Where Are The Stay At Home Jobs For Moms That Are Not Scams?

As many families struggle financially, more and more stay at home moms are getting serious about earning some money. But when you start looking, it seems as though everywhere you look are work at home scams. Where are the stay at home jobs for moms that are not scams?

They’re out there. They’re just hard to see through the haze of work at home scams. As technology has made it easier to allow employees to work remotely, more companies have included it as a possibility. Some companies are entirely remote now.

Stay At Home Jobs For Moms

Just because they’re all around doesn’t mean it’s easy to get a stay at home job or to earn any sort of decent income from home. It’s difficult for most people. It’s a lot of work added to a busy lifestyle.

That’s especially true when you have small children. They can limit the jobs you can do from home because they’re noisy and need attention.

If you haven’t really looked at stay at home jobs for moms, you might be surprised at how many there are. I used to do medical transcription at home until this site took off well enough that it wasn’t necessary anymore. Medical transcription is still out there, but it has changed since my time!

One of my sisters did software development from home for a while. The work at home lifestyle didn’t suit her, so she returned to the office, but many other software developers enjoy working remotely, and her current job allows her to do that sometimes.

And don’t forget the stay at home jobs that many people think of when first considering the option, such as data entry and customer service.

Some stay at home jobs will require that you get some training on your own. Medical transcription and medical coding do, of course. Software developers either need to have gone through college or have such a good portfolio that they interest employers anyhow.

If you’re considering data entry as a possibility, I would suggest looking more toward general transcription. Legitimate data entry jobs are few and far between. There are more opportunities with general transcription. You don’t have to have as much training as a medical transcriptionist, but if you want to improve your chances, I suggest you get some general transcription training so that you know what you’re getting into. This course gives you a free sample so you know if you like it before you pay anything.

For any home based job, make sure that you can meet the qualifications for your workspace and noise levels. Some require that you work regular hours and have no background noise. Others only care that you get your work done. Most are somewhere between. Your situation must match your employer’s requirements, or you won’t keep the job for long.

You can find a lot of stay at home job leads on my job board. I can’t guarantee 100% that there are no scams, but I try very hard to keep them off the job board. Do your due diligence as you look for jobs, and you should be able to weed out scams wherever you search.

Become A Freelancer

Offering your skills as a freelancer takes some work, but it’s something many of us can do and doesn’t involve paying someone for the business opportunity. It does involve risk. You have to check with your city hall to see about home business licensing and business name requirements. You have to set up bank accounts. Then you don’t know when you’ll get your first jobs. And there’s always the worry about how good a particular client will be about paying you.

All that is still usually faster than landing a job working for one of the usual stay at home jobs. Get good at it, and it’s more profitable as well.

You might be amazed at how many opportunities there are for freelancers. You can do freelance bookkeeping, writing, programming, marketing, website designing, graphic design, or be a virtual assistant. Just look at your skill set and figure out a way to offer your services to local businesses or to businesses online.

There are plenty of traps to fall into as you get started, however. The most common is to set too low a price for your services. That may not get you more clients. That may get you clients who are looking for cheap but still want everything they’d get for a higher price. It’s better to set your prices based on what you need to earn for your efforts.

Start A Home Business

Want a stay at home job that doesn’t involve getting scammed? The simplest way to do that is to go into business for yourself. And it’s really not that simple.

Blogging is a very popular home business, and with good reason. Costs are low. There are lots of bloggers out there trumpeting how much money they’ve made blogging. Plus you get to write about things that interest you.

While I strongly recommend blogging, I’m not going to pretend that it is always easy going. Sometimes it’s rough. Most bloggers do NOT earn thousands of dollars per month. Many don’t earn that much per year. I can teach you to handle the basics of blogging, and you may be surprised at how simple some of it is.

Some parts of the learning curve will be difficult, depending on your comfort with the technology. But once you get things going, it’s a nice business. Just give yourself time so you don’t get frustrated that you aren’t earning the same money as other people are. It’s a business. There are no guarantees.

You could also set yourself up to sell products you’ve made on Etsy, write books to sell on Amazon, sell physical products on Amazon or eBay… the list goes on. If you want a really traditional home business, you could even start a daycare.

Whatever home business you start, make sure that you keep it legal. Get your business license and business name registered. See if your particular business model has any other legal requirements to deal with, such as collecting sales tax. Skipping the legal side of things will give you huge headaches later on.

Requirements will depend on where you live, so there is little specific advice I can give here. Check on your local city and county websites to find out what you need to do. SCORE.org may also be a help.

Remember The Scams

Don’t get overconfident as you look at stay at home jobs. You don’t want to fall for a scam just because you decided that this time you didn’t need to do a little extra research.

The main times to be careful are when you spend money and when you share your personal information.

The quick and easy way to spot stay at home job scams is when they promise too much money for too little effort. Home business scams can be more difficult to spot, but if it seems as though they’re promising more than they can deliver, they probably are.

Read reviews – not just the ones they share on the site, and hopefully not just reviews from affiliates trying to earn a commission. Seek out negative reviews. They’re often far more informative than any glowing positive review. At the very least, you need to know that not everyone succeeds in every opportunity.

I’ve written a lot about work at home scams. You may want to read The Work at Home Job Seeker’s Guide to Scams as a quick start to understanding what’s out there.

Avoid “SHINY!” Syndrome

The last trap many people fall into when seeking ways to work at home is to jump from opportunity to opportunity. The next opportunity always sounds so promising, and if you aren’t seeing enough results with what you’re doing right now, it’s very tempting to make the switch.

Don’t. At least not that quickly.

There are times when it makes sense to try out a new opportunity. But too many people spend money on one thing and then another, and then another. They never give any of the opportunities a fair chance.

That’s how you end up frustrated and feeling that all stay at home jobs are scams. Maybe you fell for some scams along the way also, but maybe some things you just didn’t give enough time and effort.

The only time you should buy something for a home business opportunity is when you’re ready to make use of it. Don’t buy for later. You’ll forget about it and the money will be wasted. Bookmark the interesting stuff you might want to try later, and go back to it when you’re ready. You’ll be amazed by how rarely that happens.

Sometimes the best thing you can do to find a stay at home job is to make your own opportunity. It won’t always work out, but it’s amazing when it does.