Anyone have a finance-related career they do from home?

[WantToFindWorkLifeBalance]

I work in IT consulting - am currently on maternity leave from a senior management role I do 4 days per week. It's long hours, 90 min commute each way, some travel and I no longer enjoy it very much. I definitely don't want to be doing it for the next 25 years. I'm using this mat leave as an opportunity to look at different options, e.g. retraining. I'd like to take a stab at finding something that may suit me career wise for the long term. My degree is in Maths and I have a general interest in Finance - have always wondered if I should have pursued that direction instead of IT but then hindsight is always a wonderful thing...

So I'm currently looking into what I could retrain as, potentially in the finance area, that could lead to a career with some flexibility and preferably home-based. I'm comfortable with working 3 / 4 days a week with childcare and putting in evening / weekend hours as needed but want to be able to have the flexibility to see the children every day, not have a major drama every parents evening, school play etc. At the moment I'm looking at accountancy, training as an IFA or some form of home trading. Does anyone do any of these? Do they work well flexibly? Any other ideas of routes I could investigate preferably with a Maths / finance slant?

there is an old thread on here of a group of ex city Mums who now work with each other from home ....

are you using linkedin to see what work is out there to avoid going back to the real world?

Hi Talkinpeace - thanks for your reply. I did have a search through historical threads but don't think I found that one - will have another hunt.

I am active on LinkedIn - just really at the stage right now of trying to come up with all my options - work out what's feasible etc. I know I need to do it for me and the family but it's trying to maximise my chances of going in the right direction. I'm alternating between being scared and excited at the prospect of change right now!

If you have worked in IT couldn't you work as a freelance programmer? It's what I do, it tends to be from home 50% of the time could do more at home if I wanted to but I quite like going in for a bit a human contact. I subcontract out work to guys working remotely all over Europe when on larger projects. There is lot of work for skilled developers so if you are willing to put the time in to train it's worth considering getting your coding skills up.

Sorry my post won't help at all if you are only looking to pursue a financial career.

There is a big finance/IT cross over area, but I am not sure about the working from home bit.

I'm AAT qualified and work from home as a self employed bookkeeper and accountant. I also go to clients offices so have a good mix of work.

THe City mums thread appears to have gone.
Personally I would advocate incremental steps from your current work - using your existing contacts, rather than retraining into already overstuffed fields such as accountancy.

Any way you can leverage your maths (statistics?) and IT in to being the best damned Big Data analyst out there?

Is there a market for that DD? Who are the clients and how do you get visible to them?

Well she's already got the IT contacts - I would have thought that one of the problems in this type of industry (finance) is being "allowed" to work from home. I've a few friends working for big finance institutions and their employers make a right old song & dance about "bums on seats" and online security issues.

As far as statisticians go - that's a small, select group isn't it? It's such a niche market and it's not easy (I spent a week doing stats despite doing some maths at uni and it made me weep ) - so perhaps it's one of those things that if you can, you can. LinkedIn?

Wow - thanks for all the replies - really appreciate you taking the time. To answer a few of the questions:

Fusam - programming is a good idea. I haven't done it since the early days of my career but I did enjoy - I just happened to end up going down more of an infrastructure path by circumstance really. Do you not find that competition from offshore makes it more challenging now? I will look into this more.

Skyeblue - I have just received some info from AAT and it looks interesting. Did you self-study and then go self-employed or did you spend some time in a company first?

TalkinPeace - I know what you mean ref. incremental steps. It would make more sense in many ways to try and use my existing skillset at least in part. I have a bit of a head (gradual change, keep earning etc.) versus heart (just go for something different) type of dilemma at the moment.

DD - my stats would be very rusty but then it would probably be easier to re-learn something I've done before. Like you say though, it's whether there's a way to use the skills in a flexible from home style role / self-employment.

Hmmmm, lots of food for thought - it's amazing how much it helps setting it out and getting some input like this. Thanks again.

Funnily enough DD my speciality is 'Big Data' and building large scale data related applications for start ups and corporates. I am more on the development side but dabble in number crunching as needed.

I am more than happy to talk off line about what I do. There are some small financial tech startups that are starting to disrupt the market of the established city software houses at the moment. There is something called fin tech www.fintechinnovationlablondon.co.uk/ which is basically an incubator for small startups so if you have an idea there has never been a better time. The barrier to entry has been significantly lowered because cloud computing is so cheap thanks to AWS, rackspace, etc. Today I crunched through terabytes of data using over 100 node AWS cluster and it cost me less than $50 which would have been unheard of even 5 years ago.

If you are near London let me know I run a networking group for women who work with data it's for developers, stats people, visualisers and data journalism bods.

Re: Off shoring, a lot of my emergency client jobs tends to be the fixing mess created by people trying to save money by off shoring development work. It's an amazingly false economy.

Sorry for the waffle but essentially if you are looking for flexibility then tech is your best bet as a lot of the developers pointedly refuse to work from anywhere but from home. The downside is you have to keep your skills sharp as things change/progress pretty much every few months but if you enjoy it then it's no big deal.

I think I have totally outed myself with this post so I am due a NC.

Hi Fusam,

I was wondering, I'm a freelance IT contractor (tester) but I've always had to work onsite for clients and have found nearly all of my gigs through agencies. Is it possible to make the leap to work from home (most clients will only allow the the odd day from home and insist on being office based)

Just stuck on ideas as to how to find clients that will allow it - grateful for any advice :-) I currently work on mobile apps which is still quite a new niche area, I'm just not sure how to grow what i do, if that makes sense?

Sim - sorry for thread crash.

Have you considered retraining as an Actuary? There are quite a few exams and they are considered tough but could be done in the same length of time as accounting exams while pay much higher in training.
Actuaries are paid much better than accountants ime and have much lighter workload. Should be easy enough to work a 4 day week 9-5. If you work for an insurance company hours are usually flexible so could start at 8 and finish at 4 say.
If you want any more info check out www.actuaries.org.uk and feel free to PM me

Hi Sim,

I personally never go through agencies. The way I find work is either through stack overflow or networks.

If you are in London have you ever attended any of the silicon roundabout/tech city events? It's a great place to meet start up founders. I am pretty sure there is a group for Android/IOS developers on meetup.com that meets regularly.

I rent space in some of the shared tech spaces in tech city just to be able to meet other developers and small companies so that I don't get forgotten. If you can't network in person then you need to use social media and blogging to get your profile up.

Also getting involved in open source projects in the last few years has really helped me, although I actually do it because I believe in the ethos of open source rather than just for the sake of getting work. Hope that helps in anyway.

Pm me if you want me to send you the London networking events.

One more thing Sim and Want, some freelancers give on-site vs remote rates to clients for added incentive. i.e. lowering remote work price. Then it's a 2 way benefit.

Aha that's a cunning idea, thanks Fusam. Is peopleperhour and elancer and rentacoder also worth looking at? Or are the rates to low as your competing internationally.

Sim I've looked at stuff on those sites before and I wouldn't code for those prices... I'd get a better hourly rate at Tesco - but maybe I was just looking at the wrong jobs.

OP - if you're working for a bit anonymous corporation how about abusing their facilities whilst you're on maternity and leveraging any Gartner/Forrester type memberships you have. I was just on Gartner this morning and saw they have networking forums - which have GOT to carry a bit of weight being as it's paid membership.

I looked at peopleperhour when I initially started out (but not the other ones) I was put off bidding because of the rates. I have no idea if you will get work if you quoted a realistic price.

You need to ask yourself if you were looking for a freelancer where you would look. I personally would ask friends for recommendations or look around where I know people of that skill set gather, i.e. forums, meetup groups, etc. Hence the need to network as much as possible and having a body of visible work i.e. open source software or whatever way you choose to toot your accomplishments. I think github has a jobs page too.

Skyeblue, how did you go about getting clients? That's something I'd like to do as I was an accountant pre-kids (management accountant as opposed to working in a practice).

(sorry for thread hijack, Wantto)

I started off part time self employed while still employed in general practice, some of my work was bookkeeping for clients of my boss. Then when I had enough work for 2 days a week, I left my job (after 20 years!) and went fully self employed.

I advertise in the local church monthly magazine which costs £50 a year and covers 6 local villages. I also advertise in the annual Fair programme, of which they print around 2000 for £35.

I advertise that I do Payroll, VAT, accounts and bookkeeping and software training.

Most of my work is picked up through that and then through word of mouth after that by clients recommending me to people.

It was a very scary decision to make after 20 years in the same job, but I havent regretted it

Thanks for that Skyeblue (sorry took me so long to reply again). Am glad its going well for you.

Did you have to register with HMRC? I am CIMA qualified but haven't renewed my membership for about 10 years due to the cost. Been looking into it and you need to register with one of the supervisory bodies. But the cost of readmission and registering with CIMA again and its restrictions it puts on you if you want to work as a bookkeeper do put me off. Was wondering if HMRC was the simplest way to go as its listed as one of the supervisory bodies.

You have to register with HMRC if you are not registered with anybody else, otherwise you get fined or something? It costs me around £500 a year to be registered with AAT as a Member In Practice

I think that will be the easiest route for me, HMRC. Will cost a fortune otherwise. Have been given a contact today so fingers crossed it turns into a client. Will have to register with HMRC quickly if so!