It’s one of the great flaws of human design that the desire to have a family and the desire to have a great career can sometimes seem mutually exclusive. However well you plan it, the process of having a baby disrupts your career. You have to take time off in the lead up to giving birth, and more time off while your child is young and completely dependent upon you. You also have no way of knowing how much having a child will affect you until it happens.
Sometimes, moms go on maternity leave with every intention of resuming their careers at the earliest opportunity, but then change their mind when the baby comes along. A survey a few years ago found that when women do go back to work after starting a family, the majority aren’t doing so out of choice. They simply feel that they have no option but to do so because there’s no other option from a financial point of view.
That might sound like a surprising fact, but there are statistics to back it up. Another study found that almost half of women are unable to completely resume their careers after having children, because the competing demands of a professional career and childcare simply place too much strain on them.
There’s no denying that balancing a career and a young family is a difficult task, and that women still shoulder too much of the burden when it comes to childcare at home. What if there was another way, though? What if you could earn a reasonable income and support yourself and your family, but be at home at the same time to make sure children are cared for? Perhaps you can. Perhaps one of the options we’re about to outline below could put you back in control of your schedule and your finances.
Customer Service Representative
One of the wonders of the modern age is that you don’t need to be in an office in order to be a customer service representative for a company. All you need is an internet connection and a working telephone line (and perhaps a headset, too). Job search websites like Indeed list plenty of vacancies for remote customer service representatives, although the website remote.co specializes in such vacancies. You’d need to make the time to go through training, so you’re qualified to answer the questions asked of you, but so long as you have good communication skills and don’t mind working in isolation, there’s no reason you can’t do it. The going rate is around $18 per hour.
Gambler
Yes, we’re serious. There are thousands of professional gamblers in every country where gambling is legal, and an increasing number of professional gamblers are female. You’ll need to know your craft, though. We don’t suggest sitting on the internet playing bingo or mobile slots to earn your crust. There’s too much chance involved in playing mobile slots on website like RoseSlots.com, and there’s no way of improving your chance of victory by sharpening your skills. Instead of mobile slots, become familiar with internet poker. Learn the rules, hone your craft in low-stakes games, and then move up the ladder.
Bookkeeper
There’s a difference between being a bookkeeper and a professional accountant. It’s unlikely – but not impossible – to work as an accountant from home. Being a bookkeeper is much easier, and you can still make good money doing it. You can complete a bookkeeping course online, and so long as you’re a good learner with a sharp eye for detail, you should have no difficulty doing so. It’s a role with great responsibility, and so you can expect to be paid accordingly. Again, most job recruitment websites have multiple vacancies for people wanting to do bookkeeping work from home, and the going rate is around $20 per hour.
Tutor
This would be the perfect option if you worked in a highly specialized career. If you have excellent and specific skills and qualifications, those skills and qualifications haven’t disappeared just because you’ve given birth. The only thing stopping you from teaching your skills to someone else is finding out whether you can teach. If you think you have the patience and communication skills, you’re just one step away from becoming a tutor. That could be a tutor for children if you have skills which relate to education, or a tutor for adults if your skills are valuable to the workplace. Perhaps you could even teach English as a foreign language, or you could teach a foreign language to people who want to learn? You can do this over Skype if you don’t want people coming to your home, and the amount you charge will be relative to the value of whatever you’re teaching.
Transcriber
How good are your typing skills? If you’re rapid with a keyboard, there’s no end to the number of people and businesses who would love to use you for transcription. Law enforcement agencies and medical professionals have particular needs for people who can do quick transcription work. Police interviews need typing up, as do medical assessments and reports. By no means is it just those two professions who might be in need of your assistance, either. So long as you can relay words from your ears to your keys accurately and efficiently, there’s no reason why you can’t excel at this. Your upper earnings limit is only be defined by how much work you can get through in a single day. While some recruitment websites sometimes advertise vacancies in this field, you may be better off registering with a freelancing website. Places like Fiverr and Upwork are a good place to connect with people who might want to make use of your talents.
Having a child can be as stressful as it is exciting, and most of those stresses are down to the financial issues that come with having a new mouth to feed. When your costs go up and your income goes down at the same time, it’s understandable that you’ll want to start making money again as quickly as possible. Even if it’s only for the short term – until your children are old enough for you to go back to work full time – taking on a profitable ‘from home’ job like the ones we’ve listed above can be a great way to keep the bills paid while you settle into your new life as a mom.
