Becoming A Home-Based English Editor

One of the first things Gary D. and I did was to look online and in the Sunday newspaper for work. I discovered a website www.bestjobs.ph that has plenty of work at home jobs posted. While I did apply for many of the jobs, I did not get even a single response from those ads. One Sunday, I saw an ad in the newspaper for a Korean company that was looking for Home-Based English Editors based somewhere in Mandaluyong. Now this really excited me. They did not require experience but they did require someone who communicates well in English (of course), with a PC and an internet service at home. They did say that work can also be done in an Internet rental shop, and you can work your own hours.

I applied for this job and was accepted. The job calls for me to download a Korean student’s essay and edit it. Apart from editing, we are also required to write down our comments. There should be from one to four comments per essay. Payment is given for every essay that we complete. The company will pay us between P10.00 to P15.00 (US$0.20 to 0.30).

At first, I was excited to do this job. It’s not hard for me to edit a student’s essay. However, it took me about 20-25 minutes to finish editing one essay. I did some computations and I figured that if I wanted to make about P10,000.00 monthly doing this, I’d have to be editing about 40 essays a day. Sleep would be impossible if I wanted to finish those 40 essays a day.

Gary D., to his credit, was very patient with it all. The two weeks that I worked there, I had to tell my children that I can’t be disturbed. My eyes started to hurt because I was working eight hours straight staring at my laptop. After two weeks, we computed my pay and it did not even reach P500.00 (US$ 11.00)! It was only when Gary D. told me that I paid my helper more than I was being paid that I finally decided to resign from this job.

Now I’m not saying that all home-based work is this way. I’ve read about others doing legitimate home-base work and are earning a lot from it. I will continue my search for that.