How can I make a comfortable income from home

[Sweetly1]

Hi Ladies I want to find out what ladies are doing to make a comfortable income around their primary school children and still have time for family? Kindly advise?

This - ive been out of work for 10 years now and cannot get a job for love nor money, anywhere! (ideally money!)

I work part time, spread the hours across 5 days and use a little bit of wraparound care. I go into the office some days though. You will limit yourself significantly if you want 100% work from home & no childcare at all. You would probably need the equivalent of an £80k job to get £50k within school hours, and you'll still need childcare in the holidays.

I'm currently doing a intensive Business Administration course

This sounds a bit generic and unlikely to open doors job wise. Can you do a coding/developing course - makers academy? Have you got any higher level qualifications? Degree? I assume so if you are looking to earn £50k from part time work.

A 15 year gap on your cv is going to be a huge barrier. I'd take literally anything at all to get some more recent employment experience on my cv - care work, retail, anything.

• the people that have those unicorn jobs have usually obtained them by staying in the workplace and working their arses off while juggling nursery bills etc. If people could take years out and the just sashay back into a decently paid and flexible job that could play second fiddle to their kids, then everyone bloody would!*

This 😂 high five to all the working mums on here who pretty much paid to work when the kids were tiny and the nursery bill + train fare came to more than the wage. Its hard and you get NO rest but you come out a few years down the line in the plum senior job with flexibility and good pay and its SO worth it.

I work full time from home. It is very flexible, can nip out when I like for school runs. Though ai do some meetings from my car and have to use after school clubs too some days. apart from some international travel and client visits which are mandatory and then I havr to sort childcare while I am away. I earn about 85k. Most jobs are requiring back to office so I am staying put even though I could earn more.
I work in tech consultancy and have worked full time in this field for 25 years. I never stopped working full time and have two kids.
I think starting from scratch you arent going to find a 50k job that is wfh flexible hours. You have to build up to that. I would suggest freelance in something and go from there.
Flexible working is being reigned back in everywhere. I could earn double going back to the office so you are competing with people like me for flexible jobs who are overqualified and taking more junior roles for flexibility.

this is so so true, I think a lot of people only see the moment they live in and they don’t think of the future effects, I stayed home for 5 years and took enough of a hit for that. It’s hard to go to work and come out with very little but it doesn’t last forever.

Music tutors, or subject tutors such as maths or french etc

BUT you'd have to teach at least five lessons each day for at least five days each week at £40 ph to make that income.

If you're good then people would pay it. I pay £50 an hour for an hour's music lesson.

ETA - a music teacher friend slogs his guts out from 8am - 9pm every Saturday and Sunday to make the numbers work. (Because kids are obvs in school during the week)

Ex teacher, now online tutor and examiner. I'm self employed and earn between 40 & 50K and fit it around drop off / pick up / after school clubs etc. I could earn a lot more and have to turn students away.

But I've got years of experience, post grad qualifications and am trained in 2 different educational curriculums. I also have to work school holidays, some evenings (I try not to but...) and weekends.

Upside is if I have something on, I just cancel lessons. Downside is if I'm ill there is no sick pay.

One area that is a HUGE growth market is tutoring SEN students.

If you get a good qualification to teach children with dyslexia, you can earn up to £120 / £150 an hour. Not all of those tutors are qualified teachers. If you can get registered with the British Dyslexia Association, you can set whatever rate you want. And have a waiting list of clients.

I don’t think 50k per year part time is realistic unless you have specific qualifications in a well paid job. You could potentially find a WFH job with flexible times and do full time hours to earn this amount by working a bit when the children are in bed or on weekends.

I don’t think anyone thinks that’s what you START on. But what you aim for and how you get there! I don’t need to work for bills money, but I’d like to and it nice to have extra for luxuries, especially as your kids get older. I’d happily work for NMW if I had plan and it was a stepping stone, even if it was boring/frustrating/unrewarding/hard etc. But I’m not doing it that’s all there is because life is too short and it DOES have a massive impact on my ability to be there for my child and for us to have a good life. That’s worth considerably more than NMW to me. I have way more to offer a job and I expect more back. Even its potential. It needs to be part of something bigger to be worth it I expect a lot of people feel similarly. It doesn’t mean we expect to drop right into it.

Presumably you are thinking of full time, so 9-5 or equivalent? In which case you will need childcare right up to the end of your working day, so as you will have that in place what stops you from working in an office or hybrid? This will open up so much more for you and although I'd say you'd be extremely unlikely to start on that salary you can work your way up....

Many things can be done from home. The key is what skills and experience do you have?

Dh runs a company that makes professional kitchens (he only is on site one day a week around family life). I am an academic who has mostly always worked remotely unless I am teaching, which is only a few times a year. We collectively earn over £100k and both nearly always around for the kids outside of school hours. I went back to work when my dc were 9 and 11 months old, respectively.

But what are you good at? You need to find work that fits the skills you have.

I nearly spat my coffee out at £50k.

I’m a freelance consultant in the property industry. My hourly rate varies between £40 and £100 and I’m entirely flexible in terms of my hours. I wfh almost all the time but occasionally go out on site. I do have two degrees and 20 years experience. I think £50k working from home with flexible hours in an admin role is very unlikely. I have a friend who is an EA to a CEO in London who works full time, flexible hours, 3 days wfh, but she also has two degrees and experience working for clients that are household names.

I'm a teacher on the highest rate of salary but I only work 3 days 9-2:30pm for the grand total of £21k :)

Is that on main payscale? Or UPS? Doesn't sound a lot.

Definitely! I’m well-paid and part time with some level of flexibility (still need to do 60% in office, there are very few 100% remote jobs) but like you say I had to keep working through the nursery years for this.
Long days commuting before Covid, so wfh wasn’t a thing and children’s frequent illness days had to be shared between me and husband depending on who had the most important work going on that day. Missed school assemblies etc etc. Rarely are these things achieved without sacrifice or compromise somewhere.

I'm interested in why you did the TA course if you need £50k per annum...

I am following out of curiosity as I've been struggling to find full or part time work for the last year. I'm quite skilled (or so I thought!) and experienced (or so I thought!) but the job market is crap.

I actually wanted to work in an office but there's barely anything going locally. So I looked on LinkedIn at remote roles hoping to find more variety even at NMW (I thought I was worth a bit more per hour but most roles are around £24-26k) and that was pretty hopeless too.

Beginning to freak out about the future, my cv and my career. ☹️

Sounds like 3 x short days (~60%) so probably FTE around 58k, not that bad.

We’re here but feel outnumbered. MN isn’t a representation of society as a whole, it attracts a lot of wealthy women but they are not what the majority of the UK are made up of.

It's in FE so we have lower pay scales than schools.

More like 42k FTE :(
And I also work one evening 5:30-9pm along with the three short days.

I think it attracts liars too