By aranarose

I confess… I’m a WAHM.  That’s Work-At-Home-Mom, for those of you who aren’t up on the lingo.  Over the years, I’ve tried different businesses, until I found the right one for me.  I tried the direct marketing thing.  You know Avon, Tupperware, Mary Kay, that sort of thing.  I don’t know enough people to make that work.  I also, for a short while, sold books on Amazon.com.  That actually went quite well, until the bottom fell out, and people started flooding the marketplace with penny books.  You can’t compete, and make a living, against a warehouse that can sell 1000 books for a penny each.  I still occasionally sell books on Amazon, but that’s more in the interest of clearing out my bookshelves and getting more books, not in making a living.

I finally settled on transcription.  Well, I shouldn’t say finally, as I am branching out and opening a new business as a Virtual Assistant, but transcription has been my sole source of income since May of 2007.  What is transcription you ask?  My job, currently, consists of listening to recorded interviews and presentations, and typing them into a word document for the client.  I have one primary contract with a company that handles insurance claims interviews.  When someone is in a car accident, and fault is disputed, the insurance company will take a recorded interview.  It is then sent to the company that I contract with, and they assign me files to transcribe.  It sounds interesting, at first, but believe me, there are only so many ways that people get into accidents.  I’ve also transcribed interviews for theft losses, and house fire losses.  I have another client who is an American, living and working in Japan, and attending a university in the U.K. for his Ph.D.  I transcribe the interviews that he’s doing for his Ph.D. thesis.  That is actually interesting work, but there isn’t a lot of it.  He only sends about a dozen files every six months or so.

Virtual Assistance, the work that I’m branching out into, is basically office management, administrative, secretarial work rolled into one package, and done remotely.  I do research online, editing and proofreading of articles, help set up websites and blogs, contact and email management, and more.  Basically, anything that a secretary would do that doesn’t require a physical presence, I can do for a lot cheaper than a business having to pay a secretary.  They don’t have to pay employment taxes, as I’m an independent contractor.  They don’t have to supply me an office or a computer, I supply those myself.

When I set out to write this article, I wasn’t entirely sure what to say.  Then I thought about all the comments and questions that I’ve gotten about working from home.  And I decided to respond to some of those right here in this article.

1.  Working at home must be so awesome!

Yes.  No.  Maybe.  It depends on the day.  Sometimes it depends on the hour.  I’m independent.  I don’t have a guaranteed number of hours each week.  I don’t have a guaranteed paycheck.  I do have one main contract, but they have times when they can send me a lot of work, and other times when they can’t send me much, if any, at all.  This month, for instance, has sucked.  The holidays are horrid, because no one wants to work.  Summer is bad too.  I am lucky, however, to have gotten a WAHM-wish this year, and to have been offered free business coaching from a Virtual Assistant (VA) who has an established business with more clients than she can handle.  She’s walking me through the steps to start that business, and get more work than I need, which will be a blessing.  Sort of.  You see, because I work for myself, everything is up to me.  If I don’t want to get out of bed, I don’t have to.  But if I don’t get out of bed and market myself, and seek work, I’m not going to be able to pay the bills.  It’s completely and entirely up to me whether I succeed or I fail.

Being at home means TONS of distractions.  The dishes need done.  The floor needs to be swept.  Have to scrub the toilet.  The kids want attention.  The cat thinks the keyboard should be hers.  And I can’t just get in the car and get away from all of that.  Because walking away from all of that means walking away from my place of work.  Working at home requires patience and intense focus.  You must, must, must be able to work well under pressure, and under a deadline.  When you’re in an office, it’s easy for your boss and coworkers to see what’s going on, and to see if you have too much on your plate.  When you work at home, for yourself, there’s no one to see that but you.  And often, you don’t see that until 10 minutes before your deadline with 2 hours worth of work left to do!

Don’t get me wrong, though.  There are benefits.  I’m home with my son, all day.  Yeah, that can be a pain at times, but that’s when he gets sent to a relative’s house!  I don’t miss out on his learning and growing up.  I don’t have to panic if the alarm didn’t go off.  I don’t even have to set my alarm!  I don’t have to ask for time off for doctor’s appointments or family events.  I don’t have to worry about working a holiday.  If I don’t want to work a certain day, I just don’t request any work that day.  If I want to go on vacation, I can.  I don’t have to request vacation time six months in advance.  That’s great.  But I also don’t get vacation pay.  That pretty much sucks.

2. So… when are you going to get a real job?

This one irritates me to no end.  I have a real job.  I get up everyday, and I work.  Just because I’m doing it in my pajamas doesn’t mean it’s not a real job.

3.  You must make a lot of money!

Oh, how I wish.  I’ve already finalized my finances for the year.  I know exactly how much I’ve made this year.  $9874.76   That would be a lot of money if I lived in a Third World country… but no, I live in the U.S.  In Flint, Michigan.  Now, Flint sucks, Michigan’s recession started years before the national recession started, so prices are low here, but it’s still not a lot of money.  I do have some advantages over people who have to go to work outside of the home that make it a lot easier to live off of that income though.  And yes, I’m living and supporting my son on that income.  I’m single, no husband to add his income to the mix.

I don’t have to drive to work.  That means no car payment, no car insurance payment, no car maintenance, and no gas.  How much do you spend on car stuff a year?

I don’t have to buy work clothes.  If I worked in an office setting, I would need several outfits to wear, as well as the cost of cleaning those clothes.  Working at home, I can toss on jeans and a t-shirt.  Or just not get dressed at all, and walk around in pajamas all day long…

I don’t have to buy lunch out, or worry about taking lunch with me.  I eat what my son eats each day.

I don’t have to pay for childcare.  Although my son is 11, if I were working outside the home, he’d have to attend public school, and afterwards, he’d likely have to attend a latchkey program that I’d have to pay for.

So there are expenses that I don’t have that make working at home easier.  However, I do have the expense of my own office equipment.  I pretty much buy a new computer every year to keep up.  Thank goodness for tax returns!

And that’s another thing…  taxes.  I don’t have an employer to take taxes out.  When I send an invoice to a client for $180.36, I get $180.36.  Minus any payment processing fees.  But no taxes.  I have to pay my own taxes.  This is done through self-employment tax, in addition to income tax.  Self-employment tax covers what would be deducted as Social Security and Medicare if I were an employee.  It takes a LOT of discipline to set aside that 25% and send it in to the government every quarter.  I do, however, get the nice bonus of Earned Income Credit, as well as child tax credit, and this year, the First-Time Home Buyer Credit.

But no, I do not make a lot of money.  I do, however, make enough to pay my bills, including buying a house.

4. Can you show me how to work at home too?This is the question I get asked the most.  When asked, I try to steer them towards resources, but that’s not really easy to do, especially considering I don’t know what a person might be well-suited to do.  Someone hears that I’m a transcriptionist, and then hears that what I do is type all day, and they think, “Oh, I can do that!”  But it’s not as easy as it sounds.  First of all, people speak at about 200 words per minute.  Can you type 200 words per minute?  I can’t, and I’m a fast typist!  My max, on a really, really good day, is 120 words per minute.  I average between 80 and 100, depending on the keyboard, how long I’ve been typing, how warm or cold my hands are, etc.  Transcription requires special software to be able to start and stop the speech, slow it down, etc., so that you can catch every single sound.  Not just word, sound.  There are multiple levels of transcription.  Some just want you to catch the gist of what is being said and create an outline.  Others want edited speech, but catching everything.  And my main contract is what is called strict verbatim.  That means every and, um, uh, duh, buh, huh, wha-… that comes out of the person’s mouth!  And let me tell you, there are some sounds that do not translate well to the written word!

Okay, so you don’t want to do transcription?  What skills do you have that could be turned into something from home?  If all you’ve ever done is flip burgers, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.  Sure, maybe you can learn, but that’s going to cost you.  A good business coach is going to run you $50 an hour.  I got very, very lucky to get one for a Christmas gift.  VERY lucky.  I’m setting offerings to the gods daily for that one…

There are a lot of training programs, but those are going to cost you as well.

If you really want to work at home, start researching now.  Don’t quit your day job.  I started working at home when I was married as a way to bring extra money in.  I was a stay-at-home-mom.  When we separated, and then eventually divorced, it became a matter of supporting myself.  If I didn’t work at home, I’d likely have no work, given the local economy with an unemployment rate of over 12%.  I got lucky when I fell into transcription, but I already had the skills.  If you don’t already have skills, then you’re going to have to learn them.

Consider what skills you do have that might be marketable.  Can you build a website?  And I’m not talking about template based, easy, you just throw in the words website building either.  I’m talking something professional, that you’d see a business using, or something like MysticWicks.  Something clean, but complicated, that requires special skills.

Are you a graphic designer that can work with a website builder to design the graphics for sites?

Are you a writer who could freelance and write articles for multiple kinds of markets?

Think about what you do now, and consider if it could be done remotely.  Talk to your boss, maybe you could work out a telecommute option where you work from home part time

To close the article, I’ll leave you with a few resources:

http://www.wahm.com – This is a site for work-at-home moms (and dads) to explore their options and learn more about working at home.
http://www.associatedcontent.com – This is a site where you can submit articles for pay.  You can get an upfront payment for some articles, and all articles offer residual payments based on page views.  Which means the more people that come to see your article, the more you get paid.
http://typists.quicktate.com/transcribers/signup – This is a site that does transcription of voice mail.  There’s a waiting list, and once you’re off the wait list, there isn’t a ton of work, but it will get you experience, and they pull from the Quicktate transcribers to work for another company that they own that has more work and better pay.
http://www.speak-write.com/web/ – This is another transcription company.
http://www.ratracerebellion.com/ – This site screens work at home job postings and lists them.  There are tons of jobs in all different industries.

If you have questions about working at home, feel free to ask me!  You can PM me, aranarose at MW, and I’ll try to answer any questions you might have about working from home!

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