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?

I was a stay at home mum for about three years and when I went back (to admin) I earned £10k a year less

I think 50k is a crazy goal for admin if you've not worked in so long

It's a case of finding a job you can do with an employer who allows you to work from home. However, if you're thinking that working from home is an easy gig, it's not. One of my friends works in the public sector and since COVID only goes into the office once a month. She works at least an hour of unpaid overtime a day, with only a short break for lunch. It's worth it to her because she no longer has an exhausting and expensive commute every day.

100% agree with that.
You can earn maybe up to 20k doing some remote language teaching/11+ tuition, training AI, maybe some translation if you know a foreign language, virtual assistant and the type, working around the school hours and that's basically it, if you didn't have a flying career before or recent qualifications.

Unfortunately that’s not a realistic salary expectation unless you’ve got a specific skill, such as being an experienced software developer for example.

I was a VA and am now a freelance business consultant, I earn about £60k working 5 hours a day 4 days a week. However I had recently departeed an industry where I was incredible well known and sought after.

You could earn this as a VA, but after 15 years out of work you'd have a slog ahead of you to build up the clientele- you would have to work full time and maybe even more in the beginning to get the work. Once you've done that for a couple of years you could probably move into some more strategic work and charge more like £50 an hour, then you could probably work less hours and bring in what you want.

£50k from home on school hours? Sorry, OP, but you're living in la-la land. I'm all for supporting women's employment and it not having to mean children are endlessly in childcare, but goodness ... we live in the real world here.

🤣

🎣 9/10. Excellent.

Selling magic beans

😆

Yes - agreed. That seems very ambitious without any niche skills. BTW if I were hiring I’d reject anyone who called women ladies.

I didn’t put DC2 into nursery initially, thought as I was freelance I could work when she was asleep (at the same time as doing my MSc). It worked until I burned myself out completely and ended up nearly dying of sepsis because I worked on through appendicitis. DC2 went to nursery after that.

50K - lol. OnlyFans it is then! (And even then you'll have to come up with something pretty original or niche!)

Kindly, I think your expectations as someone who has been out of work for 15 years and will effectively be starting from the bottom are out of whack with reality.

The Civil Service tends to have good opportunities for flexible work and progression. You can expect to start off on £25ish for an administration role. Most roles are highly competitive and you would be spending several hours on each application but once you've secured a role you can probably work hybrid and flexible hours.

That is quite a salary with lower experience levels.

If you need school hours have you considered being a TA or LSA in a school? Or if you are extra brave a Secondary Cover Supervisor or Student Elsa / Attendance Support Officer? Sorry nowhere near £50k in fact you will be lucky for half that, but you will have school hours and term time so you save on holiday clubs etc.

School Reception? School Suport jobs are hard work and incredibly underpaid, but you get the holidays so you have to accept the fate.
Perhaps you could look into childminding at home, not the easiest but some have a few and earn well from it, you could opt for term time only which obvs is less money (some have additional extra holiday club weeks).. This can be financially rewarding but emotionally and physically tough and in your own home.
or use your recent qualifications and work your way up.

Selling magic beans in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

I would recommend looking at qualifying as a parish clerk and working towards a town clerk post. I did this when my children were very little as it’s flexible and home based. Very well experienced clerks can earn £60k +, start small with your admin experience and a council will pay for you to qualify.

I now earn very almost that working for a local authority in my early 30s. I work full time but hours that suit me and do a few hours twice a week in an evening to facilitate pick ups in the week combining my old degree in a property related field with the local government experience. Local government finds it quite difficult to recruit in my experience and is massively flexible.

So you mean WFH as an employee rather than some business of your own?

I did several years WFH with Citizens Advice on different workstreams.

While some local outfits seem to expect attendance at an office n days a week others do not, Once they've accepted 100% WFH they then twig they can recruit nationally rather than just fishing in a pool of those who can get to the office.

Last I was at was in SE England. There was a sort of coincidental cluster in the East Midlands but one was in the NW of Scotland.

Prostitution?

The problem you have is that you either have to get a job with that as the attached salary and WFH as an option

or

You have to start your own business - which is what I do - but new businesses rarely return big profits early on, its not unusual to see a loss for a few years, then a slow creep into profitability. And of course, you need to have an idea that people want and is sustainable over a long period of time.

OP keep an eye out for school admin/reception roles. Obviously wouldn’t be wfh but you’d have the right hours. Either that or start your own business. I’m in the same situation and I have just started a home help business x

Social media influencer if you’ve got an angle that people will want to follow you for! It might take time to build up but I have paid influencers a LOT of money for making a 30 second video

If you speak a foreign language you can make big money working for a bank.. not sure of wfh options

£50,000 doing part-time hours? So that’s like an £80,000 job? That is an enormous salary for admin, even if you’d been working your way up for the last fifteen years instead of taking that time out of work. I think you need to spend some time looking through the jobs pages to see what salaries actually look like, and what eexperience is required.

Well national minimum wage is £26,430 a year… so there are huge numbers of professionals working for a lot more than 13% above NMW. As there should be.

I have a brilliant morning job that works around being a parent to a primary school age child but I earn a third of what you call "comfortable" (and it's not from home).