3 Hidden Benefits to Working From Home

I’ve been working from home on a full-time basis now for just over 6 years and I absolutely LOVE IT!

It wasn’t always like this though.

20 years ago I was working a full time job that required me to spend 1.5 – 2 hours a day stuck in traffic.

So on top of my regular 8 hours shift, my total “at work time” was over 10 hours a day.

That doesn’t leave a lot of time for doing anything else.

And that’s why so many people find it difficult to find the time and energy to start a home-based business, because by the time they finish their 10 hours of “work” time or more, they just want to sit in front of the TV and veg out.

Not me though.

The idea of having to work a 10 hour work-day, 5 days a week, for 40-50 years, doing something that I don’t like doing, and spending 2 hours of that time in traffic every day made me want to VOMIT.

That is why even though I didn’t have a lot of time on my hands, I started my first business 20 years ago and worked on it whenever I could.

That particular business ended up being a complete flop, but my desire to be an entrepreneur was born.

At first I thought that what I wanted was to build a HUGE company the likes of Microsoft or Facebook or something BIG.

So I started manifesting various opportunities which eventually landed me a cushy job as the Chief Technology Officer of a multi-million dollar publicly traded company.

What I discovered, however, was that the corporate world – and especially the publicly traded corporate world just wasn’t for me.

What I realized is that what I really wanted was the FREEDOM to be able to work on whatever projects I enjoy working on, and to do it from the comfort of my own home.

So in January of 2009 I quit my job and left behind a cushy six-figure salary to pursue my dream of becoming a multimillionaire Internet entrepreneur who works from home.

I haven’t hit multimillionaire status yet, but I have managed to replace my six-figure income, and I wake up each morning getting to do what I love to do.

I have also helped my wife to quit her full time job to pursue her dream of working from home as well.

Since I’ve started working from home, I’ve discovered three things that make working from home even better than I originally thought when I was working in the corporate world.

#1 – Spending Time With My Loved Ones

Every day I get to spend time with my loved ones.

My wife Drea also works from home so we get to see each other every day.  Even though our days can get pretty full as we both work on various projects and my wife sees clients throughout the day, we do get to see each other every day, throughout the day.

Sometimes people ask us if we ever get sick of seeing each other all the time since we both work from home, but the truth is that we don’t!

We both have our own separate offices where we work, so that we have those boundaries in place and when my wife is working with her clients in her office I am not disturbing her working from my office -and vice versa.

It kind of makes me laugh when people who work full time in an office ask me if I get sick of seeing my wife every day, when they work in an office and see their co-workers every day!

Many of whom they don’t even like!

Besides the benefit of getting to be around my wife’s energy every day, I also get to be around the energy of our animals too.

I mean, take a look at our animals – our dogs Zoe and Eddie and our cats Marlie and Winnie.

Zoe

Eddie

Marlie

Winnie

I mean c’mon.  Who wouldn’t want to spend their days surrounded by THAT cuteness? 🙂

#2 – 10,000 Less Hours Spent in Traffic

If the average person spends at least 30 mins in traffic each morning getting to work and another 30 mins getting back home, that adds up to 5 hours a week, or approximately 250 hours a year in traffic.

Multiply that by the typical 40 year minimum that most people spend working for a living, and you get over 10,000 hours.

That is a LOT of time to waste in traffic.

In the last 6 years alone, my wife and I have saved ourselves over 3,000 hours of time that we would have previously spent in traffic just getting TO and FROM work.

Read that again…that’s THREE THOUSAND hours!

In traffic…

… just sitting there…

… with your hands wrapped around the steering wheel…

… listening to the same 15 songs on the radio that you heard the previous day …

… I honestly don’t know how people do it any more.

The other day I drove into town to go to BestBuy and my drive in was about 30 mins or so, and I was stuck behind a bunch of cars in some fairly mild stop-and-go traffic.

While I was driving, I just kept thinking to myself “How the heck did I DO this before every single day, twice a day!?”

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t mind driving.  I sometimes enjoy going for a drive in the car, especially in the summer.

However, there’s a difference in driving your car for pleasure, and driving your car TO WORK IN TRAFFIC.

#3 – About a 30% Savings in Expenses

When I first quit my job to work from home, I was pretty scared to take that leap.

After all, I was leaving behind a six-figure salary that I had worked for 10 years to earn.

Before I left, I spend quite a bit of time getting my budgets figured out and one of the things I did is I analyzed my monthly expenses in a lot of detail.

I went through everything with a fine-toothed comb, because I wanted to see what stuff I would be able to cut back on, in order to reduce my monthly expenses until I was able to get my income back up.

What I discovered was rather shocking.

When I studied the numbers, I realized that there were a whole bunch of expenses in my monthly budget that were mostly related to working away from home.

Meaning, I was spending money on things that I wouldn’t normally spend money on – but I was forced to spend money on those things because I was an employee.

For example, here is  a list of just a few of the things that I was spending money on as an employee that I didn’t have to spend as much money on working from home:

• Work attire and regular wardrobe upgrades (dress shirts, dress pants, ties, shoes, etc.)
• Gasoline for getting to and from work
• Extra car maintenance due to extra distance drive to and from work
• Eating out for lunch more often while working
• Extra dry-cleaning costs
• etc.

All in all when I started crunching the numbers I realized that I could cut down my monthly expenses by approximately 25-30% every single month,  just by working from home.

That means that if you’re currently making $5,000/month in gross income, working at a job, you may be able to live the exact same lifestyle working from home for around $3,500 – $4,000/month.

In other words there are COSTS associated with working at an office, especially if you have to drive for more than 30mins each way to get there in the first place.

And all this doesn’t even take into account the extra income you COULD earn with the extra 10,000 hours you’ll have from not having to battle traffic. 🙂

Not to mention a LOT less stress not having to be on the road for that long every day.

Are YOU Ready to Make a Change?

Are you ready to make a change in your life?

Tired of wasting your life stuck in traffic?

If so, I strongly recommend downloading my free eBook ‘Breaking Free in 2015‘ and joining my team at Empower Network.

You can learn more by clicking here.

P.s.  I’m not saying that making money from home is easy.  I’m just saying it’s WELL WORTH IT!