Legitimate Work From Home Opportunities

Based on my personal experience, research, education, and all that I’ve learned along the way, I’ll be writing about the following on this blog.

1) What I’ve learned about work at home opportunities in general.

2) Golden rules to live by when searching for a work from home opportunity.

3) Tips on how to tell a scam from a legitimate work from home opportunity.

4) Resources to use when researching whether or not a work from home opportunity is legit.

5) Free or low cost resources to find legitimate work from home opportunities.

6) The two different work at home employment arrangements.

7) Advantages and disadvantages to each employment arrangement.

The bottom line is, no on should ever have to pay for the right to work.  I can’t stress that enough. Too many decent people have paid money to those sites that I’m sure you’ve seen. The type that say something along the lines of “Process Rebates From Home” and you have to pay money in order to do so. What they’re not telling you is that you’re NOT getting a job after you pay, but rather a document that tells you how to find a job like this. This is information that is readily available on the internet if you know how to look for it. Essentially you’re paying for public information. Sorry to get on the bandwagon about this, but I feel strongly that these sites are ripping people off, people who are willing to work hard to bring home a paycheck.

As I sat there day after day, I kept asking myself the same questions over and over again.  How was I ever going to find a legitimate work at home opportunity amidst this gigantic pile of absolute junk?  How was I going to insure that I wouldn’t be taken advantage of?  Why was it that after a while, all of these sites started to look and sound exactly the same?  How would I know, especially considering my new found cynicism, when I actually found a legitimate opportunity?  So yeah, a lot of questions and not a lot of answers at that time, thus the reason I decided to write a blog about it and all that I’ve learned thus far.  If I can save just one person a little time and keep them from getting ripped off, then writing this blog was well worth it.

Since I’m a self proclaimed ‘internet research geek’, I set off to scour the internet for the perfect opportunity, both work at home “jobs” as well as business opportunities.  As I’m sure you can believe, I was immediately overwhelmed with the amount of crap I found.  Please excuse the “French”, but that’s the tamest way for me to describe my initial findings.  I found everything from obvious scams, to not so obvious scams, to ‘it’s so ridiculous I can’t even believe it’ kind of crap.  I almost gave up, but my desire to work from home and to have even a small amount of financial freedom was strong, so I kept at it, day after day.  I mean what else did I have to do?  You can only clean the tile grout and organize your closet so many times before sheer boredom sets in.

After leaving my professional position of 20 years, and having quit the rat race, I was left sitting and wondering ‘what do I do with myself now’?  I knew I had marketable skills, an old resume, and a pretty good sized network.  But I wanted out of the industry I’d been in since graduating college.  Additionally, I was sure that I did not want to return to the rat race.  Instead I wanted to do something that I had control over and something that compensated me for my time and the quality of my work.  I first started by polishing my resume.  It had been quite some time since I last updated it, so I worked hard at it and finally came up with a resume I could be proud of.  Now what?

So first, if you’ll humor me for a minute, a little about myself and the reasons why I started looking for the elusive legitimate work at home (WAH) opportunity.  Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines the “rat race” as “strenuous, wearisome, and usually competitive activity or rush.”  I can personally attest that that definition is correct, although very understated.  I myself quit the “rat race” about a year ago; about six months after my company had been bought out by a larger corporation.  Since the buy out six months prior, I had been working 80 hour work weeks as a salaried employee, meaning I got no personal benefit from working more than 40 hours a week, other than patting myself on the back for a job well done.  This was after continuous pleading with my new employer to provide me with some help, which I finally realized was never going to come.  Even though I’ve always been a well grounded person, my sanity was suddenly on the line.  In retrospect I now realize that, like many others today, I was being taken advantage of because of my strong work ethic and my perfectionist need to get the job done and done well.  Sound familiar?