Blogging Away Debt Our Journeys to a Debt-Free Life

by Tricia

I am very thankful that I work from home. I don’t have to worry about buying nice clothes the daily make-up and commuting costs. As a result, our expenses have gone way down in clothing, grooming and gas. An added benefit of working from home is I could go anywhere in the US and work as long as there is high-speed internet access and a telephone.

It wasn’t easy finding it, and I was out of full-time work for 4 months. I probably sent out over 50 resumes, but all the time spent job hunting worked out for the best.

If working from home sounds good to you, here are the sites I checked almost daily and it’s where I found my position. Keep in mind that competition for a work-from-home position is fierce and you really have to make yourself stand out. There is also a very broad range of pay for the positions you’ll find. I’ve seen anywhere from $7.00/hr to $25.00/hr, and the positions are most often contract work (brief meaning is that you are not the company’s employee and no taxes are withheld from your check).

IMPORTANT: Something to always remember is that you should never have to pay for a job! Your job is supposed to pay you! If a company or individual asks for money up front that is a red flag for a possible scam. Scams, no matter their nature, can happen to the best of us (and one recently happened to a fellow personal finance blogger).

1.) Wahm.com Telecommute Forum. This is one of the top forums for Work at Home Moms and Dads. This is a great place to find job leads as well as ask questions if a particular job is legitimate. A must-read thread is the First Stop for Newbies. There’s a great list of companies that hire telecommuters.

2.) Craigslist. The link here will take you to the San Francisco Bay Craigslist, but there is a Craigslist for many of the bigger cities in the US. What you need to do is pick a city (any city because you can live almost anywhere with telecommuting). Then go to the “Jobs” link. Next you will want to search the jobs, and make sure you have “Telecommute” checkmarked and click “Search.” Now you will have a list of the possible telecommute jobs with the newest jobs listed at the top.

TIP: If you are going to be searching Craigslist as often as I did – here’s something I did that saved me ALOT of time and I was able to look at every Craigslist city on a daily basis. This tip works with Safari and Firefox (as well as any other browsers out there that have tabbed windows).

I went to every city and completed a search for telecommuting jobs. I bookmarked it and named the book mark with the city. Warning: it is time consuming to do this part. Once everything is bookmarked, I created a folder and put about 10-12 cities in each folder (I organized alphabetically). Once that is done, you just need to go to that bookmark folder and tell the program to open them all in tabs. All of the sites in that folder will open, and you can easily cruise through them and close tabs as you are finished looking at a position. Repeat with the next folder and keep going down your Craigslist folders.

Another place to search is the main job postings sites, such as Monster.com & Hotjobs.com. Use keywords such as telecommute & telecommuting. The only problem is that you will get many repeat positions and it takes a while to sift through all of the job postings.

There are some companies out there that for a fee will provide you with job leads. I never investigated those companies more because I searched for positions myself. Some may be legitimate, some may not. Just use your judgement and ask around.

If you start looking for a work-at-home position, I wish you the best! Just remember to keep trying 🙂