In these hard economic times, is it possible to make a living working at home on your computer? People across the US are dealing with the prospect of being out of a job, and working from home is becoming more appealing every day. However, there are scams that are taking advantage of honest work-at-home prospects every day and are tarnishing the work-from-home industry.
It’s the dream—work from home
Wake up in the morning, work a few hours from your laptop in the kitchen, then call it a day. However, you’ve all heard the horror stories: scams where people were stuffing envelopes for $.01 per letter. Make millions of dollars with vending machines or ATMs. You’ve all seen them, get-rich schemes that promise to make millions in real estate. Buy the house for $100K and flip it for $200K, right? While some people do make a decent living doing these jobs, the majority do not. If making millions of dollars were as easy as you see in a 2am infomercial, everyone would do it. So what are the viable options when it comes to working from home?
First, we recommend not quitting your day job
Start by doing a few work-at-home options to test an opportunity. Once you are making a decent income on the side, you then have the option to devote more time to your part-time work and make it a full-time gig. That said, before moving to full-time work-at-home job, also consider things like health benefits, large fluctuations in your monthly income, and self-employment taxes—to name a few. These items will cost additional out-of-pocket expenses and time. If these opportunity costs are outweighed by the potential income, it’s time to take the leap.
When thinking about what you could do from home, first focus on your skill set. By leveraging the skills you already possess, you can find great opportunities that will allow you to continue doing what you enjoy (assuming you like what you do). As an example, if you enjoy writing, consider becoming a freelance writer or copy editor. Mechanic, work on cultivating your own client base. Lawyers consult on the side for a fee for legal issues.
Do not forget to take your hobbies and interests into consideration
You may hate your day job; however, enjoy taking photographs on the weekends. This skill could be leveraged into part-time wedding photography. How, you ask? Start by working with friends and family. Offer to be the main or secondary photographer at a family or friends’ wedding. This is a great option to get your foot in the door and will help you create a portfolio of work to use as examples. In addition, this will give you job references to use for future work. As another example for an interest in photography, you can sell the photos you take—of any medium. Interested,
The easiest part-time job we’ve found is online surveys and focus groups
These are companies, such as IBM, needing insight into a product or TV commercial before making it mainstream. Through market research, they ensure an advertisement or product is ready to take to the general public before investing the money. If you live in a larger city, you may have already participated in such a study. Before the internet, it was hard to do these jobs given travel costs and the additional time it took to get to and from the location of the focus groups. However, now companies are doing online surveys and focus groups. Also, with the internet, the door has been opened for jobs such as selling items on eBay. eBay? You’d be surprised how many people now do this as a full-time job. It could be selling items you make yourself, reselling items you find at garage sales, or drop-shipping items directly from the product manufacturer.
The point of the above is you don’t have to stuff envelopes, and the number of legit work-at-home jobs is endless. As a personal example, my work-at-home/part-time job/hobby is stock trading/day trading. You may consider the stock market and trading stocks online from home on your laptop (a great link for people considering this). That said, being a day trader can be stressful; please factor this in when considering the job as an option—it takes guts and a fair amount of company research to make money.
Just for fun, this next one may sound crazy… Need a car?
How about agreeing to put advertising on your vehicle and get paid? You’ve seen marketing on the side of taxicabs (in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.). If you want, you can also get paid to put similar ads on your car and drive a car with advertising to promote a product. While it’s not going to make you enough money to quit your day job, it can subsidize the high cost of gas and help with your monthly car payment. Also consider, they put a GPS in the car to ensure you’ve driven the proper miles to “promote their product.” If you’re OK with this, why not?
Final
In the end, pick something you’re passionate about when pursuing at-home work. Working from home brings freedom; however, you must choose something you enjoy. Do not get caught up in scams. To protect yourself, review the scams at the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau. If you’re looking into an opportunity promising millions per month, take the opportunity for what it’s worth. Stuffing envelopes for $.01 per piece is not worth the time, but attending an online focus group during your lunch hour for $100 is time well spent. If the job promises an outrageous income or a free car, then it’s probably a scam.