I have been work­ing from home since Novem­ber of 2003, on and off. Since then I have done all sorts of online jobs. Even though it has been almost 6 years, I have only just found some­thing I really like doing. Each of the work at home oppor­tu­ni­ties I was able to fol­low in the last 6 years have taught me things, and given me oppor­tu­ni­ties in my per­sonal life I am very thank­ful for, but this one seems to take the cake. This is a job I would do no mat­ter if I needed the money or not, because it is so much fun for me.

What you might be won­der­ing though, is how to even find work from home that is legit­i­mate, that is why I wanted to put together this post for you, because it is so easy to get scammed, and spammed when look­ing for work at home. There are a lot of things you have to watch out for, but once you know how to avoid the scams, work­ing from home is much eas­ier to achieve than you think.

To get started, don’t pay for any­thing that doesn’t make sense. When you think about enve­lope stuff­ing, don’t you think “why would some­one pay me to do that?”, because in all hon­estly, why would they? And if they did pay you to do it, why do they make you pay for the sup­plies first? The rea­son is, it is a scam, it doesn’t work. They send you some good infor­ma­tion about how you can make money stuff­ing envelopes, then you pay them for the sup­plies. Once you get them though you real­ize they are just order forms for the com­pa­nies’ prod­ucts, and you only make money if some­one who gets an enve­lope makes an order and they use your refer­ral num­ber. There are just too many if’s and and’s there for me. Not to men­tion, You have to pay for the stamps to send the envelopes.

Another pop­u­lar scam is get­ting paid to write ads from home, on the com­puter. What hap­pens here is, you pay them $10 for your starter infor­ma­tion, doc­u­ments, etc, and then you make money for writ­ing the ads. Unfor­tu­nately when you pay, you get a down­load of infor­ma­tion telling you to take the same ad (or pretty close to it) as the one you bought through, and to go post it all over the net. When some­one orders through your ad you will get paid $10. It’s a scam, and it has worked on many peo­ple. With this one, it seemed too good to be true, and it was, I never wanted to mis­lead other peo­ple to make the same pur­chase I did.

With both of these, the ques­tion you should have asked is “why am I spend­ing money, what do I get out of it?” do these com­pa­nies have any refer­rals, are they listed with the BBB, are their scam sto­ries about them online?” Chances are, if you have been scammed by either of these, you were dis­ap­pointed, and you were afraid of the next offer when it came.

Luck­ily though, there are ways to find work at home, that don’t require you spend­ing money on so-called sup­plies that are worth­less. For instance there are sev­eral com­pa­nies that hire at home con­sul­tants to do lots of jobs, and they are listed with the BBB and have great busi­ness rep­u­ta­tions. The first one I ever con­tracted with was West. If you search West At Home on Google you will find it. I liked it because it didn’t ask for any money up front. Other peo­ple I met on forums (wahm.com and workplacelikehome.com/) worked with them, and they had some­one who answered the phone.

Since then I have also worked for ACD Direct, and gone through their no-cost train­ing, and I have recently had some expe­ri­ence with Arise (for­merly known as Wil­low). So far I really like what I see. Things are a bit dif­fer­ent than the other com­pa­nies because I had to pay for train­ing, but I can under­stand why now. The pay is much more, you have to work under a cor­po­ra­tion to con­tract with them, there is a lot of sup­port, and train­ing avail­able to improve your skills for work, and the this com­pany actu­ally seems to have posi­tions to move up too. None of the other work at home jobs I have had offer all of this, so I have gladly paid to get started. It is only $49 to do their ACP course (their agent cer­ti­fi­ca­tion course), then the cost of the client course (depends on any vouch­ers you get for being new, and the class itself), plus the cost of your back­ground check.

At this point I feel lucky to have found work at home jobs that allow me to stick around my fam­ily more, do you work at home, are you look­ing to? What other posts can I do to help you find work?