Are you missing the camaraderie of the office? In regular office settings, coworkers quickly become family, and going into an office helps make and maintain our daily routines. Whether your position has been made remote, or if the Covid pandemic has you searching for remote work, there are plenty of benefits to enjoy from the comfort of your home.
Say good riddance to morning traffic, uncomfortable office chairs, and the coworker who always eats your lunch. Working from home may have gotten its popularity increase from unprecedented circumstances, but having to be a remote worker can be anything but unfortunate.
Insurance, Bundles, and Savings
Let’s just jump into what matters — your monthly and day-to-day expenses. Realizing that it costs to work is a harsh realization that due to the Covid pandemic, many are facing the reality of. However, working from home can ease or even eliminate that strain.
A Different Kind of Home and Auto Bundle
As your life changes, so can your insurance. One of the first things you should do when learning your position will be remote is to adjust the mileage on your car insurance. For most people, driving to and from work is the main contributor to their annual mileage, but work from home car insurance will reduce your monthly premium to account for those saved miles.
The average driver claims between 10,000-12,000 miles a year, but everyone seems to be doing a little less driving due to the pandemic. So even if being remote is only for a month, drivers should contact their auto insurance provider. In addition to reduced car insurance, working from home makes bundling insurance that much easier.
Insure the Home and Office
Bundling insurance can save policyholders up to 25% of their car and home insurance premium rates. Keeping your focus while working from home can be a challenge, but knowing how much you’re saving while in the quarantine office can help give you motivation.
Whether it’s from your company or yourself, supplying any equipment used for work will affect how but not if you can be insured. Extending your home insurance to include equipment used for daily work tasks such as laptops, chairs, tables, software of any kind, copy machines, etc., is a great way to protect both your physical property and livelihood.
If you haven’t already asked your insurance provider how to protect your assets, listing the things you use at home is a great place to start. We don’t often think about our personal property being business assets. However, this especially applies to you if you are a contracted remote worker because you are viewed as a business owner under that term and should make sure everything you use is at least 75% covered under your plan.
Stretching Your Salary
As mentioned before, having a job isn’t free. With the average driver cutting their annual mileage almost in half by not needing to drive to work, eliminating the daily commute is saving the average person thousands of dollars by not paying for gas, tolls, parking fees, and extended vehicle maintenance.
Not having to travel for work means you’re more likely to eat meals at home and save money on costs that originate from appearance costs such as uniform cost and upkeep. We spend lots of money on “looking the part” for work yet none of those aspects have proven to make a worker more productive or make work more enjoyable.
Some companies will even offer to pay up to half of their remote employees’ employment taxes, which you should ask about before accepting a remote job offer or transfer. Fifty dollars here and ten dollars there may not seem like much, but when you tally up the weekly expenses on making appearing in-person safe and comfortable, you’ll see the many dents in your salary.
Promotions are for Happy People
It’s statistically shown that happy people operate at a higher productivity rate, and the more productive you are, the more likely you are to get promotions.
The people unaccustomed to working from home may feel heightened senses of anxiety at first and find that finding home-work happiness difficult, but remote working allows for a more flexible routine. Once you realize that work time can now be included with “you time,” waking up and getting to your day won’t be something to dread.
Viewing Self Care as a Lifestyle
Working from home may not have saved my life, but it most certainly has saved my pores. Being remote I can do small self-care activities while working that make the time I have to spend doing work not so dreadful.
Not to mention that I’ve found more time for increasing my education on my trade outside of my job duties fun. Watching videos on insurance lectures and writing techniques doesn’t precisely scream party, but add in some nail polish, a face mask, or some bubbles, and work just became a relaxing night in.
Allowing yourself to work and study on your own time in less formal ways can make you more productive while both on and off the clock.
Making Time for Physical Health
How many times have you blamed work for being too tired to exercise? Now there are no more excuses. Between cutting down on commute time, buying lunch, and the increasingly popular quarantine fitness plans, there is more time for exercise and general healthy living practices.
Increased rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and other cardiovascular health complications have been linked to the modern-day normalcy of long commutes that have us sitting when we could be moving.
Even while you’re working, standing at a counter versus sitting at your work desk can drastically improve your health.
Evaluating Your Mental Health
This year has taken its toll on everyone. Even if you’ve been fortunate enough to say the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t directly impacted your life or loved ones, others’ stress and sympathy still take up mental space.
Despite the CDC regulations of staying 6-feet apart in these stressful times, it can sometimes be relieving to be alone. Engaging in everyday work activities in an office can be draining when you don’t feel up to it.
Remote working allows the space to log off and decompress before becoming overwhelmed.
Reaping the Benefits of Remote Work
While baking bread is the number one quarantine activity on social media, taking inventory of the various thoughts and feelings surrounding these unprecedented times is also trending. Seeing the bright side isn’t easy for everyone because everyone’s home life is different, but the insurance and benefit package bonuses are here to make up for any undesirables.
This remote work life may not be forever, and remote working may not be for you, but before you start hating your new normal, check in with your insurance company and review your monthly budgets. The home office benefits you can get from working remotely may just change your perspective.
Author bio
Danielle Beck-Hunter writes and researches for the auto insurance comparison site, AutoInsurance.org. Danielle is an insurance expert who has been running a business and working remotely for the past three years. In unprecedented times, she shares her knowledge on how making working from home work for you.
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