A work at home business is very attractive, isn’t it? Don’t have to commute, don’t need to dress properly, your child don’t need to be alone…there are a lot of benefits.

But, if you are thinking about to start your work at home career, you also need to think in the bad things. I don’t want to discourage you, but help you to take a good decision.

It would be a great mistake to think that you will have 8 hours of work per day, having a great income and a nice security. Well this can happen, but you will need time to achieve it. Today, I want to focus in one problem of working at home: the work time you need to do and nobody will pay.

Time that you need to invest when working at home without getting a direct income from it

• Finding clients and jobs. Yes you may think that this is only necessary in the beginning, but if you are serious about your business, you will always be looking for new projects. So, you will always need to spend time looking for new projects. And, nobody will pay you for it.
• Calculating budgets. Once you or your client have started the contact, you will need to calculate your fee. Of course you will have an idea about your fees before that, but projects usually have their own details that will make you need to adapt your fees to its specifities.
• Keep the accounts. You will need to take a good amount of time to track your profits, taxes and expenses.
• Creating invoices. Yes an invoice is different to an accounting entries. You will need to do both.
• Creating a portfolio. Necessary and don’t think you can do it once and forgot it, you will need to update it with time, and it has to be perfect.

So if you are dreaming with a 8 hours work, you need to take into consideration all these activities, to see if you will be able to have the income you want in that 8 hours, knowing that a nice amount of time will go to activities that do not generate income directly. Also, you need to think in this when you are calculating your fees.

Of course you can outsource some of this needs, but in the end is the same because time is money.

Is there any other work-related activity you need to do and that doesn’t generate income directly? Share in comments!