5 Tips for Staying Financially Happy and Physically Healthy While Working from Home

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, many companies have implemented a work-from-home strategy for the sake of their employees’ safety and to reduce the transmission of virus. However, this means that you unavoidably have to stay at home around the clock. How can you deal with this change of your lifestyle and make sure to be financially happy and physically healthy? Here are 5 tips for you.

1) Create balance in your life
During a normal situation, you’d start doing your work once you arrive at the office. You’d go for lunch at noon (with a question of all time: “what will we eat today?”), and never want to talk about work during your break. You’d go back home in the evening, leaving all your works behind at the office, and do no more work until the next day. 

As you can see, by working at the office, you can effectively manage your work and leisure time. However, when it comes to working from home, it turns out that you need to work almost 24 hours a day.

In order to solve this problem, we need to set up a clear work plan. This plan can be made at the end of the day, or early in the morning before you start doing your work. Let’s plan for the tasks on which you’ll work and focus on each of them. Moreover, don’t ever forget to relax your eyes every 1 hour. Stand up and do some stretching and be away from your computer or laptop whenever possible in order to give your body a chance to get relaxed. 

2) Beware of your expenses 
Talking about working from home, definitely some of your expenses may remain the same, while some may be less or even increasing. Let’s take a look into the increasing portion—how can you avoid it?

• Food expenses: For those of you who do all the cooking stuff, this portion of expenses may get less. However, if you’re not a good chef, these expenses may be multiplied as you rely more on food delivery services. Anyway, a solution to this is to cook for yourself sometimes. Otherwise, you may cook your own rice and order a big set of side dishes which would take a couple of days to finish, and that means you’ll be able to save your money for a couple of meals as well. 
• Electricity charges: Working at home gives you an unwanted chance to stay home during the hottest time of the day. By keeping an air conditioner on for or almost 24 hours, your electricity charges will unsurprisingly jump up. Anyway, you can save this cost by turning on your fan instead in the morning, or setting your air conditioner to a slightly higher temperature while turning on the fan concurrently to reduce cooling load. Last but not least, don’t forget to pull all the plugs or switch off your appliances and gadgets if you no longer use them, or when any electronic device is fully charged. These are simple ways to save the electricity costs.
• Shopping expenses: When everything is available online, online shopping applications are something we always turn ourselves to. It’s time for you to take a deep breath, considering whether the item you want is really important before pressing the ‘Add to Cart’ button. Think to yourself first before making a decision: if I buy the item, will I use it immediately or leave it unpacked for a few days? If the latter is your answer, such item may not be that important to you. Don’t forget to take a long deep breath before pressing the ‘Add to Cart’ button!

3) It’s time for self-development 
If you can successfully create balance in your life as what being told in Item 1, you’ll surely have time to develop your own self, because you no longer need to spend time on the road. No more distant travel to work with less time spent on your lunch break and no more queuing means you get extra time for self-development. You’re recommended to first go with your favorite activities, such as reading books, learning online courses, listening to topics you’re interested in on Podcast, or even do some physical activities.

Working at home limits walking steps. Working in a sitting position for a long time may make you feel sore and get headache easily. 

During your lunch break or after work, let’s do some simple exercises like stretching or yoga for approximately 10-15 minutes by learning from YouTube to brighten your brains and relieve muscle tension. 
If you want to take this chance to get in shape and to stun your colleagues on the first day getting back to the office, you can do it as well by setting up an exercise schedule, 3-5 days per week. Surely, you’ll be healthier with a good shape as an extra gift. 

4) Turn your hobby into a business
It’s undeniable that all of you do have at least a hobby. Despite of this tough period, you got a chance to spend much more time with yourself. Let’s review your skills and capacities—what you can do and what you like—your favorite hobby may be potential enough to generate incomes!

Some of you may like cooking. Nevertheless, as previously you had to go to work almost everyday, you might not find a good time to cook that much. The chance is here! Grab it to practice your skills, strengthening your capacity to generate incomes by selling delicious meals online.

Some of you like reading books, watching series/movies, how about launching a Facebook page, featuring clear and concise contents in a form of articles or infographic. If writing is something you’re not good at, then let’s speak out instead! You’re highly recommended to create a Podcast or YouTube channel, recording video clips telling about what you’ve read or watched. With these available platforms, you may become an influencer some day and that means another source of incomes. 

5) It’s time to set up an investment plan
Working from home means we still have incomes, and now is the best time to start planning for investments as future is insecure. While many people have been affected by the crisis, you still have incomes. Well, yes, but don’t be complacent of your present security. 

The term “investment” doesn’t always have something to do with risks. You can set off by setting aside a contingency budget to be spent when you’re unemployed. This is also a way of investment. You’re recommended to set aside 3-6 times of your monthly expenses, or even up to 12-18 times, to make you feel more financially secure. In addition, you can invest 10-20% of your monthly income in DCA (Dollar-Cost-Average), or gradually invest it in low-risk liquid assets, e.g. money market fund or short-term fixed income fund, on a monthly basis.

For example:
Your monthly expense is THB 20,000, so your contingency budget should be at least THB 60,000-120,000. With this contingency budget, you can live your life for 3-6 months while your fixed monthly expenses remain unaffected, even when your income is being unreliable. 

In this regard, for those of you who are interested in setting up financial targets through mutual funds, you are highly recommended to first understand the nature of products (funds), conditions, returns, and risks before making a decision. 

For more information about Principal Asset Management, please visit https://www.principal.th/th/mutual-fundth

**Investors are highly recommended to first understand the nature of products (funds), conditions, returns, and risks before making a decision.