What can a stay at home mom do to make some extra money? (Maine, business)
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It's difficult to imagine how you could find time to do much of anything else with three kids under four at home. Adding 2-3 children in a childcare situation, (including hiring an assistant), might give you the added income you are seeking. (But, over time, it might also make you crazier than a bedbug.)
(Shrug) with 3 kids all under the age of 4, how are you going to place any attention on anything except for those kids, 24 hours a day. Unless maybe they all sleep through the night and you don't need any sleep at all so that you can watch kids all day and work at night.
What I did when my child was small was I raised and trained expensive national award winning horses. Profit after all expenses was about $5,000 a year, with extra pocket money from giving riding lessons. There were always a lot of stray kids around and I just put them all to work shoveling horse poop and brushing horses.
With 3 kids under the age of 4 around horses, you'd have to be willing to lock them in a stall while you did your work.
Maybe you could start one of those "reality TV" type blogs or a Youtube channel where you feature the chaos of your household-- although I sure wouldn't put my kids out there on a national blog with god only knows who looking at them.
If you have great sense of humor, Erma Bombech supported herself writing a very funny newspaper column. But that was one housewife out of millions, so you'd have to have extraordinary talent.
I don't know if you could handle it with 3 young children, but when I was quite young, very early school years, I was in a program called Saturday Adventurers. A van came around and picked me up and a group of kids, maybe a dozen, were taken to a different learning experience every Saturday.
I can't remember everything we did, but we went to see a rock hound and his rock laboratory and he explained different types of rocks and showed us the tumbler and rock saws. He sawed geodes in half and everybody got half a geode. I still have mine. A sort of introduction to geology.
We went to a ham radio operator and he showed us how the radios worked and we got to say "hi" to someone in Australia.
We went to a professional theater costume department and were showed how theatrical make-up was put on.
I have not the slightest clue what my parents paid for that program. The presentations were most certainly given by volunteers, eager to share their hobby with a nice group of young kids.
Oh wait... we went and saw radio controlled airplanes. That was another excursion. Think "drones" for today's kids.
If you could put that together, OP, you'd need a van and some paid employees. It's mostly an exercise in organization.
There have been some great ideas but they need to match the OPs skills. If she returns and gives us more information I am sure that we can give her more accurate advice.
I personally have known several people who had lucrative side businesses while they were SAHMs. One baked wedding cakes, another baked specialty ethnic cookies, a third did alterations specializing on pageant gowns and another made dream catchers that a friend sold at craft fairs. Another person gave Russian lessons in her home. Heck, I even knew someone who grew a special kind of mushroom, on special types of logs, in her basement and sold them to fancy restaurants.
And I know several teachers/retired teachers who earned extra money tutoring students. If you have an extra special skill, such as tutoring AP Calculus you can make big bucks (my friend charges $90 an hour and has far more requests for her services than she can handle). I also knew a SAHM, who was an attorney, who wrote or proofread/corrected legal briefs for her former firm after her kids went to sleep.
But, the main point is that you need to have some basic skills, or even extra special skills, to do many of these things. Or you have to figure out a niche skill area and learn how to do it.
Good luck.
Quote:
Originally Posted by germaine2626
"A few hundred bucks a week" ? That is a pretty tall order. I'll be curious what other people suggest.
What type of skills do you have? Sewing? Specialty Cooking? Baking? Computer? Languages? Can you do something like tutoring or teaching your special skill while someone else watches your children (maybe after Dad is home) ?
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Have you ever tried to do any of these with 3 kids under the age of 4 around? If she doesn't have anyone to look after them it won't happen unless she does it around times she would have help.
Yes, that's the point. The people I know that switched to doing captioning, for example, which when you're live you're live and 100% occupied do it because they can do it from 5-7 a.m. and after 8 p.m. If the kids wake up at 5:30 crying, dad takes care of it. Dad puts the kids to bed after dinner and dishes are done. For most people, it's a part-time job that brings in $30k/yr that lets them spend much more time with the kids than someone as they're only checked out at work an hour or two a day It's not like they're doing it five hours a day, five days a week which would be closer to $100k That's basically a full-time job at that point. I occasionally babysit for my niece and nephew who are 2 and 4. I couldn't do live captioning but it's not an issue to do the prep work for a realtime job the next day done or catch up on transcripts. It's not efficient as sometimes they're happy to sit and watch cartoons for an hour and other times they aren't but I can always squeeze around that.
Here is another idea. I have known several couples who work opposite shifts. Mom watches the kids during the day while Dad works (example 7 AM to 3 PM) and then Dad watches the kids at night while Mom works (example 4 PM to midnight).
With three very young children, this is really the only option. Nights & weekends.
Office buildings get cleaned at night. With some hustling, the OP could land some small jobs as an independent contractor at smaller offices they can handle themselves rather than going to work for one of the bigger cleaning outfits that pay poorly.
There are all kinds of part time service sector jobs for people willing to work weekends when most don't want to work.
Most work-from-home jobs require very specific job skills or they won't pay much of anything.
Maybe try being a cam model on such services as Chaturbate. There are all kinds of freaks out there that will "tip" well just to see your feet. LOL
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