By Angela England
Many women make money from home.
In today’s economy we’re all looking for ways to stretch out budgets. While many times the need for frugal living means creative meal preparation on the part of the wife and mother, there are other ways to help with family finances from home. Here are some zero or low-cost ideas for making money from home.
1. Write Article and Web Content
This is how I’ve been contributing to my family’s income the past couple of years and I’ve become rather successful at it. If you can put two words together and create a coherent sentence, there is definitely potential for earning money writing online. On my writing website, I’ve outline several places that pay for content and how much they pay, as well as their revenue structures.
2. Make Telephone Calls With OnPoint Advocacy
I’ve worked for this company before as well, and while I can’t share details, you make phone calls (not sales calls) and write letters for people. The pay is $12 per hour with a minimum of 25 hours per week. The pro is that these are good hours for flexibility from home. The con is that the campaigns aren’t constant, so you may be working for four hours straight and then off for an unknown amount of time. Pay is processed every week and I’ve always been paid in a prompt manner. To apply visit the OnPoint website and click Telephone Outreach to fill out an application.
3. Sell Baked Goods
I know a mother who scraped together $10 of loose change and made as many chocolate chip cookies as she could make with the materials that bought her. With one baby in the carrier and a toddler in the stroller, she walked through all the downtown businesses until the cookies were all sold and found that she’d made ten times her money. Now she sets up a free table at the farmer’s market each weekend selling baked goods and makes a few hundred dollars per week—not bad for one day’s work!
4. Sell Stuff on eBay or at Garage Sales
EBay is like a worldwide yard sale. I’ve never had the patience for figuring out what items sell or don’t sell well there; however, I do know some women who do very well selling items via eBay or yahoo groups. One in particular posts to freecycle or local groups that she’ll “haul off garage sale junk” and then turns around and sells the items online. She makes about $400 extra a month for one day of picking up garage sale leftovers and one day mid-week taking a trip to the post office with her various bags and parcels. As a homeschooling mother of 6, she has very little free time but that extra little bit allows her greater flexibility in her budget.
5. Grow Home Produce or Eggs
In some areas there is a desperate need for locally grown produce and farm fresh eggs. While our family has a medium-sized flock of chickens, I do not sell many eggs because we eat them so quickly. It is hugely satisfying to feed my family breakfast every morning and know that no harmful chemicals have gone into their food unawares. However, the 4 or 5 dozen eggs I sell each month covers the cost of feed for the chickens, and the eggs produced save us around $50 per month. (Farm fresh, free-range eggs in our grocery store go for around $4 a dozen.) That’s not a huge savings, granted, but it’s a good start for 15 minutes of “work” each day.
A neighbor has a much larger flock (about 3 dozen hens) that runs free range through her backyard and garden and she sells the eggs for $1.50 per dozen, raising an extra $200 per month on average. Sometimes she’ll have a hen go setting and save half the babies to raise for herself and half the babies to sell at $1 apiece as day-old chicks or $8 as half-grown pullets (young hens). See more about raising chickens in the Livestock section.
Have you been doing something creative to earn extra money from home? Leave a comment to share with us, stop by the Facebook page or consider joining The Untrained Housewife as a contributing writer!
