Beware of people offering you favors. Not everyone who says they are doing you a favor is in fact doing a good thing for you. Even if the concept is good the final result may not be so great.
Case in point:
Recently my wife's company started a policy where you could work from home 2 days a week. They said it was to help people off set the costs of commuting to work. Initially that sounds like a great idea! Sounds like a good way to save some money in these tough times.
Well, not really. At least not for us.
When you add it up, having my wife work from home 2 days a week doesn't save us anything.
First, her commuter train ticket into New York City is a monthly pass. To pay by the week, by the 10-trip, or even by the day would cost at least $100 more a month. In other words, there is no cheaper train service to her job. So she is stuck buying the monthly ticket even though she would only be using it three days a week.
Commuter parking at the train station is also monthly so there is no savings there either.
The train station is only a few blocks from our home so any savings for gas to drive to/from the station is literally pocket change at best.
And we will still have to take our children to day care even when she is home because you can't conduct phone calls and get much done with a bunch of crying kids around (in spite of what you see on TV commercials about the person who left the big office and work from home – it just doesn't work that way).
So at the end of it all the "favor" of letter her work from home 2 days a week is an empty gesture at best for us. I'm sure that others in the company will find this a great benefit. But you can't prove it by us.
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