Jody Allen - Earn at Home Mum: How to boost your income or start your own business from home

Are you looking for a flexible way to earn more cash that fits in around your family?

Have you always wanted to start your own business but arent sure how?

Do you dream of the freedom to set your own schedule and work from home?

Jody Allen will show you how to make it happen.

Jody, also known as the Stay at Home Mum, has been there and done it herself. She was made redundant while pregnant with her second child and, inspired by necessity, built a money-saving blog from her kitchen table that has grown to become Australias biggest mothers network.

In this book, Jody explains everything shes learned to help other women get it right. Whether you want to bring in a little extra income on the side or build your own company from scratch, Earn at Home Mum will give you the knowledge and confidence to make the leap to earn at home.

For me, working and earning at home is the best of both worlds. It means achieving a balance between making enough money to pay the bills, but still being around enough for my family. I love having the freedom to go to my childrens rugby games or see them get an award at school. But I also love working online because I can set my own hours, Im my own boss and I can work from home, which is my favourite place in the world. Plus I find the work challenging and engaging certainly not boring!

As parents, we often feel that we are juggling more balls in the air than we can possibly handle. Long gone are the days when there was only one breadwinner whose wages were sufficient to support the whole family; now in most two-parent families, both parents have to work. And the cycle of rushing out to work, parenting, cooking, housekeeping and sleep, day in, day out, totally sucks.

This working and parenting pressure was unexpectedly increased in 2020 with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Many people had to juggle supporting their kids remote learning alongside trying to do their job from home, usually with minimal preparation. However, this also gave many a taste of working from home and helped them to weigh up priorities, imagine lifestyle changes and explore new working possibilities for their post-pandemic life.

Even in normal times, society expects a whole lot when it comes to the primary caregivers of children, which still tends to be women. There is an expectation that we pop out a few kids while we go to work full-time, keep on top of the housework, pay the bills, have time with our partner, take the kids to all their sports and activities, prepare meals for the family and still find time to exercise, have our nails done and our hair coiffed. The sheer pressure on us today is exhausting.

There are different reasons many of us want to earn extra income. Commonly cited reasons include:

• Independent income
• Family holiday
• Extra payments on the mortgage or credit card
• Pay down other debt
• Being able to afford little luxuries
• Fund extracurricular activities for your kids
• Build up your superannuation
• Freedom to go buy whatever you want

Whatever your reason, in the chapters that follow Ill show you ways to earn that extra cash, step by step. Just the same way I learned how to.

This book will not only teach you how to go about earning a living from your kitchen table, but also focus on business ideas aimed at mums that may well be something you could consider pursuing because, lets face it, you rarely get rich working for other people.

So what does a mother-of-two from Gympie in rural Queensland know about earning from home? Ive well and truly walked the path for the past decade, and it was something I was forced into out of necessity rather than something I started from a hobby or as a side hustle.

Theres a quote by Hillary Clinton, which was attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, that Ive always felt drawn to: A woman is like a tea bag. You cant tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water. Never has a quote felt as true for me as this one.

Ten years ago I found myself in hot water. I had two baby boys, my husband and I had started building our own home, and then I was made redundant from my secretarial job. We went from two good incomes down to one. We had the costs of a mortgage and renting at the same time, as well as the expenses that come with raising young children.

If we wanted to keep our new home, we had to maintain all our financial commitments on just a single income, which meant there was only $50 left to pay for food. And thats where Stay at Home Mum was born...

I started blogging about my struggles and asked mums on Facebook what they did to make ends meet. I quickly found there was a whole stack of other women out there in the same boat as me. It was a little piece of the internet made for mums to not only share their money-saving ideas, but to share how they used the internet to make a living for their families. Inspired by the challenges I was facing every day, this little money-saving blog had very humble beginnings, but it has grown into a full-blown parenting network read by millions of mums.

Dont for a second think I had a fairytale rags-to-riches storyline I made every mistake in the book along the way! But I have detailed them all in Earn At Home Mum so you dont have to make them too.

I love that there is now a huge community sharing their ideas on the blog and website. These people, mostly women and mums, come to connect, to laugh about the stupid stuff that happens in life, and to vent frustrations about things only mums can fully comprehend.

If I can create something out of nothing and turn it into a successful business that is now paying my mortgage and putting way more than $50 worth of food on the table every week for my family, theres no reason why you cant take a passion of yours and find a way to make an income from it. This book is full of practical and sensible information, plus hundreds of ideas on what unique items or services to sell and where, how to market your products and ways to succeed on social media.

Its time to get fired up and start tapping into the resources you have access to from your home, and start earning great money doing something you love.

Now, let us begin!

Its official earning at home is on trend! With a massive push from the COVID-19 global pandemic, so many people have been compelled to open their eyes to the benefits of working from home and just what is possible if you dare to think outside the rigid square of the nine-to-five rat-race.

Its not just mums wanting to earn extra cash on the side who are working at home now many corporations and businesses have taken advantage of their employees working at home during the pandemic. Not only are their staff just as productive (if not more) while working from home, most of them are also happier without the stresses of the daily commute, saving both time and travelling expenses. Not only that, business owners are re-evaluating their need for the huge overheads of office space and all the costs that go towards maintaining their premises. Working from home where possible has become a winwin situation. COVID-19 has forced the issue of cultural change for both workers and employers and that aspect, at least, couldnt have come at a better time.