How Much Money I’ve Saved From Not Commuting to Work for the Past Month (and what I did with the savings 💲)

Last week I took a short break from writing a blog post. I don’t want to make any excuses but I needed to take a break to focus on spending time with my husband, speaking with my family on the phone to make sure they are alright, and taking the time to just…breathe.

I’m happy to say that I’m back! I have a more lighthearted blog post this week. Working from home for almost a month has had it’s challenges but there is one bright spot. I haven’t had to commute to the office!

That means that my commute costs have been brought down to a whopping $0. That is unless I count the $60 a month cost of high-speed internet. However, for the sake of this post, I’m looking at the amount of money that I’ve saved by not taking the AC transit bus and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to my office in South of Market in San Francisco, California. I live in the “southeast” bay area which is about 20 minutes north of San Jose so I was easily taking 1 hour and 20 minutes each way to trek to the office. I was very blessed that my company allows me to have the flexibility to work from home. I work in tech sales so sometimes my phone calls would not allow me to have a break to commute into the office. I often worked only three days in the office and spent the other two days working from home. Sometimes I’d work only one day from home, sometimes none, but had an average of two days working from home every week.

I saved a whopping $189 dollars by not commuting this past month!

That may not sound like a lot of money, but that was money coming directly out of my paycheck to shuffle me to an office that wasn’t absolutely necessary to the function of my job. I’m able to complete all of my tasks online and even when I was in office, was often busy with emails and phone calls out of our call rooms.

My commute consisted of taking the AC transit bus that was a three minute walk away from my apartment, and then catching the Warm Springs BART train from the Fremont station into the city.

I often took this time to write down blog ideas, work on drafts for my next blog, read e-books on my phone, and catch up on my latest podcasts. However, was it worth the $189 dollars? Hmmmmmmmm. Not really.

I’ve been able to do all of these to do all of these things working from home in the past month and reclaim almost three hours of my day back. Time is such a precious commodity and I’m thankful to have that time back. I’ve used it to read more books (my goal is to read 5 books per month), go on long walks, and spend more time cooking and catching up with my husband when he comes home from work.

So what have I done with that extra money?

I’d honestly love to tell you that I saved it all, but I didn’t. I have saved about $100 of it and spent the rest on house supplies such as dishwashing pods, laundry detergent, a new pair of pants from Everlane because they had a great sale (don’t judge me, I don’t have any proper dress slacks) and two new shirts from J Crew.

This has been an eye opener to me and fueled my desire to transition back to 100% remote work in the near future. I am currently in a new role and want to feel comfortable in my ability to hit my sales quota for the entire year before requesting to become a full time remote worker with my company. I have experience working remotely but want to make sure I feel setup for success when that does happen with my current company.

Have you been saving money from not commuting to work? Have you gained back extra time?

If you’d like to share you experience feel free to comment below.