there were no benefits, an employer would never allow you to complete your work at home. Truth be told, there are huge advantages. these are just a few.

• One Standford research study showed that call center employees that telecommuted increased their productivity by 13%
• 73% of telecommuters were reported to be happier with there job compared to only 64% of commuters being happy. This equals a lower turnover rate with employees
• Teleworkers feel more valued and have a higher morale being trusted to work from home. This tends to make them invest more time into completing work for their employers
• It is estimated that for every telecommuter an employer saves about $11,000 a year making it more cost effective for companies.

As you can see, it’s not only the employees that benefit immensely. Employers gain many perks from this as well. If you have 10 employees working from home, you are saving annually $110,000. that’s a lot of money being saved for only 10 employees. This not only saves employers money,  it also allows them to create more jobs.

Conclusion

As you can see, these are only a few of the advantages from working from home. There are many other benefits, but when you look at your daily expenses and struggles that it may cause, telecommuting can help you live a happier, less stressful life.

I mean, who doesn’t want to have the flexibility and freedom to do whatever you want? You not only get freedom, but you also don’t have to stress about bad things happening like my car breaking down or deal with all that time and money lost having to commute to work everyday.

What are the advantages for you working from home? What would you do with your extra time? Where would you travel too? I want to see the world, and with the flexibility I am able to do that. If you want to find financial freedom, click here and learn how.

Questions and Concerns

Express your opinions below. Have a question? Ask that too. Please leave me a comment. I would love to hear what you are thinking.

Best Regards,

Brandon

Resources:

Forbes.com

Census.gov(link no longer exist)