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Hi,
assuming a mom with 3 kids under 4 years old, is there anything that the mom can do from home to make afew hundred bucks a week in extra money?
"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) ?
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).
I also know a couple where Dad worked 10 hour days Monday to Thursday & Mom worked 12 hours shifts on Friday, Saturday & Sunday. Perhaps something like that would work out.
The big advantage of that is that you do not have to pay for child care. Of course, the disadvantage is that they did not have a lot of free time together as a family.
Actually, I have known quite a few couples who did some variation of working opposite shifts or on different days so that they did not have to pay for child care (or they felt that Mom or Dad should always be with young children).
Good luck.
Last edited by germaine2626; 07-18-2016 at 09:20 AM..
Maybe watch one or two extra kids. That's all I can think of at the moment. There's pet sitting but that won't work for you now with the kids being so little. There's also mystery shopping. You could check into it that but it's not going to pay you a few hundred bucks a week.
Find a few hours each weekend to get out of the house alone, hit up yard sales and such, learn to spot deals and items which might have some sort of value, and sell on Ebay.
I've done this in the past with good success. Usually if I spot an item I think has some good resale, i'll pull out my phone, search Ebay for active/completed auctions and make a decision as to if I could resell it for a profit.
I used to make $100-200/week doing this part-time in addition to my full time job, and mostly would use it to build up my paypal accounts, and fund purchases on Ebay and other sites that went to my hobbies.
I know a few people with kids at home who switched to doing captioning. Pay isn't as good as it used to be, but it's still usually $75/hr of "live" time which is a bit misleading as there's a lot of time you spend you aren't paid which ranges drastically based mostly on subject matter expertise but there's always some. It's great flexibility though but when you're live you need to be live. Mostly they did either early morning (5 a.m. for East Coast) and in the evenings 8 to 11. That's not something you can just get overnight though. There's a few exceptionally talented people who get there in 2-3 years but mostly you're looking more like 5-10 as an average. You need to be in the upper maybe 20-30% of the court reporting field by ability to caption at which point you can make more elsewhere but in a more stressful environment. The multiple copies, multiple real-time, daily transcripts is $$$. Back when I was doing more of that it was rare I'd make less than $1,000/day of which about 30% goes right back out the door to pay for scopist/proof readers.
Scoping/proofing. It's slow to get work. When I use one I need to rely on them so there's a big amount of trust. I generally only use retired court reporters although in the past I've had good relationships with non court reporters as well. It just takes time. If you throw a shingle out you'll get a few small jobs here and there with people testing the water on jobs they don't need one. I might send five test jobs over several months before I'd ever rely on someone. They have short crash courses in scoping which is sort of a mini-paralegal course. Honestly there's no real barrier to entry so it gets flooded, but majority of scopists and especially proofers are awful hence why I mostly only will use retired court reporters. Then you also have to weed out the lousy reporters as well. Unless it's just an insanely technical, fast job I can scope 20 pages an hour and going rate is $1.25/pg so it's decent money. Most of what I sent was 12 or 24 hour turnaround, so double that. It's tough to find people who can crank out 100+ pages in 12/24 hours though. I mean, I understand that. It's tough for me to do 100 pages. My attention span is pretty shot after two hours and I need a break. Occasionally I've stepped in for bad reporters who got jobs they couldn't handle at which point you're just transcribing from audio and praying it's good. Maybe you can do 10 pages an hour, maybe. Usually it's not. It's full of people talking over each other since they were afraid to step in and control the room.
Paralegal/legal work a lot of it can be done remotely. Accounting as well. A lot of it is flexible and can be done completely remotely at any time. My uncle works in project management remotely. He flies in to the Bay Area a few times a year but otherwise works remotely. He's semi-retired at this point so it's more a matter of beating the work back to stay semi-retired than anything else. Intensity could be a problem there as it's uneven work. When things are going well there's not much to do besides make sure everything is flowing smoothly. When it's not it's SHTF.
Crafts sometimes can sell well online. I wasn't a stay at home mom, but to earn extra on the side I made 3D nails(bought supplies at Walmart very inexpensive) and sold each set for $30 plus shipping online, first just on forum sites and then eBay. It did very well! I got out of it once my husband and I were planning our wedding, working full time and buying our first home but I'd love to try something like that again.
You could try working in a church or MOPS child care where you can bring your kids with you, but a lot of those hours will be on weekends. It won't get you a few hundred dollars/week, though.
Offer an afternoon kids activity class such as tumbling, or art, or learning about nature in the park, or kids can cook, or Kindergarten readiness, or whatever you know that kids would like and moms can drop their kids off for a few hours one day a week for $20 a week/$80 a month or so per kids.
Offer Friday night and Saturday night slumber party / date night for parents to drop kids off at your house for the night and pick up the next morning to give the parents a night off. For the kids at your house do typical party games or art projets or themed nights, and then watch a movie with snacks and sleep in sleeping bags on the floor...boys room and a girls room. Give them pancakes for breakfast and send them home happy.
I know a few people with kids at home who switched to doing captioning. Pay isn't as good as it used to be, but it's still usually $75/hr of "live" time which is a bit misleading as there's a lot of time you spend you aren't paid which ranges drastically based mostly on subject matter expertise but there's always some. It's great flexibility though but when you're live you need to be live. Mostly they did either early morning (5 a.m. for East Coast) and in the evenings 8 to 11. That's not something you can just get overnight though. There's a few exceptionally talented people who get there in 2-3 years but mostly you're looking more like 5-10 as an average. You need to be in the upper maybe 20-30% of the court reporting field by ability to caption at which point you can make more elsewhere but in a more stressful environment. The multiple copies, multiple real-time, daily transcripts is $$$. Back when I was doing more of that it was rare I'd make less than $1,000/day of which about 30% goes right back out the door to pay for scopist/proof readers.
Scoping/proofing. It's slow to get work. When I use one I need to rely on them so there's a big amount of trust. I generally only use retired court reporters although in the past I've had good relationships with non court reporters as well. It just takes time. If you throw a shingle out you'll get a few small jobs here and there with people testing the water on jobs they don't need one. I might send five test jobs over several months before I'd ever rely on someone. They have short crash courses in scoping which is sort of a mini-paralegal course. Honestly there's no real barrier to entry so it gets flooded, but majority of scopists and especially proofers are awful hence why I mostly only will use retired court reporters. Then you also have to weed out the lousy reporters as well. Unless it's just an insanely technical, fast job I can scope 20 pages an hour and going rate is $1.25/pg so it's decent money. Most of what I sent was 12 or 24 hour turnaround, so double that. It's tough to find people who can crank out 100+ pages in 12/24 hours though. I mean, I understand that. It's tough for me to do 100 pages. My attention span is pretty shot after two hours and I need a break. Occasionally I've stepped in for bad reporters who got jobs they couldn't handle at which point you're just transcribing from audio and praying it's good. Maybe you can do 10 pages an hour, maybe. Usually it's not. It's full of people talking over each other since they were afraid to step in and control the room.
Paralegal/legal work a lot of it can be done remotely. Accounting as well. A lot of it is flexible and can be done completely remotely at any time. My uncle works in project management remotely. He flies in to the Bay Area a few times a year but otherwise works remotely. He's semi-retired at this point so it's more a matter of beating the work back to stay semi-retired than anything else. Intensity could be a problem there as it's uneven work. When things are going well there's not much to do besides make sure everything is flowing smoothly. When it's not it's SHTF.
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.
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