Finding My Ideal Work-At-Home Job at Essays.ph

I’m a stay-at-home mom who is homeschooling my three children. Though this is a big task already, I refuse to believe that there is nothing I can do anymore to earn my own money. I tried several things in the past, mostly in sales because these did not require me to go to the office daily. However, I still had to leave my children at home almost everyday to see clients and to attend trainings and meetings in the office. I did this for two years while still educating my children at home. Though I was earning, I was unhappy because of the hours that was spent outside the home. I am of the belief that my place is in the home with my children.

Eventually, I decided to leave this sales job and focus on my kids at home. After giving birth to our fourth child, I decided that I wanted to earn my own money again. This time, though, I thought long and hard about the kind of job that I will be doing. I had a few ideas:

1. I should be able to do it at home.
2. The job should not cost me so much money to start.
3. Since I don’t have much in savings and believed in myself, I decided that my next job would capitalize on what was already inherently mine – my brains and my natural abilities.

I have already been blogging for some time when I noticed that this one blogger homeschool mom was making money by writing online. I asked her about it and she confirmed that this is so. She said that she did make money with her blogs. This totally intrigued me and this began my search for online writing jobs.

I diligently waded through pages of bestjobs.ph and got my first online job editing Korean students’ essays. I wrote about that here. Since this was not earning me much, I gave up on it after a few weeks.

Again, I searched bestjobs.ph and finally saw the ad for Essays.ph. I was very interested and immediately applied and submitted samples of my writing. I did not hear from them immediately so I almost gave up on Essays.ph. At that time, I was busy with my homeschool reviews so I did not push it. When I finally got their email that I was accepted, I was so happy and immediately signed the contract and sent the copy via email.

During my first week, I worked hard to finish my articles on time. Since I was new, it was taking me longer to research and write. My children were already complaining about the amount of time I spend writing and not attending to them. My husband and I spoke with them and explained that I have to do this in order to help add to our income – we do have a big family with four children and a helper. I further explained to them how this job is a blessing to us because I can work but still stay at home with them. I may not be able to attend to them for a few hours but the important thing is that I’m immediately available if they need me.

Now I feel that the good Lord has blessed me so much in giving me an online writing job. I treasure this so much because it allows me to earn while at home. I am also doing what I already like to do – writing. All those three qualifications of the kind of job I wanted was all answered by Essays.ph.

At Essays.ph, I don’t only have the satisfaction of earning money, but I also have the satisfaction of a job well done. After just a few assignments on the gray team (probationary), I was transferred to the Red Team(a promotion – yay!). Since words and writing come easily to me, I don’t find it such a hard job to do because I enjoy it. After all the articles that I have already submitted, I only received one request for revision. This job also affirms my abilities as a writer. The editors are very accomodating and answers our questions as fast as they can. I also have the chance to get to know other writers online through our forum. Working at Essays.ph is truly the ideal online job for me!

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.

Fighting to Stay and Work At Home

The title of this blog actually means two things for us. First, we really just want for Gary D. to stay at home with us. We no longer want to be separated from each other. We have endured the two years that he was gone and now we just want to be together. When he came home, the children has flourished even more. Our Flash Boy, the baby, grew by leaps and bounds since Dad came home. Sunshine Girl has become more confident. Artsy Princess’ constant illness have gone away. Guitar Babe has relaxed and become more like a child again. As for me, I, too, have relaxed in every way possible. No longer do I have to constantly worry about being alone in our home. I’m able to rest more in him. Many of the responsibilities that I carried on my shoulders are now back on his shoulders. We just want him to stay in the Philippines with us. Really, the money earned working abroad is fine, but it doesn’t compensate for all the emotional losses we’ve experienced while being separated.

The other reason for the title of this blog is because I am also fighting to stay and do work from home. We are a family that homeschools and I love being a SAHM (Stay at home Mom). I can’t imagine our life being any other way. Of course, realities set in and the reality of earning more money for our living stares us in the face all the time.

We have considered putting the children to regular school so that I can work outside the home full-time. But we just can’t see that as the solution for us considering that we would have more expenses if I’ve had to work away from home. Expenses by way of purchasing office wear, transportation allowance, daily food allowance, hiring another live-in helper, paying for school bus service and the biggest of all, the kids’ tuition fee. Even if we had combined salaries, we feel that the expenses just does not justify my working full time. Apart from that, there would also be the stresses of not being available to the children when they needed me.

So we want Gary D. to stay in the Philippines with us and I want to continue to be with my children at home.

We are working on ways that we can do that and I’ll be sharing with you in future blogs what we have done and are doing to accomplish this.

On Writing Full Time

One of the first things I've done was to consider what I'm really good at and what I enjoy doing. I know I do considerably well with writing but have never considered going into full time writing. However, writing gives me an outlet with which to express myself. There are just so many thoughts in my mind all the time that writing is much like a brain dump to me. If I don't write down my thoughts, they're just floating around in my mind. When thoughts are floating unattended in there, new thoughts and ideas just can't come in.

Since hubby was in the US, I've already read intermittently about people earning money online through writing or blogging. I was curious about this but never took it as seriously as I should have. However, this did lead me to open my very first blog with Multiply. Multiply gave me my first taste in blogging, uploading photos and videos, etc. This is where I first learned that I can do it.

Last year, I applied to become a homeschool product reviewer for a magazine in the USA. I did not really think that I'd make it since they said that there are over 800 applicants for only 100 spots. Fortunately, I'd been accepted to become one out of the 100. I believe this meant that my writing is good enough for this magazine. So on I became a product reviewer and blogged my reviews in my Multiply site.

A few months after that I attended a homeschool conference with over a thousand people. Imagine my surprise when some people would stop me and say that they've been reading my blog and appreciated my reviews. Some even went on to say that they were so encouraged by my blogs and would forward it to friends. Wow! Then this must mean that my blogs are good. The seed that was planted in my heart some years ago is now being watered and growing.

I still was not that convinced because I kept putting off creating a new blog. You see, on Multiply, you can't apply Google Adsense in your site. So there's no hope of monetizing my blog there. Although, I would highly recommend Multiply for its ease of use and privacy.

What solidified my decision to open up this blog was our need to make money. For me, working outside the home was not an option. I really, really love being able to stay home with my kids. Teaching them at home is important to our family. The option that I had for me was to find work that I can do from home.

Writing for my own blog is one of the things that I'm doing now to earn. There's no earnings yet since I've just started but, hopefully, one day soon, I'll see the money coming in.