Starting your own business from home can have huge rewards and benefits, but why consider starting your own business working from home? Consider what your other options are - working from an office, or factory? Working from your car spending hours on the road? It's when you consider the other 'ways to work' that working from home with your own business seems so attractive.

Let's look more closely at comparing working from home to your other options

COST SAVINGS - Running your business from an office or any other commercial location involves cost - often big cost when you add up rent or possible commercial mortgage payments, rates, electricity and other utility costs, communication costs - phone, fax, internet - all these costs are often much higher when you are working remotely from a commercial property.

Working from home you can cut much of these costs down dramatically because you will likely be paying residential tariffs for all these outgoings, which invariably work out much cheaper than commercial tariffs.

Also, don't forget you can actually charge yourself 'rent' and a percentage of utility costs for using part of your home as a working environment - 'home office'. What that means is a percentage of what you pay in your mortgage can be offset against any business tax you pay because you can claim a certain amount as rent, etc, even though you're working from home. Ask your financial advisor to get more info on this.

MORE EFFECTIVE USE OF TIME - How much time do you (or would you spend) travelling to work? Apart from perhaps the odd phone call on your mobile, or sending a text or two, it's hard to be effective with your time travelling to work, especially if you drive to your workplace.

I key benefit of working from home is you can get up later (making it more lifestyle orientated), and yet still start earlier. Why? simply because you will have cut out all the 'dead time' travelling to and from work. You could be working from home, more refreshed, more effective, and certainly more productive.

QUALITY OF LIFE - One of the challenges of working in these fast-moving times is how much our quality of life, particularly family life suffers. How much time do you spend now away from home because of your work when, if you were working from home, even taking a tea-break means you get to see your partner and possibly your children more.

My father loved me and my sisters deeply, but had a high-powered city job, and so left in the morning to catch a train before we were awake, and invariably didn't get in 'til after we were asleep, often unfortunately not seeing us awake for days on end! Now that wasn't really his fault because his 'job' demanded he work a long-distance away, but if you had the choice to start your own business working from home, allowing you to spend much more time with those you love, doesn't that make far more sense?