Times are tough for many families right now. It’s not just a matter of having a limited space to move in, but many income sources have not bounced back from the damages of the past months.
Surfing the internet, looking at your social media feeds, you could get envious of those moms who seem to have everything put together. They have managed their schedules despite their children jumping around the house with all that confined energy. They are also earning through a vlog on cooking, and in the case of the famous Marie Kondo, an entire business on keeping tidy.
You look at yourself and think, what else is there aside from selling insurance or doing real estate sidelines? These side incomes had been helping out before the pandemic, but right now might have become liabilities.
There are the usual home-based jobs like freelance writing. Many institutions don’t have a dedicated writer and outsource intensive writing jobs like publications, annual reports, and proposal writing. You think of taking an online course to get a certificate in grant writing. And maybe another course on copy editing. But at the moment, you need an immediate source of income while building on this kind of career.
Well, if you look at your work at home, you’ve already been doing a lot of things that could earn you money. If all the tasks you do for your family were given a salary, you’d be raking in a huge paycheck. Here are some ideas on how to monetize what you are already doing as a mom.
Home-cooking food hub
Food deliveries have become popular. If you’re in the middle of what used to be a busy urban hub, this adds to your advantage. You would have many single people who are in the city to work. Other than basic frying and boiling of eggs, they probably are not good with the kitchen. Maybe they don’t even have a kitchen in their little pads. Thus, they rely on food deliveries. Enter your home cooking offer, and they could get something that’s not from an expensive, fancy restaurant, nor is it from a fast-food chain.
Register your business to get a permit, and then sign up with those online food delivery services. Since you’re just using recipes you have for your family, there’s no problem with your stocks spoiling.
Short courses for children.
Think of how you entertained your children before. Did you teach them origami? Maybe you taught them how to knit mittens for grandmother. Or maybe your mother had taught you how to do puppet socks before. Right now, so many parents are looking for ways to entertain their children even for a short time so that they could have some peace of mind.
Come up with creative lessons that you could put up online. You could partner with your children’s school or with your local social outreach to help you with the dissemination.
Start a Pandemic-Adjusted Day Care Center
It’s a Day Care center but with strict protocols that follow health guidelines. Meaning, unlike school, you don’t gather the children together. Rather, you accept them individually, following a schedule. Parents who badly need some quiet time to finish a report or breathe for a while could drop off their kids at your place for two or three hours. You have to be very meticulous with your sanitary and disinfection procedures, though. You can’t afford to have the parents blame you in the unfortunate event that their child becomes sick after going to your place.
Sale Shopper
You probably never thought that shopping could earn you some money. But for this scheme, you need to partner with someone overseas. You might have a good friend or a relative who’s already based in another country. Better yet, find that friend in a country where U.S. products are not that common and could be expensive.
What you need to do is look out for end-of-season sales. Many brands have online catalogs on what’s in their inventory. All you have to do is have your partner post these items online and wait for orders. Either you gather enough orders and ship or post a schedule for your deliveries. Again, the only catch here is you need a partner overseas because it won’t be practical if you’re doing it inter-state.
For sure, you can think of other daily tasks you do that other people are paying for. If you garden, you could sell plants on the side. If you bake, you could also accept orders. The point here is you already have skills—bank on what you already have while building on a new career path.
