Hate doing that laundry and grocery shopping? You’re not alone. The need for home services is growing and will continue to do so as the number of aging baby boomers continues to mushroom. Because 85 percent of seniors want to continue living in their own homes, an alternative to nursing homes or assisted living centers, they need a variety of services to maintain their independence - from help in paying bills to meal delivery to medication management to house cleaning. The two-income households also contribute to the urgent need for home service providers. Busy working parents are constantly looking for child care providers, tutors, cleaners, music teachers, and personal chefs.
So who will provide the services then? Service providers include self employed people and people who work from home. Where do you find the service providers? Try it online. As businesses use the internet trading platform to outsource to overseas manufacturers and software developers, individuals and families are also seeing the benefits of outsourcing. However, people are not realizing that domestic services such as cleaning, music teaching, and personal training can be traded online also. Internet sites are creating online platforms where freelancers, businesses, and customers trade services in minutes.
These sites offers wide variety of services ranging from tutoring to India software outsourcing. It enables customers to search by location and category. The result page shows detailed information such as charges, availability, contact information, photos, and user initiated feedback.
I get quite a few emails asking about Mystery shopping. What is a mystery shopper and how much do they generally earn on hourly basis? Mystery Shoppers are researchers who pretend to be customers and investigate companies through using their services. “Mystery shoppers” are typically paid $5 to $100 per project. There are also private clients who hire mystery shoppers to do holiday and birthday shopping. Those service providers are usually called shopping consultants and tend to be paid on hourly basis. There are many legitimate online survey and mystery shopping jobs available online.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CollegeandFamily/Raisekids/P143966.asp
We all dream about owning our businesses and quit that full time job. But just how risky is it? According to the the Center for Women’s Business Research statistics, overall survival rate for startups in four years is 44%, 66% for women owned businesses. Most of the startup failures are caused by lacking of capital, market research, and business planning. Here’s an interesting article,
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Managedebt/P143840.asp
Hi there,
I just came upon another interesting article about working from home. “Real Jobs”,
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CollegeandFamily/Raisekids/P142363.asp
We all heard that in order to cover the expenses of unexpected circumstances in life, we need to have savings equal to at least three and preferably six months’ expenses. And that’s not the retirement savings. It’s the kind of money that you know you have but can neither invest nor touch until the unexpected happens. Which means that, for example, if your monthly household take-home net income is $4,000, and if you spend every dime of the $4,000 just to cover all expenses including retirement and child support, then times 3 or 6, you need to have somewhere between $12,000 and $24,000 emergency fund sitting idle. Now if your take home net income is $5,000, which means that you need to save $15,000 to $30,000 for the unexpected. This is not easy for most of us. So how do you do that? Many financial advisors will tell you to put set amount aside each month to accumulate. That’s easier to say than done. You would have to cut down your disposable spending for that. Imagine saving $200/month for this fund starting from the current month, it’ll take you 5 years before you reach your minimum goal. Let’s not talk about the commitment you have to have just to put aside the amount. What about the lost opportunities of this fund? To have the money easily accessible, you probably won’t put in a mutual fund or stocks, what would you do? Like what the financial advisors suggested, you can try a high yield savings account. Here comes the math part that bothers me, so it means that you could be watching your hard-earned money disappearing as taxes and inflation have their shares. Then it comes more interesting stuff, people are talking about 6 months of expenses are not enough because unemployment usually happens somewhere between 6 and 12 months. Oh boy, that’s tough. For some of us, one month emergency fund is enough for the unexpected. Anything more than that belongs to the “disaster fund”.