by Grace Alexander

Created on: February 18, 2008

I'm going to tell you right up front how much I make working from home, because that is what you want to know. I make about $21,000 a year which works out to about $10.00/hour if I put in a forty hour week. Some weeks I work more, some weeks less, and the paychecks do fluctuate a little; but it stays fairly stable. I'm putting this information right up top because I hate it when I read a whole article on working from home and in the end it gives no real information at all. This is not that type of article.

What I do is charity fund-raising. (I have been in this field for nine years now, and when I started I had no experience of any kind.) Many charities contract with companies that take care of their fund-raising. Some of these companies lobby directly for cash donations; others solicit vehicles and R V's. The most popular trend these days is toward the thrift store industry.

A 'recycling' company contracts with a major charity to supply X number of dollars per month in return for using that charity's name to solicit donations. They hire drivers, buy trucks and rent or buy a large warehouse space to open a thrift store. In the past, the next step was to open a boiler room and hire callers to sit and work the phones which ran off a random dialer. Today, many centers have shut down these 'boiler rooms' and instead employ work from home callers.

The company I work for (we'll call it Recyclecorp) solicits on behalf of a charity (we'll refer to it as People in Need, or PIN) and 98% of the money Recyclecorp sends to PIN goes directly to patient services, which makes PIN look good, since all the admin costs and employee wages comes out of Recyclecorp's slice of the pie.

Enough background. This is how it works. I sit at home. On Saturday (or Monday, or Tuesday, depending on the vagaries of the US Post Office) I receive the package the home office sent me on Friday. Inside is my paycheck for the week, encompassing work turned in from the previous Friday up through the just passed Thursday. They don't hold back at all(and they don't hold out either so pay attention to your taxes!). Also I receive my call lists for the pick-up dates starting two weeks from the coming Monday.

Each calling list is a neighborhood of about 180 addresses, names and phone numbers. They are laid out according to the postal routes. Each list has a date at the top which is when Recyclecorp's trucks (with the PIN logo) will be picking up items in that area. My organization accepts donations of

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