Back to In-Person Work? Here’s How to Prepare Your Budget

Money Files

In today’s episode, I’m diving into a topic that’s top of mind for many of you right now—adjusting your budget as you return to work after years of working from home. If you’re one of the many federal employees who’s now required to go into the office as departments shift back to in-person work, this episode is for you.

I walk you through the financial shifts you may experience as your schedules and routines change. From adjusting grocery budgets to accounting for childcare, I cover everything you might not be thinking about, like clothes, tolls, and even pet care, now that you’re back at the office full time.

I share practical strategies for making sure your budget is aligned with these changes to help mitigate financial stress and avoid impulse spending. If you’re preparing to transition back to the office, tune in for actionable advice on reviewing and amending your budget to stay on track to meet your financial goals.

Consider these financial implications of transitioning back to the office:

  • [01:30] Preparing for new expenses
    • [02:50] Food 
    • [05:28] Transportation
    • [10:16] Clothing
    • [12:00] Childcare
  • [13:42] Reviewing your schedule to anticipate expenses

Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to review your budget and prepare for new expenses as you transition from working from home to going back into the office full time. 

Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.

If you loved the discussion about financial shifts when transitioning to in-office work, check out my episode, How Financial Patterns Can Help Shape Your Budget!

Transcript for “Back to In-Person Work? Here’s How to Prepare Your Budget

Intro: Hi, and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.

Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money File. So I actually want to talk to you today, especially if you don’t know this, I live in the DC area and because I actually live in DC, like I have a Washington DC address, which I think is very important to talk about because some people say they live in DC and then you ask them where they live and they say Ellicott City, Maryland, which is not DC but anyways, I digress. So I live in DC. By way of living in DC I have a lot of clients that are in DC and a lot of my clients work for the federal government. So if you have been watching the news, there has been a recent executive order that federal employees have to return to work. So I don’t know all the nitty gritty and the logistics of it, but I do know that it has impacted several of my clients.

I’m sure that it will also impact several of my listeners. As I’m talking to clients in the upcoming weeks, there are things that I am thinking about. So how I can best support them because going from working from home basically five days a week, some people are four days a week so the shift from working at home from like 2020 to early 2025, so almost five years of working from home and then returning to work is going to have an impact on your budget. Without saying there are just things, especially if you have kids, there are life choices. There are a lot of different things that you’ve probably made in the last five years if you’ve had the opportunity to work from home. And now if you have to return to work, even if it’s not for the full five days a week, there are going to be expenses that we want to walk through and that we want to adjust.

So then that way you can feel like that’s one less thing that you have to stress about and it’s one less thing that you need to think through on your own. So with one of my clients, she actually is a mom. She has three kids. So she has been working from home for like I said, like the last five years so we’ve been thinking about what is going to shift now that you are going back into the office and how do we make sure that we account for these shifts and how do we also make sure that we monitor what we think are the shifts and then go back and monitor and adjust to actually refine like what the actual shifts are. So first thing that we talked about was food, her food budget, I’m anticipating will probably shift. 

And let me tell you how I think it’s going to shift. I think that weekly groceries might stay the same. They could also increase a little bit just because like when you are at home, you have access to all the food you want to eat in the world because your kitchen is right there. And so when you are inevitably going into the grocery store and you’re thinking about having to take lunch with you, you might decide to buy some more quick options. It’s still packing your lunch, but you might buy things that you normally wouldn’t have bought when you were just eating from home. Well, you were eating from home but when you were working from home, you maybe wouldn’t have bought as many of the process things, the things that are just really quick but also can sometimes just be a little bit more money because of that convenience factor. 

So one of the things that we’re paying attention to is her grocery budget. The other thing that I told her we need to pay attention to is how much she’s going to spend on eating out because of where she works. I know sometimes there are going to be lunch dates. She wasn’t really doing a lot of lunch dates when she was working from home, like every once in a while she would go in the office and maybe her and her coworkers would go out to lunch. But I know that there’s like a cafeteria at her work. So I said, okay, we want to pay attention to eating out and then we’d also want to pay attention, I said, we should pay attention to just eating out in general for your family because I presume that especially as you adjust to this new schedule, you might be inclined to say like, oh, I’m just going to pick up dinner on the way home because of the fact that you now have a commute that you didn’t have.

And if you live in this area, you know what I mean when I say commute. Depending on what time you leave, you’re spending an hour and a half in the car to go 10 miles. And with that there are stressors that come with that. And so just understanding how your emotional state also plays into how you spend money. So those are the areas of her budget that we are looking to adjust and we’re paying attention to. And just being honest, because when life gets busy and when there are changes in your schedule, oftentimes we look for convenience. And so if we’re looking for those convenience, how does that show up with how we spend money? So we are going to be adjusting her grocery budget and we’re also going to be adjusting her eating out budget because those are two things that we’re assuming will shift.

The next thing that we are looking at are her transportation cost. And she, prior to, for the last five years, like I said, working from home, she drives everyday or several times a week because she’s like taking her kids to and from like camps that they go to. She takes her kids to school and so she does have some gas costs already, but now that she’s going to be commuting to work five days a week, we talked about, let’s make sure that we have updated how much you’re going to be spending on gas because you are going to be traveling to work each and every day. And so you’re going to be sitting in traffic. And so I presume that her gas budget is going to increase, where if she was filling up once a week, she might now be filling up twice a week, or she might be filling up three times in a two week time span.

And so we might need to add two extra tanks of gas, if you will, to her budget. And some of you are probably listening to me and being like, Keina two extra tanks of gas. But yes, like these are the things we need to think about because one of the things when I’m talking to people just getting an idea of how much they spend on gas, I ask them, how often do you fill up your tank? And so, if they tell me once a week, I’m like, okay, so you fill up, let’s say it’s $60 to fill up your tank. Let’s put in about $240 closer, maybe even $300 into your gas budget. And so even walking through a situation like this, if I know that my client fills up once a week, but now we’re going into work and so there’s more mileage and more gas usage and I know that maybe she’s not filling up twice a week, but like I said, every two weeks, if she’s going to be filling up like three times, that means she’s going to be filling up her tank six times in a month.

And so if she is putting $60 in her tank, that’s $360 a month versus if we had it at $300 before, like that $60 matters. And let me also tell you that’s where fake math can show up in your budget when we’re just not being honest about what we’re spending our money on. And those things I think right now are really important to pay attention to because we’re not in the nineties anymore. Gas isn’t, 85 cents a gallon. Gas is, I just took a walk this morning and gas at Costco where I live was like $2.94 for regular and I think it was like $3.96 for premium. So these are numbers that we want to consider and we don’t just want to shrug off, we want to pay attention to them. So we want to pay attention to transportation costs and just talked about gas. We would also want to think about if we’re in the DC area or somewhere where you have public transportation, also thinking about, okay, am I going to be increasing the amount of money that I’m using with Metro or whatever your subway system is or does it mean that I’m going to increase taking Ubers? 

Maybe I park at a parking lot and then from the parking lot I take an Uber, like that was my routine when I used to go into the office. But really just being able to connect back to when you were going into the office full time, what did it look like? And thinking about how your transportation costs have shifted in the last five years and how might we need to boost them. Also under transportation costs is thinking about like do you pay to park at work? Once again, living in DC people easily could spend 2, $300 a month to parking at work because they’re parking at a parking garage that’s right across the street from their office.

And the monthly pass could be $200 or $300 a month. We have to put that back into your budget, if that’s something that hasn’t been there in the last five years. 

Also, tolls, if you live in the DMV, tolls are like a really, really big expense. I’ve had people that are spending like $400 a month on tolls. And so these are things that we need to consider within this area. We have tolls that change based off the time of the day and the flow of the traffic. And so a toll that could be a $1.80 could be $20 later on during the day just because traffic has picked up. So those are the things that we’re going to be wanting to pay attention to and just walking through, okay, what’s our schedule? What’s our plan? What are the expenses that I have forgotten about that I’m going to start incurring again?

The next one is to think about clothes. Yes. Clothes. And this might be like a one-off expense but if you’re going back into work and you’ve been at home wearing PJ’s or you’ve been wearing a business mullet, your business on the top, PJ’s on the bottom. I don’t know if your pants in your closet still fit, I don’t know how much bread you had during the last five years, but if you haven’t put on real clothes, you might feel inclined to also take yourself on a little bit of a shopping spree. So just be honest with yourself about this and let’s actually put it into the plan. Don’t just get into a place where you’re like, no, no, I have to do this. And so because you have to do this, you allow yourself to spend however much money you spend.

You just really haven’t gone in with a plan or you haven’t gone in with a budget and so you just go in and buy clothes because you have this sense of urgency and you feel like I have to buy clothes right now. Versus you could say, okay, I’m going to make sure that I have a couple of basics. I want to go in and I want to spend $300. Moving forward, maybe I’m going to save $100 a month. And then in the spring or in the summer, I’m going to update my wardrobe a little bit more but I’ll have saved some money for that as well. So like putting a clothing expense into your budget and not just going crazy and just thinking about how you need to spend all the money right now. It’s just a great way to actually walk yourself through some of the transitions that can happen when you’re returning to work full time.

And then lastly, the thing that I’m thinking about, and this may not apply to everyone, but it’s childcare expenses because living in the DMV, if you have to be to work by eight, you have to be to work by nine, thinking about how does that change what the needs of getting your kids to school looks like? You might have to hire someone or like a babysitter, a mother’s helper in order to get your kids to school because maybe you need to leave the house by 6:45 to be able to avoid traffic. Or if your kids have to be dropped off at school early, then now you have to pay for before care expenses. Maybe your kids also need to stay at school late. And so now we need to pick up aftercare expenses. Maybe you’re going to put your kids in some afterschool programs, like different sporting clubs or things that they have at school, which I would still put this under the aftercare expenses because of the fact that your work hours are now going to conflict with your ability to pick up your children.

So I just wanted to come on in today’s podcast and really just have a real conversation with you because I know that with the clients that I have that are going back to work, especially trying to navigate just the change in schedule, especially when we’re doing this with kids, the financial piece can feel stressful. But we can use an entire coaching session to just go through and look at like, okay, what expenses do we actually expect will change? How do we make sure that we can adjust to the changes so that money isn’t the thing that I’m really stressed out about as I’m also getting used to a new schedule. If you are thinking through this, the best place to start is really just walk through your own schedule. Like what do you know will automatically change? Are there other categories that maybe I didn’t mention that are unique to your life that are going to change?

Like if you have, just thinking of this right now, if you have a pet, if you were one of the people that got an animal while we were in the pandemic and you were working from home, what does that now mean for that animal, that dog, that cat, whatever type of animal that you have. Do you now need a dog walker? Are you now going to have to get a kennel or a different type of crate because they’re going to be crated while you’re at work? So thinking about what do these expenses look like now that you’re not going to be at home five days a week, or maybe you’re only going to be at home one day a week. And so just ask yourself like, what do I know will automatically change? And then I want you to adjust your budget for the changes that you think you know.

Remember, if you do this now we’re just playing with the numbers. And so by playing with the numbers, you can get comfortable with the needs that you foresee shifting. And then my next ask of you would be to monitor your spending for the next 30 days to see if you were actually able to identify the changes that you thought you were going to have to make to your budget. So asking yourself every week during your money date, like what am I noticing about my spending? What additions or what edits do I need to make to my budget? But you need to ask yourself, you should always be asking yourself that question anyways. But in particular, like what are you noticing now that there’s a change in your routine, now that there’s been a change in your work schedule? What did you forget about that you need to put into your budget?

When I say a budget is a living document and it should work and be flexible with you, this is what I’m talking about. Because you are going to be monitoring and thinking about your patterns and you’re going to be adjusting. We’re not just creating a budget, putting it into a wonderful template or app and just hoping that it’s going to do something for us. We’re actually putting this budget together so that way we can go back to it and we can reference it to make sure that it adjusts for our needs and our desires. So I hope this episode was helpful. If you know someone that is having to go back into work full time and you think it would be helpful for them, I definitely encourage you to share it. And thank you so much for tuning in and I will chat with you next week.

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.

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