Is it worth working at home to earn money? Can I earn more money working at home?
I think the right question you should ask yourself is: Can i work at home? is it possible? do I have a calm, private place at home to work from? what will be the motivation while working from? If you got answers to these questions, you will find if you can get money from home or not, because any place you can do work from will give you money, just work! I don't mean to be rude, but if you have to ask if you can earn a living from home, the answer is 'probably not.'  Most people are more financially productive at a traditional workplace, otherwise more people would quit the jobs they hate and work at home or develop their hobbies into businesses.   Making a living from home requires being a self-starter and finding clients/customers who accept such arrangements. First, be assured no one earns a living stuffing envelopes, being a mystery online shopper, or selling low to moderate quantities of stuff to their circle of friends.  A few earn a living flipping houses, cars, or shares, or stuff on eBay, but with considerable risk, capital, effort, luck, contacts, and experience/skill.   A few more find success by inventing something or developing a business. Once again, not as easy as it sounds.   You can look for professional work freelancing, or find grunt work on something like vWorker. But these are easily as competitive as the job market, perhaps moreso.  In the case of vWorker you are competing against people in southern asia who almost surely can beat you on price. "It completely depends on what type of work you intend to do. Are you intending to run/setup your own business? Or stay with your current employer, but work from home instead of going to the office? If thats the case, then yes it is a good idea, since you will save on commuting costs amongst other things If you are asking about working from home under one of those ""work from home piecework"" schemes, I would be wary. Many of them require you do an insane amount of piecework, for literally peanuts, so it might not be worth the effort (since you could earn 2, 3x as much in a supermarket shift of the same duration)"
"Where I'm from, ""extra income"" and side jobs are not really a thing. In fact, overworking is seen as a systemic failure. Uber drivers here mainly do it for a living but have to do long hours to meet ends." Well, did you move to go to University? For both of those prongs you would first need the skills to create wealth.  Remote work really only works will in specific types of jobs. For example, customer service jobs can be done from home. But they typically don't pay a whole lot. Computer programming might be another one where remote work is possible. Maybe a few others depending on the work being done and the demands of the job.  I would say that even today most companies would want you to come into work to do your job, whether it be a factory or an office. You would have to live within the range of your workplace. Flex time can be utilized but typically that means working from home part of the time but still coming in other days. If you are going to work on making as much money as humanly possible, then you ought to consider investing in the market. [Compound Stock Earnings](http://www.compoundstockearnings.com) agrees that investing in stocks is a fantastic technique to acquire prosperity on your own. Believe it or not, it’s the greatest source of wealth in the history of the world. For that reason, you need to ensure that you get started at the earliest opportunity. "Forget the math's specifics for a moment: here's some principles. Additional housing for a renter gives you returns in the form of money. Additional housing for yourself pays its returns in the form of ""here is a nice house, live in it"". Which do you need more of?  If you don't need the money, get a nicer house for yourself. If you need (or want) the money, get a modest house for yourself and either use the other house as a rental property, or invest the proceeds of its sale in the stock market. But under normal circumstances (++) don't expect that buying more house for yourself is a good way to increase how much money you have. It's not. (++ the exception being during situations where land/housing value rises quickly, and when that rise is not part of a housing bubble which later collapses. Generally long-term housing values tend to be relatively stable; the real returns are from the rent, or what economists call imputed rent when you're occupying it yourself.)" Might want to cross-post to /r/financialindependence;  I'm in a similar situation like yours. The problem is that working hard and really hustling it lost a lot of it's primal motivation because the utility of extra money isn't there.   You have to be intrinsically motivated to achieve it, or gain enough satisfaction from the other factors that comes with it (power, ego, etc.). If none of these are super-motivating to you, like it was for me, then you need to find something that is a lot of fun to you, but at the same time still very challenging and the outcome is not certain.   For me it turned out that it was active investing. I can scale it up or down as I please (ie: spend 10 hours on it in a day, then spend no time on it for a day) - there's no employees and no customers, so no schedule I have to keep or person I need to keep happy.   It takes a while to find that, so you just have to give things a go. However, the difference between a hobby and this is that it's A) a challenge and B) you can actually lose. At least for me, that makes it so much more interesting compared to playing computer games, which I also enjoy very much but get bored of if I spend too much time on it. Very good point. However, I would say stability.  Say I could just continue doing this one the side of my regular job, couldn't I do both?  Edit: I don't know why I keep getting down voted... I'm literally just asking valid questions. "This depends entirely on the kind of ""IT"" you're doing. A couple of examples to illuminate how wide the term is: To answer your core question: look beyond the title (""IT""), to the function you're providing to the bank, and ask if / how that function can generate money for the bank for better income possibilities; if the answer is ""none"", figure out which levers are closer to making money, and position yourself as such." When I worked for myself it was bad because But Ultimately I gave up my business and went to work for a school teaching, and through a series of other jobs ended up in a very stable reliable trustworthy job.  When I was younger the variable paycheck didn't outweigh the freedom.  Now that I am a dad I only think about having insurance and a secure job. The other option to consider is having a regular job, and then doing a little side work for yourself.  You get all the benefits of both (and all the detractions) "I think you came up with a worthy Masters/PhD research project, it is a great question. This is in Australia so it is difficult for me to have complete perspective.  However, I can speak about the US of A. To your first point relatively few people inherit their wealth.  According to a brief web search about 38% of billionaires, and 20% of millionaires inherited their wealth.  The rest are self-made. Again, in the US, income mobility is very common.  Some act like high level earners are just born that way, but studies have shown that a great deal of income mobility exists.  I personally know people that have grown up without indoor plumbing, and extremely poor but now earn in the top 5% of wage earners.   Quid's points are valid.  For example a Starbucks, new I-Phone, and a brake job on your car are somewhat catastrophic if your income is 50K/year, hurts if your income is 100K, and an inconvenience if you make 250K/year.  These situations are normal and happen regularly.  The first person may have to take a pay day loan to pay for these items, the second credit card interest, the third probably has the money in the bank.  All of this exaggerates the effect of an ""emergency"" on one's net worth.    To me there is also a chicken-and-egg effect in wealth building and income.  How does one build wealth?  By investing wisely, planning ahead, budgeting, delaying gratification, finding opportunities, etc...  Now if you take those same skills to your workplace isn't it likely you will receive more responsibility, promotions and raises?  I believe so.  And this too exaggerates the effect on one's net worth.  If investing helps you to earn more, then you will have more to invest. To me one of the untold stories of this graph is not just investing, but first building a stable financial base.  Having a sufficient emergency fund, having enough and the right kind of insurance, keeping loans to a minimum.  Without doing those things first investments might need to be withdrawn, often at an inopportune time, for emergency purposes. Thanks for asking this!" This article is misleading in it's universality of its findings. It does have a control group, which is a good start, but the findings are based on call-center employees whose functions are almost perfectly suited for remote work. In a way, we already knew this because of how much call-center work is outsourced and outside of provincial management (in other words, most companies don't bother housing customer service call centers at company headquarters). Let's see them try to replicate those results with other industries.   Treating the ability to work from home as a panacea is just as foolish as believing that workers can't ever be remote. The truth is that individual personalities and, more importantly, an individual's work functions are better suited for remote work than others and it takes good management to understand why they take the strategy they take with regards to remote work.   All in all, the study might be a good case study for encouraging remote work among call-center employees, but any further extrapolation of that for other industries is going to be a baseless claim influenced by personal agendas. Nuestra empresa requiere personas que les guste emprender negocios desde casa, ofrecemos capacitaciones y grandes ingresos por los esfuerzos realizados. Our business applies entrepreneurs with leadership who want to earn extra money from home, offers training and business strategies to expand their enterprise. Jobs don't mean anything by themselves. If you are increasing part time positions but not full time there may be no gain in income/productivity. Also if wages aren't increasing but debt is that means the portion of average take home wage that goes towards interest is increasing as well. Let me ask you another question: if that person stayed at home and made a widget instead, would exporting that widget benefit his home country? There is no difference, economically, between the two situations. A foreign worker sending home remittances is no different from a local manufacturer exporting their products. Both are earning export dollars for themselves and their home countries. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Clearly, the answer is yes - this is a good thing or a bad thing but we cannot know which in isolation. However, in general, foreign worker remittances are overwhelmingly beneficial for the host (which gets work done that otherwise would not be done) and the source (which gets export income. With reference to your particular question about local inflation, a rise in exports causes appreciation in the exchange rate i.e. local currency becomes more expensive with respect to (in this case) the Euro. Appreciation in the exchange rate actually puts downward pressure on inflation. However, the absence of our worker from the local economy puts upward pressure on local wages and and hence inflation. Both of these effects are small and other factors will dominate them. "Your house doesn't need to multiply in order to earn a return. Your house can provide shelter. That is not money, but is an economic good and can also save you money (if you would otherwise pay rent). This is the primary form of return on the investment for many houses. It is similar for other large capital investments - like industrial robots, washing machines, or automobiles. The value of money depends on: As long as the size and velocity of the money supply changes about as much as the overall economic activity changes, everything is pretty much good. A little more and you will see the money lose value (inflation); a little less and the money will gain value (deflation).  As long as the value of inflation or deflation remains very low, the specifics matter relatively little. Prices (including wages, the price of work) do a good job of adjusting when there is inflation or deflation. The main problem is that people tend to use money as a unit of account, e.g. you owe $100,000 on your mortgage, I have $500 in the bank. Changing the value of those numbers makes it really hard to plan for the future! Imagine if prices and wages fell in half: it would be twice as hard to pay off your mortgage. Or if the bank expected massive inflation in the future: they would want to charge you a lot more interest! Presently, inflation is the norm because the government entities, who help adjust how much money there will be (through monetary policy - interest rates and the like - ask about it if you're interested), will generally gradually increase the supply of money a little bit more quickly than the economy in general. They may also be worried that outright deflation over the long term will lead to people postponing purchases (to get more for their money later), harming overall economic activity, so they tend to err on the slightly positive side. The value of money, however, has not really ""ordinarily decreased"" until the modern era (the 1930s or so). During much of history, a relatively low fixed amount of valuable commodities (gold) served as money. When the economy grew, and the same amount of money represented more economic activity, the money became more valuable, and deflation ensued. This could have the unfortunate effect of deterring investment, because rich jerks with lots of money could see their riches increase just by holding on to those riches instead of doing anything productive with them. And changes in the supply of gold wreaked havoc with the money supply whenever there was some event like a gold rush: Because precious metals were at the base of the monetary   system, rushes increased the money supply which resulted in inflation.   Soaring gold output from the California and Australia gold rushes is   linked with a thirty percent increase in wholesale prices between 1850   and 1855. Likewise, right at the end of the nineteenth century a surge   in gold production reversed a decades-long deflationary trend and is   often credited with aiding indebted farmers and helping to end the   Populist Party’s strength and its call for a bimetallic (gold and   silver) money standard. -- The California Gold Rush Today, there is way too little gold production to represent all the growth in world economic activity - but we don't have a gold standard anymore, so gold is valuable on its own merits, because people want to buy it using money, and its price is free to fluctuate. When it gets more valuable, and people pay more for it, mines will go through more effort to locate, extract and refine it because it will be more profitable. That's how most commodities work. For more information on these tidbits of history, some in-depth articles on:" "Great question. There are two ways to increase the amount of money you have: It's difficult to decrease your expenses past a certain point, and your question is focused on the first aspect anyway. But it's worth noting that controlling spending is a significant part of accumulating wealth. You need to make more money, and there's no trick to it. Ask for a raise, sure, that can't hurt. But also think about what you need to do to get a higher-paying job. There's a lot to think about: Does you current job have growth potential? Are you doing everything you can do to maximize that potential? If you're just phoning it in and collecting your paycheck, that's not going to make you much more money. But if you're working hard, learning new skills, and have an opportunity to grow into more responsibilities and more money, that's a good start. In my experience, the biggest paycheck increases have come from looking for new opportunities and switching jobs. (BTW, I'm not suggesting quitting your job. You need to always have the new job locked up before quitting the old job!) The wealthiest people I know are self-employed, and they worked hard to build up their companies. Do you work in an industry where you can build your skills to a point where you can go out on your own? Does entrepreneurship interest you? Either way, focus on your job, skills, and maximizing your income potential. Be your own advocate. Make sure your boss knows what a good job you're doing. If you need to start looking for other options, take your time and start looking. The often-quoted line, ""the harder I work, the luckier I get"" is appropriate."