Legitimate work-from-home opportunities offer some huge savings and can bring much-needed balance to your life. I’ve been working from home for years and love to share my perspective to help others get a full picture of the reasons working from home can be a wonderful thing. So, here are my Top 10 Benefits of Working from Home.
- Enjoy schedule flexibility. This may be the best benefit of working from home. When you can set your hours and decide when you can work, instead of being told when you are scheduled to work—it’s empowering. Being able to fit work in around your life instead of the other way around…you may not know what to expect from a less-stressed you!
- Gain back between 10-14 days of free time each year! That’s like an extra two weeks of vacation every year! Eliminating a commute can really make a difference in your free time—and your stress level. No having to leave early in the morning “just in case” you hit traffic or feeling your stress level rise as you sit in traffic and worry about that meeting you’re going to be late for. There shouldn’t be any traffic—except for maybe avoiding stepping on the family pet—on your walk into your home office.
- Cut your gasoline costs. Gas prices are low right now but remember what a budget-buster it was when prices were high? It wasn’t that long ago—and prices can rise again just like that. Gas costs can consume two percent of your annual budget so cutting that cost by driving less can be huge. Like more than $1,000 huge.
- Save on your clothing budget. The average person spends $1,700 each year on work clothes. That’s quite a chunk of change! You shouldn’t work in your pajamas (everyday), but you also don’t need to buy a wardrobe of expensive, office-appropriate clothes when you work from home.
- Save on your dry cleaning bill. Since you don’t need expensive, typically “dry clean only” clothes for work, you can save up to $500 a year on dry cleaning. Combined with your savings from not buying that work wardrobe, you can afford a vacation in your extra time off!
- Trim your food costs. When you’re rushing to work in the morning, sometimes it just isn’t possible to make yourself lunch. That means you’re grabbing a bite to eat for lunch, and maybe a mid-afternoon “pick me up.” Eating out for lunch every day can cost a whopping $2,500 a year. It’s much easier to make yourself lunch when you just have to walk into your kitchen, where you (most likely) have everything needed to whip up a quick, healthy and inexpensive lunch.
- Save on childcare. If you have kids, you know that childcare can be the second most-expensive item in your budget, after your mortgage. When you work from home, you can set your own schedule and work around your family’s schedule. Work when the kids are at school, in the evening when your partner is home or after they go to bed. That flexibility alone can save between $4,000-$16,000 each year (depending on where you live, the age of your kids and how much time they spend in childcare). That could be like a whole extra income, when you think about it—and that’s what you are saving.
- Feel less stressed. When you work from home, you eliminate—or at least reduce—multiple sources of stress. The commute. The traffic. The annoying co-worker you can’t escape because you sit next to them. The long lunch break you feel compelled to join because the rest of the office is. You’re controlling your schedule, your flow and your work. And that definitely reduces stress.
- Increase your productivity. Remember how you’re setting your schedule and controlling your work? I’m willing to bet that automatically makes you more productive. Plus you’ll have fewer distractions from office mates dropping by to chat so you can focus better. As long as you can avoid getting distracted by the dishes, laundry and other chores. My advice? Just go back in your office.
- Stay healthier! Illness tends to spread in confined environments, like schools and offices. Once one person catches a bug, you’re almost guaranteed to pick it up when you’re sharing supplies and touching the same surfaces. Most adults get two to three colds each year. But when you work from home, you control what you touch and how clean it is. Plus, you can eat healthier when you’re making your own lunch and hopefully sleep and exercise more since you don’t have that long commute.
Working from home can save you time, save you money and even improve your health. It may sound too good to be true, but it is possible. Look into work-from-home opportunities through FlexJobs, Glassdoor and other job posting sites. And good luck in your work-from-home journey!
Karen Beaman is the Director of Agent Acquisition and Onboarding at LiveOps and has enjoyed the benefits of working from home for the past 7 years. She is responsible for sourcing and onboarding talented, independent contractor agents to work from home and provide professional contact center services to LiveOps’ clients. Karen has held a variety of leadership roles in her 15 years of contact center experience and now leads her team in the development of cutting edge recruitment, crowd sourcing and onboarding strategies to effectively grow a large distributed workforce and improve the talent available in the cloud. For more information on LiveOps, please visit: join.liveops.com.
