Insane Ways I’ve Tried to Make Money as a Stay-at-Home Mom

I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for over ten years now. It’s exactly what I want to be doing, but the pay is lousy.

I tried various methods, in the beginning, to bring in extra money to our one-income household. If you are looking for ways to do the same, you might as well stop reading now. This isn’t that sort of article.

These methods failed horribly. That is until one of them actually worked.

Extreme Couponing

I blame this one on the sleep-deprived state of new motherhood. I had read blog after blog of women who used so many coupons, they actually made money off of groceries every week. They would leave the grocery store with a cart overfilled with groceries, and money in their hand! I know it’s true because they blogged about it.

They had huge stockpiles of paper towels, toilet paper, you name it, lined up neatly in storerooms. We had just had our baby, I had decided to quit my job, and even though we knew it was coming, going down to one salary was shocking. And it’s a proven fact, babies require $1 million per month to stay alive.

To do this one, I had to subscribe to the newspaper to get those little coupon flyers that come out on Sundays. I sat diligently one Sunday, with the paper all around me, clipping out coupons. I referred to the blogs and saw that you need to go on double coupon day.

What is that? My store doesn’t have that. And you have to combine coupons with store savings. Oh, well this is getting confusing now. What did the extreme coupon lady save on this month? A dozen bags of mini marshmallows? Hmm, somehow this is less helpful than I thought.

I took off to the store anyway with coupons in hand. I tried to match them to store specials but the specials didn’t align with what we needed, or what coupons I had with me. Maybe I saved $1, I don’t know, it’s too long ago to remember.

The next week when the Sunday paper came, the first thing I did was pull out the coupon insert and immediately throw it in the recycle bin, where it belongs.

These days I no longer get the paper. I'm quite happy to read my news online.

Consignment Sales

This is where you sell all of the things that you never really needed in the first place but felt compelled to buy for your baby.

The baby outgrew them within weeks, and now you can make money off of them. You sell them to parents who think they also need these needless items.

But these parents are smarter than you because they are buying them used at a fraction of the cost you spent on the brand new item.

This method actually made money, but when you break it down per hour by the amount of time you spend readying clothes and toys for sales, I think it might come out to $1 an hour. Maybe less, I never had the heart to run the numbers on it.

Why is it so much work you ask? Well, I am happy to tell you.

First, you have to sort the clothes by age, which shouldn’t be too hard unless you have thrown everything in random plastic tubs that you store in the basement for the past several years. Then you must come up with reasonable prices for your items. Then you enter the prices in a computer system, print the labels, and attach the labels to the clothing.

Finally, you get to drag tubs of it to the resale. If your children are still small and not in school, they get to come along for all of this fun. Once this is done, you are not finished. You find out the next day that 25% of your stuff sold. Which is supposed to be a great success. And now you are expected to return to the sale, with your small children still in tow, and lug back home your 75% full tubs of baby items.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Leave it to Amazon to unleash this hell upon the world. Perhaps you have heard of microtasks. I had not. I read a blog post where someone claimed to make a six-figure salary from doing microtasks on Mechanical Turk.

How easy it sounded to make money from home while wearing pajamas! And yes, it’s very easy. It’s also extremely boring, and some tasks pay 1 cent each. I repeat, 1 cent each. These tasks may pay small, but they add up, the blogger said. Yes, they add up to about $1 before your fingers cramp up and your mind melts from utter boredom.

Transcription Online

This is just as horrible as you might think. It's similar to the Amazon Mechanical Turk theory of money-making. Some websites pay for typing little blurbs of audio. At the low end, they pay about $15 per audio hour.

I’m a fast typist, I was sure I could be making double that. $30 per hour is pretty good for a stay-at-home-mom just trying to be home with her kids. What I didn’t understand is that typing one audio hour can take you three actual hours to type. People don’t speak clearly or speak too quickly, or the audio is bad. You have to rewind a lot. That works out to be $5 per hour. Maybe I could have kept working my way up the payment ladder, but it was so mind-numbingly boring, I gave this one up as well.

AutoCAD Freelancing

I know AutoCAD from my previous job. I was delighted to discover there are lots of freelancing jobs for AutoCAD on Upwork. All of which I assumed I could do in my PJs, while the baby napped.

I applied for job after job and nothing happened. Finally, I had a result. I had an offer for $25! Hey, it's more than Mechanical Turk! Then I looked closer at the scope of work to discover I was being offered $25 to recreate an entire office floor plan, complete with elevations in CAD.

Well crap, this one was a disaster too.

Self-Taught Graphic Design

I don’t know what made me think I could do this. Yes, it’s a lucrative career for people with artistic talent. I am not one of those people.

I found this amazing blog on how an enterprising young woman taught herself graphic design and now has a thriving business. The first step she suggested was to teach yourself to draw. According to the book, You Can Draw in 30 Days, anyone can learn to draw.

I bought this book, I followed it diligently. I did every lesson every day for 30 days.

This book is a lie.

Anyone cannot learn to draw. I cannot learn to draw. My daughter found the notebook of my attempts and has not stopped making fun of them years later.

Finding Authenticity Among the Madness

All of this leads me to what I am doing now in my PJs for money. Writing. It’s my best stay-at-home-mom gig yet.

These wild forrays into working from home led me down a strange path into something I love.

What is more authentic than writing? When you write for others, you show a bit of yourself to the world.

You can't hide behind your words. Your words are you. There is nothing more authentic than that.

A previous version of this story was originally published on Medium.