Advice on part time working from home jobs

[EvilBoB]

Hi,

Thinking about trying to get some work from home (data enry or whatever). There are loads of scams out there from what I can see so any advice/recommendations would be good.

Cheers,


EB

[flumperino]

Pretty sure they don't exist mate. Scams are all you're going to get.

Happy to be proven wrong though.

[EvilBoB]

Yeah I figured that would be the case. The all ask for money up front too which is a bit suspect imho. Some of the scams I've read about are pretty involved too.

[mitchb]

Theirs a section on the moneysavingexpert forum dedicated to this, try looking at that.

Their does seem to be a few genuine work from home jobs in their, i think i even remeber seeing one about chat lines

[maltloaf]

A friend of mine trims gaskets from a rubber factory in her spare time at home. It's proper menial work but she can do it watching the telly or while somethings cooking etc. A bloke comes in a pick up and drops them off and picks up the finished ones every few days.

If you don't mind something like this a trip down your local industrial estate might be helpful.

[BFG]

MSE has a few links to mystery shopper sites, which the Mrs is currently looking into. Make sure you use tried and tested companies, don't pay up front for "admin charges". It seems that the self-assigned from a list of available jobs are the best types - I'll let you know how it goes.

I've heard of someone who used one called Grass Roots, which paid twice monthly for work done, you go shopping to designated places and submit a review/report online. Seems simple enough... she loves shopping anyhow.

[rebrabuk]

I did a home working data entry job for 6 months after leaving school.

It was for a local university, who were responsible for providing the results to the primary school childrens SATS (or whatever the exams are called these days). There were other data entry projects throughout the year, but this was the project that was being done at the time i worked for them.

I would travel to the university once per week to collect a load of boxes full of exam papers, spend the week at home entering the answers into a specifically designed application, then return the exam papers the following week whilst collecting another batch.

Pay was dependant upon how many characters you typed, so the faster you typed the more you got paid. I think i worked out that it was averaging between £5-6 per hour (relatively slow typer - one handed ) but i could do the work whenever i wanted and could take on as much work as i wanted.

So the jobs do exist.

[TwoPlAnKs]

Don't be afraid to make your own job too. Registering as a self-employed sole trader takes a few seconds online, then for the tax return form you just say how much you spent on your business and how much you earned so keep all your receipts and add them up at the end of the year - piece of piss and then you can do whatever the fuck you want.

I tried buying stuff in bulk and selling on eBay and although it was quite profitable for a totally no-skills job, it was a bit poo. I had a fairly well paying full-time job at the time and was just doing it as an experiment to see if it would actually work for making a bit of cash when back at uni, and it does but I decided it wasn't worth the effort of packaging things up and going to the post office with them. On a bigger scale you'd pay about £2 a day to get a royal mail van to drive to your house and collect all your parcels with postage already printed from online from the royal mail website, so you could do it without as much hassle. Even on the small scale I did it on (I only sold about 40 items) it paid more than double minimum wage but only when I was driving past the post office anyway. The key is finding very cheap shit in bulk that can sell for a huge markup, you really need 100% markup (50% profit) on cheap items to cover eBay and Paypal fees.

One I've done in the past and have taken up again now is tutoring. It's my favourite way of making money atm. I do Maths for kids with their exams, and I actually drive to their houses and do it. Currently the furthest student I have is 15 mins away, the others all within 5-10 mins and I charge £20 an hour, so it's a good pay rate considering I don't have a degree and am 21. I am turning down quite a few pupils because I am fully booked, although it's very very seasonal. I find I had about 2 students from November and then loads looking in January, but all stopping in May when the exam is. It suits me perfectly because it matches the academic year, but wouldn't suit anyone looking for year round work. Teaching kids does mean it wouldn't be quite so easy if you wanted to stay at home, but if you live a large town or a city you'd easily find enough students prepared to come round to your house. Of course, you do need to know a particular subject well beyond the level of the exams you are teaching for. I refuse to teach anything harder than Higher (Scottish equivalent of AS-Level), and I've studied 3 years worth of maths beyond that level. I've also been doing it for quite a while and started when I could still remember the syllabus inside out from my school days, you really need to know that if helping with exam preparation.

A friend of mine started his own business teaching guitar in his front room. He's easily getting 20-30 hours a week from it which suits him fine, from advertising in the local magazine and in shops and word-of-mouth. He has got a teaching diploma in guitar, but did start his business before he had finished the course and as long as you were competent enough you could do it. He took on some work teaching in a music shop in town but identified that there were lots of students who would find his house more convenient as a location, and cut out the middle man for more convenience and more cash.

Somebody on here posted to say they had made an iPhone application that was doing well in the app store, and although it didn't make a huge amount of cash quickly it was just a few weeks work making it then a case of sitting back and letting the cash roll in. He made an amount that made it very worthwhile doing it, so if you have the spare time and programming skills that would be a good one to do. With stuff like this new data.gov and data.gov.uk providing raw data to developers to find interesting uses for, and the Facebook application portal which is a completely untapped resource just now IMO (it could be a lot more useful than fucking FarmVille and stupid surveys), you could find something innovative and get cash rolling in. I'll definitely give this a bash if I can't find a real job when I finish University.

One I'd love to have the motivation, writing skills and patience for is making a really good website or blog. There are lots of subjects that are covered to excess on the net, but if you could think of something interesting to write about and really put the effort into getting really good well researched content you could easily make a bit of spare cash with AdWords stuff. Blogger.com will give you a free blog and allow you to display your own Google adverts on it, for which you can keep the cash. You need serious readership to get any decent cash though, hundreds of thousands of visitors a month. I think it would be really hard to find a subject that has that sort of appeal that isn't already done to death. The key thing to remember is that you can't just throw a website online and wait for the money to roll in, if you want full-time earnings from it then you need to spend full time hours working on the site.

I know a girl who started a company making necklaces. She buys beads from a wholesaler for fuck all, threads them onto string and claims they are handmade well designed necklaces because she is an art student and genuinely believes they are. To be honest, although I'm not impressed with her product I admire her for not joining the thousands of other students working in bars and shops. People seem to like them, she's making a bit of cash off it and has got her own display in a local jewelers shop now. That is a lot better than the eBay idea I mentioned at the start because you aren't just buying and selling, you are actually adding value to a product by manufacturing the parts into something worthwhile. I reckon I'd have tried to expand my eBay business into this area if I had actually gone ahead with it. I quite enjoy making stuff and reckon I could have bought a few planks of wood in B+Q for about £4, sold it as 5 handmade birdboxes or something on eBay for £10 each and that's £46 profit for a few hours of fairly enjoyable work and a trip to the post office, which is basically a free night in the pub.

My mum took a 10 year career break to have kids (remember when people actually did that?) and during that time she became a seller of Usborne books. TBH I think it was a massive pain in the arse, she complained that it was more hassle than it was worth. It works similarly to an Ann Summers party but without loads of dildos and drunk middle aged women getting moist over bondage gear. Dorling Kindersley do the same thing. You could also become an Avon Lady for your street. It has the advantage of being for a proper company, so if it doesn't work you don't need to lose as much as long as they haven't charged you some admin fee for joining.

Increasing diversity in the economy and creating a job for yourself is a great thing to do, especially just now. If whatever the industry is in your area is not hiring, do something radically different and you've just made your area more diverse because you are then spending the money you make in the local shops and businesses.

[garagekru]

Longest post ever award goes to the above

[TwoPlAnKs]

Longest post ever award goes to the above

Your join date is 2001 - not remember ABCMan? Get him started on politics and he used to constantly hit the limit for post length and split them over about 4 different ones.

The important thing to remember is that it is harder or as hard as doing a real job - and remember for unskilled work minimum wage is approximately a fiver an hour, so there is no reason to be getting more than that if you are doing it at home. If you can do something a bit trickier than minimum wage work, and are looking at it as a serious way to make money and not a get rich quick scheme it's a very good thing to do. And you get to be your own boss which is apparently a good thing, although I tend to find that I don't really have any more freedom than my old boss used to give me because I still have to show up at work.

There's no application process, nobody is barred from doing it, so go for it.

[psxcity]

Your join date is 2001 - not remember ABCMan?

off topic but wtf happened to abc??

[TwoPlAnKs]

off topic but wtf happened to abc??

I don't remember exactly and if I did I wouldn't want to talk about it in public on here. Cutting a long story short, he fell out with the other administrators and rap and is no longer here.

[EvilBoB]

Nice post TwoPlanKs. Some good information there. Both the wife and myself used to be self employed and I gave it up because the hassle of bookkeeping was a pain and my accountant screwed me over.

We are both willing to put as much work in as is required. We both work very hard at a 9 to 5 job that regularly exceeds the normal working hours (I've been doing 15 hour days, seven days a week for the last two months!).

The wife has applied for a position doing transcriptions. All seems legit, no money up front and stuff and she has to go to an interview but can do the work from home via recordings. You have to be spot on with your typing for it though. They are looking for around 75 to 80 word per minute with 100% punctuation and spelling. Not sure what the pay is like - I'll have to ask her but from looking around it is fairly decent as long as you can type fast and there is plenty of work if you go through a transcription agency. Ideally it would seem the best way to do this is to setup your own company and advertise that you do this kind of work which is a route that she may take later on down the line but at the moment she wants to see what it's like and what the pay is like before making that decision.