Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua, and today I want to share with you some ideas about the good and bad of working from home, an honest analysis of the topic.

I think this will serve you if you've ever thought, "Man, I wish I had a different circumstance than I'm in right now." I know for me, the idea of working from home, the idea of an independent livelihood has been something that I wanted for years, literally since I was about 15 years old.

I've wanted to work from home. I always had an image of a guy with a laptop being able to make a living. I was in my middle teenage years during the time when it was first becoming more prominent that some people were figuring out how to make their living at the end of a laptop.

That was in the late '90s at that time. I remember being intrigued and entranced by that particular topic. My brothers and I were very interested in figuring out how to make money on the internet, and again, all through our teens. By the way, we all succeeded, which kind of shows the power of goal setting.

I thought I would be able to take it in a year or two or a few years. Unfortunately, the Get Rich Quick courses that I bought and the how to make a billion dollars from your internet, from your computer, a lot of that stuff didn't work out. It was a much more circuitous route than I ever anticipated, but in time, I did achieve it.

However, just like with many goals, I've learned that working from home can be built up to be too much of a utopia. It's really not. It's really not a utopia. I can remember sitting in an office and just hating being there and being very frustrated with being there. I thought the only solution was to be able to work from home, and yet I'm here to share with you that's not the only solution.

I think in the course of my presentation to you here today, you'll hear a very balanced and honest perspective on the good and the bad of working from home. I'd like to begin with sharing with you the reasons why I always wanted to work from home. The first part of that was I always wanted to be able to be available for and invested in the lives of my children.

I've always desired to have this very integrated family unit. By my analysis, I think that a fragmented family unit is one of the most destructive trends in our modern culture. Very frequently, if you consider a family unit, you'll have a dad and a mom and children who, if they are together, physically together, which is increasingly rare as families continue to splinter, if they are together, their lives are frequently not organized together.

Dad has his ideas about what is involved in his life. He's got his work. He's got his work buddies that he hangs out with. He's got his work goals, and he doesn't think that much about mom's goals or the children's goals. Mom has her work life, and she has her work buddies and her life there, and they're not really connected.

Frequently, mothers and fathers who are in that circumstance might try to coordinate their calendars for family vacation, but there's not really a shared sense of purpose. Rather it's more of you've got your thing and I've got my thing, and I want to support you because I want you to be happy, but you've got your thing and I've got my thing.

And then the children, of course, all have their own things. Very frequently in the modern US American family, the children's courses are set primarily by their school environment, and the parents have little input or influence over the curriculum that's chosen for their children, the values that are taught to their children, and the children just kind of come and go, taking their instruction primarily just from what they're taught in that particular system.

But they're not part of an overall family unit. They don't really know what dad does. They may go to the office here and there, but they don't really know what dad does. They don't really know what mom does. And usually the work that mom and dad are engaged in is not something that the children care about or are taught to care about.

They don't understand why it's meaningful. If dad's a lawyer, well, you know, dad does legal stuff, but we don't really know much and he talks about it sometimes. And I'm trying to give even in a positive case, let's say mom and dad get together and have dinner every night with the family, which is of course one of the most important things you could do for the stability of your children.

Let's say that does happen. Very frequently the children aren't interested in or the parents aren't able to articulate things in a way that will engage the children. And so the lives of the modern US American family, even a family that is together physically, those lives tend to be disconnected and going in different directions.

And there's not much of a shared sense of purpose, a sense of family mission, a sense of family identity even. Well, I oppose those things. I think there should be a sense of shared purpose, mission, a sense of family identity. And I don't fully know exactly how that's created.

I don't think you have to have a family business in order to create that sense of family mission, but I think a family business might serve that goal. I don't think you have to be physically together in order to build a sense of coherent identity as far as the values of a certain family, but I think that working together can help those values to be absorbed and assimilated by the younger generation.

And so for a long time I've wanted to be able to work from home so that my wife and I could build a more integrated family unit, a family that's going to mean something, that's going to do something throughout the course of history, not a bunch of individuals who happen to share a name.

And I've always seen being able to work from home as an important component of that. And that's been a primary motivator for me. Another part of my own personal vision as far as why I've always wanted to be able to work from home is just the simple coziness of being able to do intellectually stimulating work in a cozy environment.

Most of my personal experience in many office environments, I learned that those environments didn't have much of a sense of coziness. I guess to use some of the modern vernacular, it's hard to create that sense of hygge in the modern office environment, whereas I've always seen that as home.

Now part of that would be simply due to the fact that I was born and raised in a very welcoming environment. My home was always a place of joy, of peace, of serenity. It was always a place of warmth and love. And so because of that, I associate home with all of those things.

I know people who have a different background, people for whom their home experience did not relate to those positive attributes and virtues, they have a very different sense of home. I've always liked to be in the home and offices are often very sterile, very cold, very uninviting. And I like to be in a cozy place and be able to do interesting and meaningful work.

And I always thought that would be best done in a house, at home. I've also been strongly drawn to some of the financial benefits and lifestyle benefits of working from home. For example, obvious lowering of expenses by removing the cost of commuting. That's always been meaningful to me. If you could remove the cost of commuting, remove the cost of second car ownership, et cetera, you can dramatically lower your personal expenses.

And that's assuming even that you don't take advantage of some of the various tax benefits of dedicating some portion of your home to your personal business. But also some of the larger benefits from the geographic flexibility, the idea of geo-arbitrage, being able to live in the less expensive part of town that's still a beautiful place, but because it doesn't have easy access to the downtown business center, you can get there for a cheaper price and have a higher lifestyle for a cheaper price.

Or some of the geographic arbitrage that can be gained on a national or international basis. If you can live in Mississippi and earn at New York City wages, your lifestyle in Mississippi can be very, very enjoyable and you can also salt away quite a bit of money. Similarly, if you can live in Thailand and earn at London wage rates, your lifestyle can be excellent and your future financial freedom can be enhanced by that geographic arbitrage.

When you bring in concepts such as being able to earn income outside of the jurisdiction of any particular government by building your life in such a way that you can move outside of the taxing authorities, etc., there are significant benefits to being able to do work that's not geographically restricted.

And some of, I guess frankly, the last reason is just that it's always been a better perceived lifestyle. I've always wanted my Monday mornings not to be painful. And I remember so many times the idea when I was younger, we would, I guess I remember in college, I went to a Super Bowl Sunday party one time and it went late, the game went late and I'm on the East Coast, so of course that means that it's the latest of any of the time zones in the United States.

And people party hard on Sunday afternoon and then they dread Monday morning. Well, I've always thought, why don't you just move Monday morning back and if you're going to be up late on Sunday for something that's important to you, just move Monday morning back and instead of starting at eight, start at 11.

And that just seems to me to deliver a better perceived lifestyle. Those were some of the reasons why, since I was in my teens, I've wanted to work from home. Now, reality is that some of those things are truly excellent, truly nice, truly good. And some of those visions matched up with reality.

But of course the opposite is also true. As with much goal setting, I had a more utopian idea and I wasn't able to fairly appreciate some of the benefits of not working from home. Whereas today I look back and I recognize some of those benefits as being things that I miss.

So let's start with the reality. The reality of working from home is it is and can be very comfortable and very pleasurable. You can build for yourself a very nice environment. And although I've been in some beautifully decorated offices over the years by people who were able to generate a very warm atmosphere in their private office, that's nothing compared to what you can create within your own home.

You can create a beautiful study, a beautiful work environment that is exactly how you want it to be. And that can be very, very comfortable. And in a moment I'll talk about some solutions, but I love the solution of having an office that is on the same physical property as your house but is outside of the house.

And I think of some of those types of offices that I've been fortunate to be in, of wealthy people who have created their perfect office environment. And they're just the kind of places where you love to be, where I really enjoy being. And it's easier to do and it's really nice and comfortable and pleasurable.

I really love the ability to integrate my work life with some of my other life events, especially life events in the world of my children. By not having to commute into the city, I'm more available for those moments, those times, those special afternoons, those special activities. If it's a particularly beautiful day and my brain is not working, I've learned instead of just chaining myself to the desk to try to beat it out, I've learned just to say, "I'm done," and to go.

A number of years ago I had an experience where I was just totally stuck. I could not seem to create and I was so frustrated. And I would go, this was after the course of a couple of days and I had nothing to give. And finally I just threw up my hands and I said, "That's it." And I took my family to the beach and we went and hung out at the beach and played on the beach and I came home from that experience.

And instantly several things were clear. I sat down in front of a microphone, I cranked out a whole bunch of particularly useful work, but it didn't come to me while I was sitting at my desk. It came to me while I was playing with my children at the beach.

That's the kind of opportunity that very few people have when they work in an office, but you might more frequently be able to have when you work from home. In addition, I have to say that the idea of geo-arbitrage is really cool. It's really, really powerful. I haven't fully appreciated it until I've been traveling.

I had not fully appreciated it until our travels the past few months. But when you can earn an income independent of a geographic location, that's really, really powerful because it opens up the world to you, literally the world. And from a planning perspective, I had never appreciated that as fully as I probably should have until the past couple of months.

I could live and work from anywhere and I'm so grateful. I'm so blessed to be able to do that. And yet it is really, really neat when you can move and you can live in the place that you want to live. I've met so many people living in places that they never thought they would be able to.

And a lot of it has been gained through being able to earn their income remotely. If you go and look in some of the resort towns, we've passed through a number of resort towns. If you talk to people, it used to be that those resort towns were populated primarily by some lower paid service workers and retirees who could afford to live there because they had their wealth earned independently.

But now it seems more and more that you find increasing numbers of young professionals who enjoy living in those resort towns and because they can earn their living at the end of an internet connection, they're able to live there while not yet being independently wealthy. That is really, really neat to be able to have that geo arbitrage.

It's really cool. And I think it sets the stage for all kinds of lifestyle choices that hitherto were unimaginable for the common person, the common person who didn't come from an inherited wealth base, but rather had the responsibility of earning their wealth and saving it themselves. That's really, really cool.

But working from home also comes with a number of difficulties that I hadn't previously accounted for in my own thinking. The first, it can be very hard on the family. In the early days of Radical Personal Finance, my wife and I had, I can't remember, I think we had one child and he was pretty young, a few months old, I think, when I started doing the show.

And one of the biggest challenges was transitioning from my leaving the house every day to my being home in the house every day. And that transition was a significant lifestyle change. Now I've been very fortunate that my wife is not the kind of person who spends all of her time interrupting me during my workday and wishing that I would spend time with her.

But it was hard for her to figure out, "What do I do now that Joshua's home?" Because of course, when I'm in the home, the family dynamic is different than when I'm not in the home. And so when I'm in the home and coming and going from the kitchen to get a cup of coffee or a glass of water or a snack, then I'm there, but I'm not emotionally available in the same way that I am at other times.

And that took time, that took work, and that was a significant challenge to make that transition period. But that was a relatively short-term challenge because once she got used to it and once I got used to it, it really worked out well enough. There weren't any long-term issues with that particular challenge.

But there have been other things that are challenging. For example, one of the most significant is that it's hard to get meaningful work done with young children around. Now that's the phase of life that we're in and we embrace it fully, but I have to admit that it's hard to get meaningful work done with young children around.

The microphone here at Radical Personal Finance has been silent over the last few weeks, and there have been a number of reasons for that. But one of the major reasons is just simply that I couldn't figure out how and where to get work done. I didn't have an office space, I didn't have anything set up.

I have solved that problem, I think. Today is my first day in my new mobile office space and I think it'll work out well. And thus far, today's experience has been proving that I was right. But that's hard, of course, in a small, perhaps couple hundred foot RV, but it's still not easy in a house.

For me, noise isolation is challenging. One of the most difficult things of creating audio has been noise isolation, but even isolation in terms of movement. We previously had lived in a place that had a separate bedroom that didn't have a pass-through, but right before traveling, we'd spent the last couple of years living in a place where the access to the backyard was through my office.

And that was really exasperating. I'd be in the middle of a train of thought, I'd be working on something, and then all of a sudden here would come a troop of children to go through the backyard. And there was no other real choice. It wasn't as though I could fairly say, "No, we can't go through the office right now," but it would be so disruptive that it was just physically hard to be able to focus.

And so I found that it's very difficult with young children. Don't kid yourself about it. If you have young children and you want to work from home, don't kid yourself. It's tough. It's really tough. To figure out an environment where that will actually work. They are very disruptive. I'm so thankful for them.

They are incredibly disruptive. Of course, also in the home, it's easy for you to get distracted. It's easy to allow yourself to become distracted. Now your distractions may be different than mine. My Achilles heel is simply the internet. There's so much that I can get distracted into and drawn into that it's easy for me to waste hours on things that really don't contribute to my own personal goals and my own personal lifestyle.

Some people have the distraction of television or of activities around their house that they would like to engage in. But it's challenging if you don't have a place that you're used to doing work. It's challenging to make that switch from personal mode to business mode because I don't want to be productive 24 hours a day.

I don't want to spend all of my time working and putting forth work, but I do want to be productive when I'm working. There's something about having a commute of some kind, whether it's a walk across the property, down the street, a drive across town. A commute can allow you that transitional space where you get your mind ready for work.

And then on the way home, you get your mind ready for home and you enter those two different things. Frequently, what I have found is it's hard to transition from work mode to home mode. I may be sitting at my desk working and then I recognize, "Ah, it's time for me to quit." And I'm in the middle of thinking about things that are so far away from my personal life or I'm concerned about something or I'm stressed about a major decision.

And then I come home and it's hard for me to put a smile on my face and say, "Hi, honey, I'm home." My wife and I have this little tradition that it's silly, but I do the way of transitioning to let her know that I'm here and available is I come out the door and I say, "Hi, honey, I'm home." And it helps me to transition.

But still, I wish for the time. Sometimes I need about 10 or 15 minutes in the car to adjust and to transition. Working from home is often very lonely, especially if you're not involved in a virtual team environment of some kind. It can be just very lonely. It can be very difficult to stay focused.

If you don't have someone to talk to about what you're doing, about what the next actions are, those meetings, it's of course easy to hate on those team meetings where you sit down around a conference table and try to figure out what's next. But frankly, those are very helpful to help you figure out what to do.

And when it's just you at your desk, it's hard to figure out what to do. Now, I think that can be mitigated to some extent if you're involved with a team, co-workers, employees, people who you're interacting with. Then that aspect can be mitigated. But it is a truth. And often you miss out on just talking to adults and having those natural ad hoc conversations.

One of the biggest challenges experienced by, that is often joked about by stay-at-home moms is the desire for adult conversation. When you spend all your day talking to little children, just having an adult conversation can feel like a breath of fresh air. Well, I have certainly experienced that. One of the things that I'm grateful for, having worked from home, I have a much deeper appreciation of what it's like to be a stay-at-home mom than I think many fathers do.

And if you're a father, I encourage you, perhaps it would be good for you to spend a few days at home to understand what happens in your wife's daily routine. A lot of fathers who go off to the workplace often have very naive understandings of what happens in the home.

But that rabbit trail aside, it's the same experience that I've had working from home that often you just wish for a friendly conversation. What happens is, at least for me, if I don't get a chance to talk to many people in person, I miss out on the normal human interaction.

And yet because of the availability of the internet, all I see is internet speech. And I struggle to understand how much of internet speech is real. I have friends who I've spoken with on this and they say, "Well, all internet speech is unreal." I don't quite buy that. And by here I mean, I'm referring to the vicious commentary, the ugliness of speech, the personal attacks that seem to flow so freely from one person to another.

I don't think that that's all unreal. Those are real people who are typing those things out. But I don't also think that it's all entirely real. And for me, I so desperately need to get out into the world and to spend time with people who I'm not interacting with on the internet to regain a little bit of confidence in some sense of normalcy, of people's willingness and ability to interact with each other as humans, to have civil conversations with one another.

And that's been a real challenge for me personally, to identify the lines. Where is the line between what's real and what's not? Interacting at the internet versus other things. So that's one experience. And so it's very easy when working from home to get lonely. And I never appreciated how important those ad hoc conversations really were.

The ability to talk with somebody at work and just to bump into them, just bumping into people and enjoying those off-topic conversations, I have a greater appreciation for them now than ever before. It can also be just simply very boring to be in the same place all the time.

If you are in your house, even if you love your house, if you're in your house and you live in your house and you work in your house, that can be really boring. And if your personality is anything like mine, at least, you can crave a little bit of external stimulation.

And so you might find that you wind up underappreciating being at home and you might find that you wind up going out more to compensate for that sameness of routine, that sameness of place. Now that might be a good thing. You might further embrace the opportunities for adventure in your local town because you have more energy and more desire to go and embrace those.

It could also be a down, a not so good thing. You might wind up spending more money than you otherwise thought you would. But those are some real, real factors. So in short, it's not all good and it's not all bad, just like with anything. It's not a utopia.

There are certain problems that can be mitigated and can be solved. But I think those problems and ideas that can be improved, whether you're in an office environment or in a home environment, I think they can be mitigated both ways. I don't intend to go back to the corporate world.

Now if the circumstances of my life ended up leading me in that direction, I wouldn't be opposed to it. I'd actually appreciate certain things more than I appreciate them now. Just like I've previously recorded shows on the value of being an employee. When you are an employee, it's easy to look at the value of being a business owner and to say, "Well, everything would be better in the world of self-employment." And as a business owner, it's very easy to look back over at the world of employment and say, "Man, I wish I just were an employee.

I wish I just had some vacation days or somebody to call in sick to or stated tasks where I didn't have to figure out what to do and also do it. I just went in and did what my boss told me to." I think it's the same with this particular environment.

But here's my best analysis at trying to solve some of the problems both ways. First of all, in the office environment. The major problems that I used to have with an office environment were the requirement to be in that office when I didn't need to be in that office.

I can remember being there and it's 4.42 and I've finished all my work and yet I know I can't leave till 5 and yet I've got to just keep on being there at my desk. And you kind of get to the point where like, "What's the point of this?

I want to go." Other examples would be days that you have people in town, friends of yours who visit, and you want to take the day off and show them around town, but you know you can't really do that because you've got to be at work. Or it's a beautiful day and you want to go surfing or snow skiing and take advantage of the weather, but you can't because you've got to be there in the office.

Well, I think that problem can be solved in a couple of ways. First, that problem is largely solved by moving up the ranks. If you are an entry-level, line-level employee, you're probably going to be required to be there at those certain times. But if you are a management-level employee or an owner or partner-level employee, you can pretty much come and go as you like because you're held accountable for your results, not for your time.

And so you can solve that problem by moving up. You can also solve it by choosing different kinds of work. That's always been a high priority, and it continues to be a high priority for me. I would very much not want to go into a job environment where I were required to be there from 9 a.m.

to 5 p.m. every day. So you can just think carefully about your job. And instead of choosing a job of being a banker, you can choose a job of selling life insurance. The financial skills associated with both of them, but one of them is going to require you to be at the teller window from 8 to 5 or whatever those banker hours are.

The other is going to give you that personal autonomy. So you can make those choices and solve those problems in your own life if you're in an office environment by simply moving up or making a different career choice. One other strategy is just appreciate that with the 8 to 5 comes the ability to leave at 5.

I don't think it's a good idea really unless you're really convinced and you can have your work pay off with your career by really putting in the hours. I don't think if you're paid for an hourly job, I think you should leave at that time. I had a family member who was a government school teacher.

One of the things I most appreciated about him was he left as soon as he didn't stick around and put in an extra 20 hours of work per week in the evenings being a government school teacher. He left at 3.30 or whatever the time was and he made sure that he got all the work needed to be done during that time.

There's no reason for you to spend more time at a job unless it's actually going to pay off in the long term. But the great thing is when you leave that kind of job, you can leave it and there's no stress that follows you. My wife was always very good about this.

She never gave her employers her cell phone numbers. She never interacted with them. This was in the era when it was common to do that, but she didn't put her work email on her phone. She just always left. I think that that would benefit many of us today to put those things in place.

Your employer might need a copy of your cell phone number for the emergency files, but you should never answer it. Don't answer the text messages, don't answer the emails and keep that line drawn. Unless it's going to pay off for you, just take advantage of that. And then you can, instead of substituting that, instead of having that frustration about the fact that it's 4.42 and you can't leave, you can appreciate the fact that at 5.01 you're free of the job.

And so that can be helped. Another major problem with the office is working with people that you don't like. Just being exposed and being forced into a circumstance and a situation with people you don't like. I simply point out to you this, you're not forced to be there. So leave and go find an office with people that you do like.

Other problems with the offices in terms of the commute, those can be solved with planning. For example, you can live close to work and you might work downtown, but if you also live downtown then you can enjoy living that downtown lifestyle. Or you can look into some transportation route into your town where instead of having to sit in traffic on the highway, you think about being on a bus route or on a bike route.

I am profoundly convinced of the value of buying a house or renting an apartment that's closer to work, even if it costs you more money. I think that's a good lifestyle decision, a good expense to bear if you can make the numbers work. I'm also very much convinced of the value of choosing a neighborhood that is close to a transportation route, such as a bus route or a train route that would be convenient to get you to your office location.

And I think that if you're working in a job that you have this kind of choice over, you should choose your job based upon its location. Very frequently people will choose a job in a location that doesn't fit some of those things. And I'm talking about the kinds of jobs where there are many versions of those.

I recently was interacting with somebody in a grocery store and I found out that they lived several towns over, but they commuted into this town. And I thought, "Why do you commute into this town? You're working at a grocery store. Just go and get this same kind of job, but instead of working at a grocery store, work at an auto parts store or something so you can avoid this commute." Because so much of your money is being sucked up in this commute.

So if you work at a job that's very fungible, where you can substitute one job for another one, then choose a job that is close to a bus stop or close to a train stop or has a beautiful bike path. We passed through in our travels a town that has this beautiful bike path going from one end of town to the other.

And you could easily choose to live a couple miles outside of downtown, but by choosing a place that was near that bike path, you could bike in on this beautiful greenway into the downtown urban environment. That's a really strong decision that I think really would pay off. And you should be willing to pay more money to enhance that lifestyle.

And there are those benefits of being in an office that if you appreciate them and you plan around mitigating some of the things that you don't like and figure out how those can be mitigated for you personally, you can really improve your quality of life without working from home.

Now back to working from home, I think the most important thing about working from home is the optionality of it. The fact, the thing I most appreciate about working from home is the fact that I can work from home or I can choose not to work from home. Because then it gives me that sense of freedom.

But you don't have to have a home office to do that. I think it's nice to have, if you're working in your home, it's really worth it to pursue establishing a separate facility for working, meaning a separate room, a separate suite in the basement. I think an ideal situation is to have a separate physical structure.

Now that helps me in terms of sound isolation with my unique type of work, but it'll help you with sound isolation as well, being able to make conference calls or business calls without hearing the dog barking in the background, et cetera. And so if you can build a separate facility, a simple backyard shed will suffice that you go to, then you can have a place where work is done and where you go home.

One of the entrepreneurs that I interacted with that I just thought had just the most beautiful facility, he had about a five acre farm. It's not a farm, a five acre property in a somewhat rural subdivision. And he had the house, but he had converted the barn to this wonderful office and conference space.

And the walk down to the barn was not insignificant. It was perhaps 100, 200 yards, 100, 200 yards. It wasn't across the 30 foot backyard, it was a couple of hundred yards. And yet that walk of a couple of hundred yards was ideal because it provided that transitional space where he was going to work.

And yet his facility in the formerly converted barn was beautiful. It was so comfortable and cozy. It was the kind of place that you really wanted to be. And I think that's the best type of work from home environment to have. It's really nice to have a separate facility for working.

That solves some of those family problems. That solves some of the ability to get meaningful work done with young children around. And it also gives you some measure of flexibility while not removing those benefits of working from home. I think it's well worth considering the modern co-working movement. In my travels, I've tried to visit a number of co-working spaces and facilities.

And those co-working spaces and facilities, I think, really do meet some of those needs of entrepreneurs or of independent workers where they have the ability to interact with people on that ad hoc basis, even though their work is independent. And that gives them the ability to move and to travel, but you're not confined to one specific location, but it gives you those benefits of being in an office space where you have a separate space.

And that's why they're growing so much. I expect that trend to continue. And I think it's a very positive and healthy trend. And I would like to support it in any way I can. I think the factor of loneliness of working from home by yourself can be solved and should be solved by developing a team and/or by cultivating more meaningful social interaction outside of work.

My wife and I have talked a lot about this in terms of your social relationships. What I realized is how much of our relationships are simply there because of factors we didn't intentionally choose. What I mean is those relationships are frequently with co-workers just because that's who we know.

And we don't take the time or effort to cultivate relationships with those who we'd really like to spend time with, but we may not choose to work with. So I try to look at that as an opportunity to embrace more social activity, but more intentional social activity. Some of the boringness of being in the same place all the time, I think that also can be compensated by taking advantage of the fact that you are location independent.

Here, I think, again, working in a co-working space or renting an office is well worth considering, but do it in a way or place that solves your personal desires. As I've traveled and stayed in RV parks and campgrounds, I've interacted with a lot of people who do live and work on the road full-time or part-time.

One of the most interesting people with whom I interacted was this man I met. And he had this big, beautiful motorhome, big, probably 40-something foot, class A motorhome, practically brand new. It was about two years old. He'd already put 50-something thousand miles on it, even though it was two years old and he bought it brand new.

And as I inquired of his situation, he works for a large company doing remote customer service work. And so his job requires him to be on the phone and on the computer with customers during the entire normal 40-hour work week. But what he has chosen to do is to spend about 50% of his time traveling during the year.

So he and his wife, his wife also works independently, he and his wife have a house in a big city and they spend a good amount of time there. But then they also go on the road a lot. Sometimes she goes, sometimes she doesn't. But he works his normal 40-hour work week.

But then when he's done, he comes out his front door, he gets on the bicycle, and he loves to go and explore small towns. And so his reason for doing it is every night, instead of going to the same pizza place around the corner, every night he explores a new restaurant in a new small town.

He goes to all the small town museums and he travels and seems to spend about a week in each place. And he really likes that particular lifestyle. And with their circumstance being middle-aged, a middle-aged couple, that class A motorhome was just a palace for them, frankly. I chuckled at the fact that he doesn't even bother to put out one or two of his slides because he doesn't need the space and just feels too big inside.

That's how big and beautiful his motorhome was. So he was working in a traditional job that does allow that kind of disconnected location where he doesn't have to work in the central call center. And he was embracing it to enjoy his particular desired travel lifestyle. So that's my analysis for you, my overview of the good and the bad of working from home.

I hope that you can use it. What I have found in the past, it's often hard to see the benefits of your own situation until those benefits are lost because of a life change. And if you're working a job, it's often hard to see the benefits of that job until you leave and try something else.

And so I hope that if you've experienced frustration with your office job, I hope that these ideas will help you to appreciate a few things about your office job. I believe that those frustrations can be mitigated. And if you've experienced frustration with your home-based job, then I hope that these ideas will help you to mitigate some of that frustration.

Frankly, none of us have anything to complain about because we live in the most incredible time in human history where we can choose the work that we do more than any past generation has ever been able to do. A few months ago, I taught the Radical Personal Finance Guide to Career and Income Planning.

And as I went through and developed the curriculum for that course, one of the ideas that impacted me so deeply was how incredibly blessed we are to be able to choose these circumstances of our life. That is fundamentally new. Throughout human history, you did the work that your parents did or that your parents were able to apprentice you to somebody to learn.

You worked in the place where you grew up because you didn't know many of those options. And if you did pursue something else, for example, if you decided you want to get on a ship and sail across the ocean or walk across a country and start a new life, that often came with the complete abandonment of everything with which you were familiar.

But in today's world, very frequently people get to try new things, new places, new lifestyles without entirely abandoning all of the old and comfortable and familiar. The best example of this would be the embrace of modern air travel. If you look at how many people are able to move across the country or move across the world and yet still travel home for the holidays, the fact that these options are available to a swollen middle class is really incredible.

What once was the luxury of the elite wealthy is now a commonplace experience of the middle class. And we should be grateful for those opportunities. We should be grateful for the many choices that we have in our world. And in any job, any occupation, any type of business, you can take that and you can either adjust the circumstances of that job to suit you a little bit more, or you can find a different expression of that job or business that will suit your personality and suit your own personal goals.

In closing, I would encourage you, take your own situation seriously. Consider what's good, what's working, what's not. You know, as I sit here in my new digs of my office that will travel with me on the road, I'm pleased with it. One day working in it so far, pleased.

But it's because of just major problems. And so embrace the problems because they can lead you to good solutions, but recognize that you can solve those problems. If you need to buy something, buy something. If you need to move, move. If you need to change jobs, just change. Have the courage to embrace what you think will make your circumstances better and try it.

And if it doesn't work, change. Try it. If it doesn't work, change. I do encourage you, don't abandon if your visions or your ideas are like mine, where you want something more than a disconnected and fragmented lifestyle. Don't abandon that desire. Just look at how it can be accomplished in the best way possible.

When I was growing up, my father had a traditional engineering job, but he did also have the benefit of a small enough company where they were flexible with him in the early days when such flexibility was not entirely appreciated. I still remember my dad coming home one time and showing us his new laptop computer.

It would have been sometime in the 90s. And he was always on the leading edge of the tech world. We had a computer in our home when few other families did because of the type of work that he did. But that gave him the benefits of being able to really have a major impact and do some pretty cool stuff with us as children.

There were many times when he worked from home for a season. And there was one season where I particularly remember that he was able to negotiate his work environment in such a way that he did a huge amount of work in building our own house. But he was able to do all of those things without abandoning a traditional office job.

So I'm convinced that it's possible in whatever circumstance you are to look for opportunities, to improve it, and to find it. You don't always have to pursue a drastic change. Hope these ideas have helped you with an honest analysis of the good and bad of working from home. One thing I forgot.

In closing, in my experience, the most important factor is having work that matters to you. You have to have work that matters to you. If you don't have work that matters to you and you try to work from home, I think you'll spend most of your time wasted, wasting it, because you won't want to do the work.

But if you have work that matters to you, then when working from home, you may be like me frustrated that you can't get more work done and appreciating the benefits of the office. Well, the same thing goes in reverse. If you're working in an office and you don't have work that matters to you, you'll be frustrated by the office environment.

And then if you have work that matters to you, you'll appreciate those certain things and you'll deal with the negative. I almost forgot, because in conclusion, that point really, I think, is one of the most important things. If you have work that matters, then that's what will attract your attention and your focus.

And if you don't have work that matters to you, then you'll find whichever circumstance you're in to be difficult. So if you're looking for a place to start, focus on finding and developing work that matters to you. Hey Cricket customers, Max with ads is included with your Cricket $60 unlimited plan at no additional cost.

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