How to quit your day job and start working from home? Just go up to your boss and say “I quit.” Then walk out, go home and start working from home? OOPS! WRONG! NOT SO FAST!

It may certainly be your dream to quit your day job and start working from home, but it’s not going to be as easy as simply walking out if you haven’t first prepared yourself to work from home full time.

It is not impossible to walk out of your day job, go home and celebrate that you finally did it, but what then? What next? You haven’t even started thinking about what you would like to do working from home. You haven’t even thought about how you will market whatever it is you are going to do from home to earn the monthly income you will no longer be getting from your day job.

Oh? You do have a plan? An absolutely wonderful idea that simply can’t fail? You’re going to make more money than you did at your day job?

How do you know that after you quit your day job your work from home idea won’t fail? Have you started selling your product or offering your service and people are flocking to your door, phoning you all the time, placing orders or joining a waiting list to book your time? No? Oops.

You really may have a great idea, a good product or service that many will need or want, but how much do you know about advertising your product or service? If nobody knows about what you are selling or offering, how can you make money? If hardly anybody knows about what you are selling or offering, how can you make a decent income? You can’t.

You also can’t know in advance that everybody who sees your adverts, in whatever form they may be, will buy your products or use your services. Maybe only one in 100 will. Maybe only 1 in 1 000 will. How much money do you have to spend on speedy but expensive forms of advertising? How much time do you have to spend on slower but free or inexpensive methods of advertising? You don’t want to spend just about all your money on advertising, and you also don’t want to spend just about all your time on slower but free or inexpensive methods of advertising and never get much time to actually work.

Will you manage to do all the work on your own? Will you be able to do enough work on your own to generate a healthy monthly income? Or will you need some staff to assist you? How much will you need to pay your staff? Will you need to hire somebody to assist you with your books? How much will that cost? Do you need to register yourself as a business? Or can you start out as a freelancer or on a small scale and worry about growth or registering yourself as a business only later?

Do you first need to purchase some products, material or office equipment before you can start working from home? Work out all your costs!

Do you have enough money to carry you through your first 3 months while your business grows – um, make that 6 months – um, make that 12 months – if you don’t really know how long it will take before your work from home monthly income will equal that of your current monthly income from your day job, and you only have enough money saved up to carry you through a month or two, you cannot yet quit your day job!

You may absolutely hate your day job, but you need the money. Imagine how much worse your money situation might be if what you want to do from home doesn’t work out.

How to quit your day job and start working from home? SLOWLY.

Yeah, you’ll have to hang in there at your horrible place of work a little longer, until you are not only sure of what you want to do working from home, but until you are also sure that what you want to do working from home full time will work.

Working from home is not for everybody. Before you quit your day job, be absolutely sure that working from home is for you, by experimenting, or by starting to do what you want to do from home, in your spare time and on weekends. Doing some work related to what you want to do from home, or even starting what you want to do from home, will also give you a better idea of how much work it takes, how much you can earn from it, and if you will really enjoy it like you hope to if you are working at it, from home, full time.

Also, be careful of deciding to work from home only for the money. If you don’t enjoy what it is you do, there are going to be many many days that you simply don’t feel like working – and if you don’t work, when working from home for yourself, you don’t earn.

Love what you do, and working will seem like playtime. You’ll want to do it more and more, and that’s where the money lies. The harder you work, the more you can earn.

Working from home can be absolutely wonderful and a dream come true for many who start to do it, but if you’re not ready for it, quitting your day job to start working from home may just be the worst financial decision you ever make, and you may end up broke and depressed – even more depressed than you feel while working at your lousy day job each and every week day.

How to quit your day job to start working from home?
Plan ahead. Prepare. Be sure it’s what you want to do and that it will work for you. Then only, quit your day job.

© Copyright Teresa Schultz 2012 and 2013