I posted last week on how many people set their sights too low when working at home. There’s a flip side to challenging yourself, of course, and that’s working too much.

This is a mistake you can make even if you haven’t set very high goals for yourself, and what defines it is quite vague. It much depends on you and the needs of your family.

Sometimes a particular schedule is just right, but then circumstances change just a little bit, and the schedule is overworking you.

This is something I’ve dealt with quite a bit lately. Having a new baby, moving, getting settled, taking my son to speech therapy, figuring out if we can manage preschool classes for him, taking my daughter to and from school… it all adds up and really makes for a more challenging schedule for me to work.

And so I work fewer hours on my business than I’d like because my family has a lot of needs right now.

I’m much prone to overworking, and I know it. I’ll stay up late even when I know the baby hasn’t been sleeping well and I’ll just be dragging the next day. It’s not the best of habits, really.

It doesn’t feel like overwork; I enjoy what I’m doing. But when I’m that tired later on, I know.

So how do you balance your ambitions with working an appropriate amount?

It’s not always easy. You need to pay attention to your own needs as well as the needs of your family. You don’t ever want to forget why you’re a work at home parent.

Make sure you take some time every day with your family. Eat meals together whenever possible. Play as a family before putting the kids to bed. Take a break with your spouse.

Sometimes, yes, you’ll overwork yourself by working more after doing all the fun stuff. That’s how it goes at times. Just don’t let overwork be your entire way of life.

I think I’m like a lot of work at home moms in that my original reason for working at home was to add to our family finances without needing daycare. Not all that much was needed, as by the time you take out the costs of daycare, transportation, wardrobe, eating out more and so forth, any job I was likely to get at the time wouldn’t be bringing in that much.

Either that or I’d be bringing in enough that we’d complain that my husband’s income was getting entirely eaten up by that stuff. But since I was the one having the baby and having left my job for other reasons at the time, as well as taking training in medical transcription, it just made sense for me to be the one at home.

And sure enough, those first few years I didn’t earn that much. I just worked part time hours on my transcription and dabbled in a couple websites. Nothing serious.

Until the first month that I had a website outearn my husband’s income.

That was quite a flash of insight. Suddenly I realized that there was much more potential in what I had been working on.

These days my sights are higher. I don’t always outearn my husband; matter of fact some months flat out suck. But knowing that I can do that has made me set my sights even higher.

I want to let him work at home.

That’s a tough one, I’ll admit. That means a sufficiently stable income to take that gamble. It means being able to pay for health insurance for a family of five. It means money to invest in whatever it is he wants to do and keep it up while he gets things moving.

After that, the goals get higher yet.

What Do You Expect of Your Home Business?

When you set a goal of just a couple hundred a month, you probably aren’t pushing yourself hard enough. It may be all you need, but is it really enough to motivate you to work as hard as it takes to get things going?

Admittedly the benefit of being there for your family is pretty motivating too. But it’s motivating in a different way than earning money.

Here’s the thing. If you can earn a couple hundred a month, there’s a pretty good chance that you can expand on those same concepts and earn more the same way. It won’t always work; some things just don’t grow that way, but often enough one thing leads to another.

I like having tiers of earning goals. There’s my basic goal of a regular $5000 a month which I’ve hit a couple times, but have yet to reach regularly. And since my lows can be really, really low yet I know I have a good bit of work to do.

But that goal is just the first, and it’s not enough to get my husband working at home. Not in southern California anyhow, and we have no plans at this time to leave the state. Both of our extended families are primarily here.

Set your goals high enough to be challenging but low enough that you know you’ll reach them eventually. You won’t know how long it will take, but make it reasonable and it will happen.

Plan rewards for yourself for each goal. I have rewards planned both for occasional high earnings and for when things start looking regular.

How Do You Get There?

There are a few key factors to reaching your business goals. One quite simple to say – hard work.

Hard work won’t guarantee success, but you’re not likely to get anywhere without it.

But there’s generally more to it. You need to invest time and money into training yourself. How you balance this depends on what you can afford to spend versus how long you’re willing to take to find the right information.

If you’re in network marketing, for example, downloading The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing and buying The Renegade Network Marketer can be a great place to start. You need to know how to build your business, and trial and error or working your family and friends isn’t always all that effective. It’s better to learn from someone who knows what works.

The resources you pick depend on just what it is you want to do. If you really aren’t into network marketing, those resources aren’t going to do a thing for you. They’d be a waste of time and money.

Pick just one business skill you want to improve. It should be something that helps you to make money, whatever it is. You might want to do more on AdWords and want the latest version of Perry Marshall’s AdWords guide. You might want to learn more about article marketing, blogging, forum marketing… any one of many more skills that you can use to grow your business.

Yes, you’ll probably have to spend money. Buying ebooks or training from reliable sources is very much so worth the expense. You might find the same information for free elsewhere, but you’ll have to dig through a lot of garbage and inaccurate information first. The time saved is worth it most of the time.

Don’t try to improve all your skills at once. You’ll probably just make it harder to improve any of them. Pick one. Get comfortable with it and see how it works for you. Focus on it.

Once you’ve really mastered it or decided that it really isn’t for you, then you can go on to the next thing. Don’t drop anything that works well for you, of course.

Your focus should always be on meeting your goals. While you can have very simple goals, the simple truth is that having higher aspirations can be more motivating than merely wanting enough to get by. Don’t settle for good enough. That can be your first goal, but why let it be your final one?

Having one parent be home with the kids often means living on a pretty tight budget. Even when the at home parent works, it’s often not enough to really ease the budget crunch. But being frugal all the time isn’t much fun.

Some of the problem can come from having to think about practically every purchase, no matter how necessary. It’s skipping your favorite treats. It’s telling the kids “no” all too often when they want a treat. It’s seeing friends and family be so much freer about how they spend money, and knowing you can’t do it.

Do You Have Any Options?

Some people say that you always have options. That’s true to a degree, but you can’t always exercise them right away. There aren’t many times that you can suddenly earn more money because you want to do more fun stuff. And you can’t just decide to splurge if you’re living paycheck to paycheck… at least not if you want a roof over your family’s head, working utilities and enough food to eat.

But you do have the option to try to bring in more money, if what you really want is an overall lifestyle change. You won’t be able to get it right away most likely, even if you were to start working outside the home, but you can set goals.

But I Want It Nooooooow!

Sometimes you can work in the small splurges. It’s wonderful when things work out that way. If you can afford to indulge yourself or your family just a little while being frugal, do so. It can really help ease some of the strain caused by being so careful with your finances.

If you can’t, it may be wiser to go over why you’re trying to save money in the first place. To an appropriate extent, this can be discussed with children. They shouldn’t be burdened too much with their parents’ financial problems, but knowing why they can’t have everything they want isn’t going to hurt them.

Especially if they watch a lot of television, kids want things. Lots of things. It often seems like they want everything they see.

Frugal or not, that’s not going to happen, right?

With that in mind, even as you say no because money is tight, think about how often you’d be saying no even if it weren’t. “No” is a great word for kids to hear when they’re trying to get you to buy stuff they don’t need. “Save your own money” isn’t a bad choice either.

When it’s stuff you want, think about what you want most. Do you want the shiny whatsit or do you want to meet your financial goals more? As a grownup, you should be able to decide sensibly whether or not you should indulge… even when you aren’t feeling like being sensible.

Get Support

No, not money. Find friends, family members, your spouse or significant other, and make sure you have emotional support for your choices. It’s particularly helpful to have the support of others who also need to be frugal. It can be a bit of a competition to see who can keep being frugal, save the most money, stick best to the budget, whatever.

Being frugal is much easier if you don’t feel alone in it.

And yes, it can still be exhausting. But you can get past that and keep working towards your goals.

Like many people, my big reason for starting to work at home in the first place was to be there for my kids. With three of them now, that reason only gets more important.

But I have to admit, dealing with a baby when I want to get work done is not easy. It’s been really tough lately to come up with enough hours to get even the minimum amount of work done I’d like to. Especially as she gets older, more mobile and more demanding.

Time was when I could sit her on my lap and still get a little bit done. That’s not quite so simple now. She’s bigger and much more interested in my keyboard and anything she can reach on my desk. Especially if it can go in her mouth.

Yeah. I pretty much need her naptimes to get anything done. And it’s still not easy many days then, as she’s not exactly a champion of sleeping through the night. Thank goodness I don’t have to drive to work that tired.

This is one of the times that it takes incredible dedication to keep going. Believe me, it would be much easier to just take off, but that’s not what I’m going to do, and if you’re in a similar situation, not what I’d recommend either.

When daytime naptimes don’t work for me, working at night after all the kids are in bed can. Other work at home parents prefer early, early mornings, a thought which gives me the chills. Really, really not for me!

But you do what works for you.

Work early in the morning. Late at night. During baby’s nap. When there’s another adult available to watch the kids.

You can even hire a “Mother’s (or Father’s) Helper” to just play with the baby as you work. I did this when I was a medical transcriptionist, and it was pretty helpful. You don’t even need your helper able to feed the baby or change diapers. Just play with the baby and let you know when something more is needed. Older siblings (where available) can also help.

I like to remind myself that this won’t last forever. That means enjoying this time with a baby and not letting it get me down too much just for being tired. And if the price for not losing a post to a baby pounding a keyboard is a little less sleep, so be it.

One of the challenges of being a work at home parent is setting your work hours. There’s a lot to balance when you have a family. You need to be there for them, but you may need to work more hours than can easily be had in the early morning or at night.

That’s not to say those aren’t appropriate work hours if you like them. I know I prefer to work at night, with the kids in bed and my husband off playing on his computer. I’ll sometimes take some time off to watch television with him, but mostly I try to be productive.

A lot of figuring out appropriate work hours is a matter of personal preference combined with family needs. If you love having your evenings open, you’re going to have to pick some other time to work.

But if you need to get a project DONE, you may have to add in some hours and lose some of the time you’d rather keep available for other purposes.

Working at home does often mean sacrificing some family time, and that’s a reality you have to deal with. It happens even if you don’t have clients and work entirely on a schedule of your own choosing. There will come times when you just really need to get something done on a tighter schedule than you might like.

Some nights getting the kids to bed isn’t easy. They’re bright eyed and bushy tailed when you’re ready for them to get to bed. This has lead to me and my husband joking about a drinking game for getting the kids to bed.

Standard drinking game rules, except you can’t take a drink until the kids are actually asleep.

Child gets up for drink – Take one drink.

Asks for other parent – Take one drink.

Gets up to go potty – Take one drink.

Gets up to go potty but doesn’t do anything there – Take 2 drinks.

Asks for an extra story – Take one drink.

Asks for same story as the night before – Take 2 drinks.

Complains: “I’m too hot!” – Take one drink.

Complains: “I’m too cold!” – Take one drink.

One child is too hot and the other is too cold – Take 2 drinks.

Wants to watch television with you – Take one drink.

The show you’re watching isn’t age appropriate – Take one drink.

The show you’re watching isn’t age appropriate and your child wakes you with nightmares that night – Take 2 drinks.

Mysterious owie appears. It hurts a lot. Needs kisses – Take one drink.

Mysterious owie must, must I say, have a bandage put on it – Take 2 drinks.

Child throws up – Take 2 drinks.

Gets up crying that favorite bedtime toy is missing – Take one drink.

Missing toy is at foot of the bed – Take one drink.

Missing toy is right by pillow, where it had been when you put child to bed – Take 2 drinks.

And of course, kids go to bed with no trouble at all… take a drink if you feel like it. You probably deserve it.

My mother asked me a question the other day that I hadn’t given much thought to in a very long time. Would I be going back to work outside the home when Selene goes to kindergarten?

Umm, well, that’s pretty far in the future. She’s only 7 months old, after all.

Now, my mother is very supportive of me being at home. This is not a topic she’s nagged me on or anything. I know a lot of work at home and stay at home moms do have problems with that, but I’m fortunate in that I don’t have to deal with that so much.

And as it is something a lot of work at home moms do, it’s even a fair question when posed politely.

My first reflex is to say “Heck no!”

Possibly more colorfully than that if someone were to be rude about it, but as I said, that was not a part of the issue.

Besides, while I like to think of it as improbable, nothing is impossible. And if my family need the money, yes I would.

But I don’t think about it because I don’t often miss working outside the home. I can miss the social side of it, interacting face to face with other adults, eating out and that kind of thing. Overall, however, I most decidedly do not.

It’s not a bad thing if you do miss working outside the home. Working at home is not the dream for all mothers or fathers. For many it’s frankly more difficult to work at home than outside the home. Being at home can be a sacrifice in many ways, not just financially.

I love being my own boss, even when I’m being hard on myself for not working enough hours. I love it even when the money isn’t coming in as I’d like. I’m even fairly fond of it when I have to work extra long hours to get something done that just can’t wait.

It’s hard often enough. There’s really not so much a possibility for a break with children around. If I’m not working on business, I’m probably dealing with children. Playing with them is a delight, but it’s not exactly the same thing as taking a full on break where I can do just as I please.

For me, the parts I miss about working outside the home do not come out ahead of the parts I love about working at home. And so, no matter the age of my kids I intend to keep on fighting to earn enough to stay here.

I’ve been watching people just about throwing fits about President Obama making a speech that schools could choose to show students. The controversy amazed me. I get that the original suggested discussion points for teachers weren’t exactly well done, being too focused on the President for many people’s comfort, but an awful lot of people seemed to be having fits over the fact that he was speaking to students at all.

Never mind that he’s not the first United States President to address a speech to students.

I’ve heard terms such as indoctrination, cult of personality and so forth thrown around about this speech. Never mind that it was just a speech about working hard in school and they fixed the suggested curriculum.

I truly loathe it when misinformation is deliberately handed out about these things. My inlaws were convinced that this was REQUIRED for all schools to show, which was never true. If you can’t complain about these things honestly, maybe the problem isn’t all that big!

I read the text of the speech. There really wasn’t anything political about it. Just a standard work hard in school sort of speech, the kind of thing that kids need to hear and probably tune out anyhow.

My daughter’s only in second grade, and I would love for her to be hearing that kind of thing from more than just Mommy and Daddy. She’s a good student but some lessons it doesn’t hurt to hear from multiple sources.

Frankly, a good, non-political, back to school speech from any President is something I would let my kids hear, even if I didn’t agree with that President’s politics. Some things aren’t about politics. And if something is said that I disagree with, that’s what talking to my kid is all about.

I’ve been in contact with Jessica LaFlesch from Arise lately. She gave me some customer service work at home job leads to post and mentioned that a lot of people have misconceptions about the relationship between Arise and people who work with them. She graciously agreed to answer some questions, so as to help put these misconceptions to rest.

1. What kinds of jobs does Arise generally hire for?

We do not hire agents; rather we contact with them and provide opportunities with specific clients to certify on and begin working. Arise has over forty clients in three primary categories: Sales, Customer Service and Tech Support. While the majority of our client needs involve handling inbound calls, we do have some clients who use Arise Certified Professionals to answer incoming emails and incoming chat sessions.

2. What is the relationship between work at home agents and Arise?

The Arise business model is built on a business to business relationship. Essentially, Arise Certified Professionals (ACPs) are considered self employed, contacted with Arise under the business entity established within the Admissions process. ACPs are able to pick the clients to certify on and build their own schedules in half hour increments based on their schedules.

3. What costs are there to work for Arise?

ACPs are considered independent contactors, not employees. As with starting ANY business, there are is an initial investment. However, much of the investment is not paid to Arise, it is invested in things like establishing your business entity with the state and your workstation. I have included a breakdown of the initial investment:

• Background Check – $13 or $26 (Paid to US Information Search)

• ACP101 Basic Certification Course – $99

• Incorporation – $100 +/- (Paid to the state you are filing in)

• High Speed ISP – $100 +/- (Paid to the vendor of your choice)

• Phone Equipment & Dedicated Line – $185 +/- (Paid to the vendor of your choice)

• Client Specific Certification Course $50 – $225

Arise does charge for certification courses. The fee assessed helps Arise to offset the cost associated with facilitating the courses.

4. What misconceptions about Arise would you like to clear up?

The below are excerpts from actual inquiries I have received.

1. “With Arise, you are paying for a job.”

The biggest misconception about Arise is that candidates are “paying for a job”. This simply is not the case. Arise Certified Professionals are independent, self employed individuals who are able to pick their own hours as well as the client they would like to certify with. They are also able to reap the tax and other benefits only available to small business owners.

2. “Nobody told me there was an investment required.”

Arise makes no secret of our business model or the initial investment – this information is located within our FAQs (no login or profile required), however not every candidate takes the time to review these pages before starting the Admissions process.

3. “I heard there are not enough hours.”

As with any type of contact center – virtual or traditional – there will be peaks and valleys in the call volume for each client. As a decrease occurs, there may be a reduction in the number of hours available. Successful ACPs will hold more than one certification to offset this.

4. “Arise brings on new agents while terminating the contacts of good existing agents for no reason.”

Arise will *not* terminate the VSC Statements of Work (SOW / contract) without cause. It is imperative that every ACP know and understand the expectations of the client before they even begin the certification course. Arise is no different than any other type of company – work at home or otherwise- agents must be meeting or exceeding the established expectations or they face the possibility of having their VSC SOW terminated.

The Arise Admissions process is typically open year round to new profiles, however, there are times of year when the demand for additional agents is larger than others. As a client advises their needs have changed and more agents are required, Arise will schedule and facilitate additional certification courses. During slower times of year, there may be a longer period of time in between certification opportunities.

I’d like to thank Jessica LaFlasch for answering my questions. If anyone has further questions, just let me know and I can send them along to her.

Never let anyone say running a home business is dull. It’s not. It shouldn’t be, at least some of the time. There are dull things you have to do in any business, but you should love doing most of it.

But then there comes a crisis. Sometimes then another. And that’s how things have been around here.

Recently, it was my home business computer having trouble. A problem to be sure, but one I had planned for, knowing that computers are nearly as temperamental as cats.

Since Sunday, it’s been watching wildfires.

Wildfires within a few miles of me.

Two of them. Oak Glen and Pendleton fires, for any who have been keeping track on the news. But I’m not in a part of Yucaipa that’s had to evacuate or is likely to need it. I did leave for a while last night after spotting the Pendleton one, just until we knew where that one was going.

Yeah, the air’s pretty awful outside, even though neither fire is headed in my direction. The winds have been kind to me.

Let me tell you, I’m getting pretty good at dealing with this kind of stuff. It was just about two years ago that we last had to evacuate due to wildfires. That was in Poway, not Yucaipa, but still. I still have a pretty good notion of what to grab fast.

My business computer is one thing. Not the monitor, keyboard, mouse or any other parts. They’re all easily replaced. In a big rush I would just grab the backup drive, as it’s fewer plugs to yank, but when I have time, it’s the whole thing.

Otherwise, clothes, important business papers, pictures, whatever can fit in the vehicle available with the kids.

You hope to never need to deal with a natural disaster hitting your home, family and home business, but it can happen pretty much anywhere. Having plans for what you’ll do is a big help in moving out fast.

For now I’m keeping the bug out bags packed, just in case we really do need to go for a while. I don’t expect to have to go, although air quality is making it tempting.