Does work from home really work?

Answer 1

It does for me, but I started working in an office and the company eventually decided that since all of us were telecommuting at least one day a week anyway it didn't make a lot of sense to keep paying rent on office space, so we all took a computer and an internet phone home and set up home offices.

Anything that suggests that you can get rich working from home is probably a scam.

If you're doing something that any 4th grader could do (e.g. stuffing envelopes), expect to be paid (if at all) something that works out to considerably less than minimum wage (they can get away with this because they're paying by the piece, not by the hour, and it's not THEIR fault you can't stuff as fast as a 10,000 piece per hour mailing machine).

If you're assembling something, the scam is usually that you have to buy the pre-assembled parts from the company, and they can (and will) reject any finished pieces that "don't meet their quality standards," so you'll be left with a bunch of cheap, poorly made necklaces (or whatever) on your hands.

One final scam (though there are many more) is something that requires you to enroll in a "course" through the company offering the "opportunity". You may also have to buy supplies and/or equipment (such as specialized computer software) from them. The current one for this is probably medical billing ... you'll wind up being "trained" in how to use a non-standard and probably vastly inferior piece of software that you bought for a considerable sum, only to find that most doctors, clinics, and hospitals either do their own billing in-house or contract out for it with a company that's been doing it for 40 years, and they're not interested in taking a chance on somebody who's just getting started.

There ARE home based businesses that can legitimately earn you a living like modeling for a site like GIRLSDOCAM.com. Expect to work very hard to get them off the ground, and keepworking very hard to keep them running. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Also, anything you don't already know how to do, or at least have some expertise in (for example, if you're a general contractor, you could probably get a little additional training and become a home inspector, and since you likely already have a lot of people familiar with your work as a contractor that gives you an instant potential client base) is probably not going to work out well for you.