How long have you been contemplating starting a home business? Most of us have had the thought of a home business rattling around in our brains, but we just haven’t taken the next step.
Before you decide to embark on a home business, take some time to explore the concept fully. It’s important to have realistic expectations and goals, and even more important to understand why you want to start a home based business.
Take a look at some of the common reasons for starting a home business and see if any match your list.
Flexibility – If you’ve worked outside of your home, you probably have a good idea why business is called the “rat race”. Between commuting from your home to work, working long hours, and having someone else establish priorities, it’s no wonder people feel like they scurrying through a maze.
Working at home gives you the flexibility to choose to work as much or as little as you’d like; you can balance the needs of your family with your work time; you can save yourself all that time on the road.
Be Your Own Boss – Working for someone else puts them in charge of your priorities, your work schedule, and your commitments. When you work from home, you establish how much you want to work. Your priorities for volume may be different than a boss. How many bosses are understanding when you want to take December off for the holidays, or take a three week summer vacation, or the afternoon off to do a field-trip to the pumpkin patch with your children?
Earn More Money – As an owner of a business, you can earn the profits that your employer or former company earned. You have control over your billings and rates. Of course, you also have to maintain the accounting side of the business, which can be challenging, but it’s great to feel like you’re being paid directly for all your efforts.
Tax Benefits – Many home business owners find they have tax deductions they had never considered before. Depending on how you structure your business, you can apply the deductions to your personal taxes, or deduct from your business taxes. In future articles we’ll discuss some of the tax deductions that you can take as a business owner, and how to avoid tax pitfalls. We’ll encourage you to take every deduction you are entitled to, and we’ll talk about legitimate deductions versus those deductions that are a little shady.
Work At Your Own Pace – As we touched on briefly earlier, a home business gives you great flexibility in determining how much work you want to do. It also allows you a great deal of flexibility in your time scheduling. Are you a night owl? After the kids are put to bed can be a perfect time to put in a few hours of solid work, or how about those early morning hours, before the sun (or the rest of the family) comes up, while the kids are at school, etc.
There are a number of reasons to work at home. It’s a rare opportunity to allow you to achieve the kind of goals that are important to you and your family, without sacrificing your time, energy and commitments to them.
A home business is not without a great deal of hard work, diligence, sacrifices, and an occasional balancing act, but it can be a great improvement in the lives of you and your family. In the next article, we’ll discuss how to go about the decision-making process of finding a business that works for you.