My wife’s work is making people come back in office, and she’s above the 50-mile limit they set. (Not only that, she’s worked from home for 10 years now). She brought that up, and they said they were looking into possibly expanding it out. She told her boss if that happens, she’s gone, and they lose someone with almost 19 years of experience who literally writes their training manuals on how to do what she does, lol.
The shear stupidity of these people is astonishing. If I ran a company, it would be nothing but WFH, and I would poach so many good workers, lol.
But how will you make sure their every waking moment is devoted to work? Gotta invest in some ridiculous office space and middle managers to crack the whip.
That’s the thing - if I’m being forced to come into an office when my work doesn’t require it, I am 100% a clock watcher, and outside my scheduled work hours, I an unavailable. You sent me an email at 5:01 PM on Friday? I’ll read it at 8:00 AM on Monday.
Take away my flexibility, and I take away yours.
I don’t understand the other side of this. I work from home and already do this. Work from home is not 24 hours work unless you let it be that. My clock strikes 5pm and my laptop is turned off.
I am the same way with watching the clock and being unavailable after hours for work shit. I won’t be, come November, because I’ll be added to the on-call rotation. Not looking forward to it, but I plan on using the assignment of extra responsibility to ask for extra money. I think I deserve a raise lol. I work super hard because I genuinely like my company and what I do. It’s the first job I’ve had that hasn’t been toxic in any way.
There is a guy in our group who had a special arrangement because his wife was sick so they allowed him to WFH regularly as long as he came in for certain things.
After Covid, they decided everyone needed to be back in the office NOW and didn’t want to have to deal with people whining because some people got a special pass that was in place before Covid, so they took it away from him.
Instead of answering the hard (obvious) questions and being irritated for a finite amount of time, they made this guy upend his whole life (he lives many hours away) and that of his family - to return to work on a regular basis.
Failure of fucking leadership right there.
It’s quite possible he had no choice since his health insurance was likely tied to his employment. If his wife was also on that insurance, it could be too big of a risk to drop it.
if that happens, she’s gone, and they lose someone with almost 19 years of experience who literally writes their training manuals on how to do what she does, lol.
She openly told her boss that if they tell her to come into the office she will willingly quit the job and forfeit unemployment so they can downsize that headcount and spread around the work to other employees?
Gotta play 3D chess, don’t show them your hand. They now have an easy way to fire her on demand without cause and without having a mark on their employment numbers.
Have to go with the angle of: if you make me move you need to pay my relocation costs because you have asked me to move. After all, this isn’t new and they have known your home address for 10 years. Make them cover the increased cost or they get to pay unemployment for laying you off. That’s the only real angle you probably have anyway that gives them a cost.
Not to mention she wrote a manual on her job so her replacement will have an easy time picking up.
If she’s as petty as I am, the manual will receive a rather intense update prior to her departure.
Crash the housing market to save the office building market
The housing market needs to crash. Prices nationwide are insane. Bubble needs to pop
No. The price is high because inventory is low. Crash happens now it won’t lower prices. Companies will stop building, prices will shoot upwards due to frozen inventory. Picture only million dollar homes with no buyers, sellers can’t sell at a loss, and hundreds of millions of homeless. 2008 happened due to an inflated inventory and prices. There’s no inventory this time around, it’s going to fucking hurt. Great Depression round two. The stock market is going to be the thing to break this go round, and then everything goes.
Prices are high because companies are algorithmically raising rents for groups of landlords or outright buying up half of all new single family homes as large scale investments. The market is screwed because of entirely new reasons never seen before, clearly demonstrated by all the conflicting signals about what is healthy and what isn’t. This is a market failure when timely information isn’t transmitted to the rest of us, monopolies are thinly veiled, and taxpayers keep being forced into subsidizing and bailing out outdated businesses that should be left to fail.
Hundreds of millions? 1/3 of the U.S.? I don’t really see that. Even if the value of your home drops to $0 it wouldn’t automatically make you homeless as long as you can pay the mortgage or if you have it paid off. And the mortgage payment would stay the same cuz we have 30 year fixed rates.
Hundreds of millions of homeless people in the U.S. wouldn’t just hurt, it would be a total collapse and the end of society as we know it here, not to mention we’d drag most of the world down with us.
There’s loads of inventory, just not a whole lot available in dense areas. No idea where you’re pulling “hundreds of millions of homeless” from.
I’m OK with that, the housing market is in a giant bubble and it needs to crash. I say that as someone who bought a house at the lowest price point right at the start of the pandemic, combined with an incredibly low interest rate. Theoretically my home is worth almost 50% more now, 4 years later.
Thaaaaat’s a bubble.
Theoretically my home is worth almost 50% more now, 4 years later.
Yep, and having your house have a higher paper value doesn’t help you much at all as a home buyer that lives in the place. Your taxes go up in most localities, and it makes upgrading that much more impossible because everything else went up in price too.
It only helps if you want to move to some other place where prices are much lower, which I’m good on moving to Idaho or whatever.
It’s great for your paper net worth…yay. 🙄
“My sellers both work at the same company, which told them they have to be in the office three days a week or they’ll lose their jobs. They have six months to make the move. They’ll probably have to take a $100,000 loss on their home,” Pendleton said.
Pretty sure I would rent out the home instead of taking a $100,000 loss? Rent something to live in where you’re moving to until it’s more favorable to sell.
In a lot of these WFH communities, the rental market softened with the rest of the housing market, so you might not have renters or have to take a hit on the rent. Also, being a landlord more than a commute-able distance away from your property sounds like asking for trouble, unless you hire a property manager, but that’s another hit to your income.
Even if the market in some of these more remote areas softened a bit, I think taking a $100,000 hit over one year is crazy, though. Even if you lose $100 or $200 per month renting it out, that’s a long ways from $100,000. Meanwhile, you’re paying off the mortgage and building equity.
Rent to own is also an option.
That assumes you can get a back to ground be you two mortgages though.
This is an excellent opportunity for corporations to buy up homes.
The rich will only get richer until we stand up.
I’m pretty sure I’d stay put and not move back. Let’s be honest. An employer can and will terminate you for practically any reason or no reason at all. Selling a house you bought in a place you want to live in hopes of maintaining a toxic relationship that will end on a whim (your job) barely makes sense from an economic perspective and makes no sense from any other.
To put it in perspective… if you had an emotionally abusive boyfriend who insisted you had to sell your house and move in with him, would you do it? If you relied on him for half your income, would you do it? If the answer to those questions are “yes” then you’re gonna love selling your house because of RTO. If you have any self respect, the very notion of this would make you dust off your resume and resignation letter.
After seeing the headline, I thought it would be people moving farther away to be outside of the RTO radius. Instead its people moving closer to work because they are cities/states away with WFH.
