Not specifically about moving permanently but I’ve been WFH since March and a thought that occurrs to me is regarding holidays.
My wife has a job that she can set her own hours and days for, the kids get long summer holidays.
If the WFH becomes standard I’m sorely tempted to book much longer breaks away and simply work for a good proportion of it whilst still being away with the family. I can’t think why I wouldn’t be able to do that but somehow it still feels wrong. No point worrying about it just yet as we are about to enter another lockdown but when the opportunity arises I’m going to explore that option.
Somethign else for the OP to consider …
Widespread WFH may be a more temporary than your new mortgage in your new town. If 3 years from now the situation has shifted and your employer is not so enamored of WFH, what then?
Pre-COVID one of the obstacles to any one person doing WFH was that the majority of their co-workers would still be in the office gathering that politically valuable face time with the boss & colleagues. Choosing to WFH was choosing to be much more “out of touch, out of sight, and out of mind” than your peers = competitors.
If the WFH pendulum swings back, having chosen to move out of commuting range amounts to choosing to be that “out of touch, out of sight, and out of mind” minority. Or to change jobs to one that is local or with a company that still embraces majority WFH. Which latter changes might be hard, impossible, or entail major pay & benefit changes.
IOW, ISTM that right now in late 2020, moving to Bumfuck to live cheap while WFHing sounds like a semi-permanent reaction to what might be a mostly temporary situation.
You could rent out your home and try working remotely for a year. Barbados has a visa program just for that situation.
Well, I’d say it looks pretty close to deceiving the employer, which is rarely a good idea IMHO. On the other hand, I think cutting salary purely based on home address being in a different location is ridiculous.That is, assuming it has been determined that the employee in question can work remotely 100% of the time. Even if occasional site visits are required, it seems to me that the fair way to deal with that is to keep salary the same but not pay any travel expenses incurred between ‘home’ and ‘work’ locations. But then it starts to get messy if multiple locations are involved, I suppose.
My employer has recently appointed someone to a fairly senior role and they live about 400 miles away from our head (and only) office. I doubt this factored in to their compensation package. For the rare occasions they might be required for a face to face meeting, they can fly down I guess.
I’ve considered doing this before and I think some colleagues have done something similar, probably just for one or two days so far but there seems no reason not to. Personally I’d only do it with prior consent - there was someone who was fired after allegedly claiming to be working from home but actually being on a skiing holiday. Fundamentally though if you are going to trust someone to do their required work from home without constant monitoring then the location shouldn’t matter.
For myself, I do wonder how well it would work - my kids are 1 and 6 so they’re not going to understand that Daddy isn’t available all day, so all of us would feel like we’re missing out. Still, I suppose not much worse than the WFH situation when they’re not at nursery/school, they (including mum) just have to deal with it - at least I can spend time with them in the mornings and evenings.
Fortunately (or not?) mine are now 13 and 15 and so far more able to amuse themselves and they aren’t missing out if I’m not with them all day every day.
In fact they went and drove to Austria last summer and had three weeks out there while I remained behind for work and only flew out to join them for the final two weeks. Had that been under the current working conditions I think I’d go with them and just work the first week out there.
Like you say, just being there in the morning an evening is still a holiday of sorts.
It also helps that my job gives me a huge amount of leeway in how I organise my day. People know what I’m working on and as long as I deliver what I promise I doubt they care whether I’m doing it in the office, on the beach or up a mountain.
Oh really? I wouldn’t think that it will be the case.
Our company likes to keep productive employees. A newbie that wants to move away from any company office might have a hard time swinging that–we like people to have some immersion in company culture. But anyone moving to our main campus isn’t going to have a problem, assuming they’re reasonably good, and they’ll get paid market rates (which are high). As an extreme example, we have offices in India where people obviously get paid much less. But a fair number of them move to the US where they get paid probably 5x as much. As far as I know, this is pretty typical for Bay Area tech companies.