Thinking of my kids' future has also made me much more energy-conscious. Meaning I've stopped running my VM host 24/7 like I was, because neither ESX nor Proxmox is really set up for saving energy easily (automated suspending and waking, etc). Which is a shame, since I'm actually finding that with gigabit fiber at home, even on mobile connections I can work pretty decently on homelab VMs.
Running something like it on a laptop directly makes sense, but I worry about bringing some workloads back to my laptop that I really prefer to keep off it. In terms of raw performance my laptop isn't even close, especially with heavy graphic workloads. And then there's heat, etc.