- Working from home brings in extra income but it takes dedication and discipline
- If it is a side-hustle, invest the extra money so that you actually make more from your extra work
- You may need to pay taxes, so track your expenses for deductions
- The business structures and what you will need to get started
- Some ideas for making extra money; child minder, taking surveys, virtual assistant, book keeping, user testing, selling online, or secret shopper
Working from home is an ideal opportunity for people that have some free time on their hands or need to work their own hours. It can provide extra income or even become a full-time position. However, it takes dedication and discipline as it can be easy to say to yourself – I’ll start working on this once I clean the kitchen, or take the dog for a walk, or whatever other reason we find to procrastinate.
Working from home should be treated like any other job, except that you decide what hours to work. Try to pre-determine what hours you will work in the week and then stick to that schedule. If you do get distracted with something then make up the time later on in the day or another day in that week. This is the only way to be consistently productive.
Of course, working from home could be something that you do on the evenings or weekends for some extra income. If you do this, I would recommend that you invest all of the extra income that you earn, in order to get to financial independence even faster. See my blog on stock market investing to see how to get started doing this. The extra hours that you put in will produce even more money than you were initially paid.
Before you start working from home, speak to an accountant or financial advisor to determine if you need to pay taxes. If you do need to pay additional taxes, find out what percentage of your income will need to be set aside to cover those taxes. You don’t want to end up with a large tax bill at the end of the year. I would recommend that you get some accounting software to help you track your expenses and income; Quickbooks is easy to use and not too expensive.
Some of the ideas below may require you to setup a business structure; normally a sole-trader structure is sufficient but again, I would recommend that you get advice on this. You will need the following to run a business:
- Website, you could use WordPress for this, this is something that you can do yourself or get some coding lessons here. Just buy a theme and start writing your web pages.
- Buy a domain name, www.yourcompany.ie or .com
- Hosting for your WordPress site
- Accounting Software; Quickbooks seems to be the goto software for this
- Accounting and possibly legal advice at the beginning
- Some marketing skills; you may need to get out of your comfort zone and start cold calling or knocking on doors.
- Office space – if you need office space, I would recommend that you look into shared spaces
Fiverr is a great place to find people to do some of the above services at a good rate. On Fiverr, you can find freelancers for graphic design, content writing, graphic design, and even logo creation. I would highly recommend getting an account on there to see what is on offer.
Here are the some of the best way to make extra income in Ireland
Freelancing
Do you know how to be a virtual assistant, how about giving relationship advice, graphic design, or even creating jingles for ads. Use your skills to make extra money in your spare time. You can charge as little as $5 for some job or up to six figures, it’s up to you. You set the price and buyers will come to you. Try fiverr today
Child Care
You can earn up to €15,000 per year tax free for taking care of up to three children in your home. As this is tax-free, it would be equivalent to earning €18,750 in taxed employment. However, be careful if the earnings go over €15,000 in a year then tax is due on the whole amount. Of course, there will be some regulations to abide by for this. Please do your due diligence.
Need training or diplomas, here are a few to get you started
Take Online Surveys
Respondent: https://app.respondent.io/r/vincedoherty-ac87ac617275
This is one of the fastest earning surveys that I know. You can earn up to $150 for a one hour survey. You get to pick the surveys that you want to do, most will pertain to your current career or hobbies. During the registration phase, you will need to fill in what company you work for and you will have to upload a profile picture as well. Some of the surveys are done face-to-face via Skype. Money is paid into a paypal account.
Red C: https://www.redclive.ie
According to their website, you can earn €1 for every 5 minutes of survey time. I have found though that even the surveys that pay out €3 – €4 take no longer than five minutes. They will automatically send you a cheque once your account hits €50.00.
You do need to take the survey quickly once it comes into your email inbox as they have a restriction on how many can take it. If you are slow, it will tell you at the beginning that they already have enough responses.
This won’t be a full-time job but it can be used as part of a complete breakfast work from home package.
Buymie Driver
Buymie is a new business in Ireland which is about to expand to the U.K. It provides grocery shopping service. They are always looking for delivery drivers on an independent contractor basis. It seems like this is only available in Dublin though.
You buy the grocery items with their credit card and deliver them to the designated house. You get to choose your own hours and be paid €10 – €14 per hour + tips. You decide the hours you want to work. You have to have a car or van and a full driving license.
Start a Meetup Group
If you have a tendency towards self-organising and you enjoy planning events then this may be ideal for you. On Meetup.com website you can start a community on virtually any topic; aerobics, palates, dancing, hobbies, music, concerts, or even staying at home. This is a good time to start a community as many people are at home and bored, they are looking for something to do. You can build up your community now via social media and when the restrictions are lifted start meeting up.
I would recommend that you set up a community based on something that you enjoy doing. You can then charge a membership fee on the Meetup site for meetups, so that you can get paid for doing something that you like.
Virtual Assistant
If you are good at organizing and planning then this is the job for you. You need to be very resourceful or be able to rely on someone who is an expert in providing the assistance that is needed.
A Virtual Assistant can be asked to do a multitude of tasks; they usually have clients such as entrepreneurs or company executives. For example, you could be asked to book transportation for a meeting, handle email inbox, provide editing or proofreading, content research, data entry, or even write out a blog post. There will never be a dull moment. But you should be up-front with the clients on what services you can provide.
This service will require some self-marketing at the beginning until you prove yourself and build your brand.
If you don’t have the skills needed here, you can still take an online course in Office Administration, Secretarial & PA Course.
Bookkeeper
You will need specific skills for this job. If you don’t already have these skills, start taking a course. Get some experience by offering your services for a small fee to small local businesses. Once you are proficient, you can then start taking on actual clients and charging them the going rate.
I would recommend that you set up a monthly contract with businesses so that you get a guaranteed monthly income and you can then provide a better service and value to them.
Take an online advanced finance course with a diploma and get your side hustle started.
User Testing
This is an interesting one, some people do this for a living; as in, this is their full-time job. However, it will take some time to build up to that level. The Usertesting.com site, for example, will require you to do user testing on a website then you will need to do some other assignments. You should aim to complete these perfectly in order to be noticed by the leads so that they will start sending good assignments to you. Attention to detail and being meticulous also helps.
The pay can be really good for this type of work and of course, you can work from home doing this.
Sell items online
This one will take some technical knowledge to set up an ecommerce site or it can take an expense to get someone to set up your online shop. You can use a site like Shopify.com that will make it easy to get started.
If you don’t want to set up your own eCommerce website, ebay is a good alternative. The advantages of ebay is that there is a lot of traffic, so there is a good chance of someone seeing you product(s). It’s an easy system to use for selling products.
To source the products, you could either purchase them wholesale or if you have a hobby that creates a product then that would be an advantage. Esources is a good starting point for finding wholesalers around the globe.
I would recommend that you stick to a niche product(s) so that it becomes your brand. It will be easier to beat the competition that sells everything. Get to know the product really well and get to know the customer really well. That will help to create advertising and marketing campaigns.
You could sell the product on donedeal or ebay as well but that may be more difficult. However, keep these sites in mind as it may work for you.
Secret Shopper
I tried this one for a while, it can be fun and you make a little extra income from it. This job requires you to follow a specific set of guidelines precisely. It usually involves buying something and then giving feedback on your experience, the product, and the establishment. You will be reimbursed for the item that you purchased and you are paid for the job. Most of the jobs were for fast food but there were some for retail shops.
You can pick the jobs that you want to do, it usually is not worth doing that ones that are far from you as you will spend too much of time to get there and petrol costs will eat into your profits. If you can do it on a regular basis, it can bring in an extra €200-€300 per month.
Do your own due diligence, get financial advice before investing in anything. I am not a financial adviser nor do I give advice in any fashion. This information is provided based on my own research and experience.
