scitta

Hi,

Could someone suggest some reliable work from home opportunities in Oz. There seem to be a lots on the net, however it would be nice to know if anyone has personally used them.
Not looking at selling stuff thou,(lousy at that) but something like "Virtual Secretaries" doing admin work or similar.

Need a break from the normal 9-5 routine.

Any suggestions would be welcome,
Sarah

Jacqui

Yeah, I'd be interested too, there are plenty of ads telling you to "put your pc to work" "work from home around the kids" etc. When you look at the websites advertised though, they never tell you exactly what the job implies, and they often want you to fork out money for further info, no way, I'm more cautious than that. I like being a stay-at-home mum who's always there for my kids, but I'd also like to contribute something moneywise to ease the pressure on my husband. Working from my pc would be ideal, but I've had no luck finding anything that doesn't look like a scam.

scitta

Hi Jacqui,

Ditto, most of these sites ask you for a small start up fee, which I wudn't mind paying, but in the end the question is, will it work?

Just bumping this thread once again to the top, in the hope of receiving some replies from anyone actually working from home.

Sarah

podgypossum

Be warned...in my mind, any job that asks you to pay up front to work for them is usually a scam...leave well alone!!

ABCDiamond

Send me a fiver, and I'll give you the best job suggestion ever ! Guaranteed to work, all you need to do is find the customers.



The job? I want my fiver first though !!! - but the answer is:- Thats easy, you just place the following advert in your local paper : -


Send me a fiver, and I'll give you the best job suggestion ever ! Guaranteed to work, all you need to do is find the customers.


If you haven't guessed, its a rip off ! PP is spot on.

But the example above does actually work, there are mugs out there who would send a fiver !!

Dawn Adams

I'm with PP - leave all the "work from home" adverts well alone.

I worked from home doing secretarial stuff after "retiring" from a proper job that I'd been doing for around 25 years. It filled the long drop between working and not working, not only financially but also maintaining some structure in my day. I thought I was going to work half a day and have half a day off. Ha! With the straight secretarial stuff, it was more like all day and all night then nothing.

Off the street customers are sporadic. If you take on a couple of small business people they can get quite possessive and consume a lot of your time, but at least you get some sort of income.

However, the cost of acquiring high quality printer and copier means you aren't likely to make a profit for a while, at $15-$20 an hour, but you can claim various office related expenses on your tax return.

And if your typing and English skills are only so-so, it will reflect on your ability to earn money.

My mainstay was radio monitoring for a national company. This required investment in several good quality radio's with dual cassette tapes, and the tapes. It involved doing a precis of the 0630 and ensuing news bulletins on two radio stations, plus a precis of interview and talk back radio segments. By typing fast and paying attention, I could do most of it on the trot, (unless the two stations were doing the interesting stuff simultaneously) using the tapes as backup. Life got difficult with thunderstorms and power failures.

The only other occupation I would recommend is bookkeeping for small businesses. It helped in WA if you were familiar with the "Mind Your Own Business" (MYOB) program. Mostly it consists of data entry for people who didn't have the time or know how to keep their books. Some times you will be able to work from home, and others you will have to work from theirs.

ABCDiamond

It's the same all over OZ, most businesses use either Quicken or MYOB. Very, very few use or have even heard of the more popular UK Sage.

Andy66

Have you thought about selling stuff on ebay?

If you can get things that have a good margin on them, you can hit a wide audience very quickly.

I know some guys who are making around £70K just doing that in the UK. Obviously Oz market is smaller, but you can do really well both domestically and worldwide.

I was doing budget digicams before I changed jobs (don't have the time now) and it was very lucrative indeed.

Andy

scitta

Hi thanks everyone for your replies.

Dawn as you say though the work is irregular, it atleast helps in bringing in some income and doing the job from the comfort of your own home (or maybe I am wrong, and need to jump into the pan to burn my toes and give it a try)

Did u begin working from home thru some agencies on the net, or were the people u worked for your personal contacts?

Cheers, Sarah

Dawn Adams

Well the work makes life more interesting, but financially you are probably just as well off to treat running the household as a business, recording all expenditure and cutting costs to fit the budget as an ordinary business would do.

Also, friends and family sometimes have an interesting view of what it means to be working from home. You may have trouble keeping them out of your office when there is work to be done, and you may also find they leave things for you to do for them (not the least being babysitting) because "you are home all day".

Also, you have to be able to draw the line between being "at work" and putting it behind you to resume domestic life. (Tricky, when you have a lot of typing to do and not much time to get it done).

However, doing the work certainly helps the people who come to you, so that's one reason to go ahead with the idea.

Get acquainted with others in your area doing the same thing. You can share out some of the load during busy times (even if it is 4 pages of an 11 page document), you will be in line to help them out as well, and you get to know your opposition

I used to us friends in the UK and America, faxing the work to them and getting it back typed by email - handy because they can work while you sleep.

I advertised in the local paper, but be warned you have to do it regularly, or else the perception is that your business has folded. And sometimes the cost of advertising exceeds the returns. In fact the best advertising I had was in the phone book (Yellow and White pages, and Yellow page rates vary depending on which city you are in - higher in the Eastern States). The other good place was in the community directory because one advert lasts 12 months. In fact, I would skip the newspaper ads unless the rates were very, very good.

Customers came to me because of good rates, word of mouth referrals, and also from the local printing business - who were kind enough to direct people to me who wanted little things like a poem printed, things that would have not been cost effective at the printers but people didn't know where else to go. I also set up numbered forms that the printers produced in booklet form for their customers.

The one job I said I would never do but invariably got, was preparing and typing resumes and CV's. If you do a good job but the customer isn't successful in his application, he comes back when he wants to apply for another.

I also supplied full secretarial services to a caterer and a fuel distributer. They used to turn up at all hours, and weren't particularly fond of sharing me. Nice to be wanted, but a funny situation at times as they both reckoned they had priority.

I know one is supposed to put forward a professional image, but I've lost count of the times I answered the door in less than appropriate costume. It makes you human, apparently.

If you want more information you'd better email me. Everyone else is probably finding this me, me, me thing a bit tedious.

ABCDiamond

I think its all very interesting, and I am sure many people, thinking along your lines, will find it interesting and useful too.

piers_morgan

Don't you need a certificate/diploma to work from home, like you need a certificate for everything you do here in Oz?

It would be interesting to hear what the self-employment rates are in Oz compared to the UK/Europe.