I’m looking into work-from-home options on a flexible, low hours schedule for when I take on grad school this fall. The trick is I can’t work many hours and thus need to make a lot per hour! My student financial aid can’t be raised to include my extra expenses for medical, so along with my $20k in loans per year I will have to earn $15-20k over the next year (it’ll be just 15 if I get the $5k scholarship I’m applying to! Wish me luck!) I have to pull this off while attending an intensive combined undergrad/graduate program full-time to become a speech-language pathologist 4 years from now.
I’m single, about to turn 26 and get kicked off my parents’ health plan, and have been out of work the past year (supported by my parents, who are convinced I’m at least partly a hypochondriac and exaggerating my problems to swindle them for money while I accomplish nothing and enjoy endless free time.) I have always been a hard-working, highly successful student and employee, and they see this “decline” (as they insultingly call it) as a sign of my unwillingness to face adult responsibility and an inability to detach from their fine parenting… (BS! I’ve been working my tail off for years to escape their narcissistic and sometimes verbally abusive parenting since before I started high school!) So, aside from the most hurtful rejections and judgments as well as the most destressing threats and manipulation ever in my troubled family relations, I’m finally starting to recover enough to attempt supporting myself. Rituxan is finally helping me to be capable of doing much of what I used to (at about halfway to how I used to push myself, and can never go back to my insane levels of over-achieving that my parents expect, and even presume reflected their magnificent guidance and support rather than a combination of being toxically pressured into it and my own motivation to escape them!) The way I used to burn the candle at both ends (like, 12hr days of scheduled commitments in and outside of school, including work, plus 6 hr nights of studying, on only 6 hrs or less of sleep… I scarfed down semi-healthy food choices while I kept studying, usually!) is likely the reason I hit such a hard wall around the time I graduated from college and had to start working, climbed over it and kept going, then got totally leveled by the disease kicking into full activity the past year! Hence, I’m studying in an area that will get me into a higher pay per-hour range so I can work less and take better care of myself and the family I long to someday have, but I have to get through school (and paying for it) first. Without any more help from my parents, despite the fact that they have tons of money, because they want to prove a point that one must earn the money themself if they want the “freedoms” it entitles (nevermind getting by ok in a crisis… Capitalism at its finest, right in the minds of people who supposedly want the best for me in life!)
To make ends meet in the grueling next few years, one skill area I may try to put to use is medical interpreting for Spanish, which can often be over the phone, yet phone interpreting is much harder to do well and would be more challenging for my non-native Spanish! I’ve looked at online “crowd sourcing” jobs with reputable companies like LionBridge, where you can review/evaluate Internet search content in your spare time, but it’s low pay. I really need to keep any scheduled work hours to a minimum (5-10 hrs per week, with 10 being nowhere near possible on a busy school week for exams!), which means making quite a bit per hour! Medical interpreting pays a little less per hour than would work to pay for everything, so I’ll need to add some extra sources on the side as well. I know this will be putting me at huge risk for major relapse, but I don’t have much choice unless I settle for marrying for wealth… And there are a lot of things I’d rather do than settle for that! At least I can get a fairly cheap health plan through school, and there’s that glimmer of hope that Obamacare will make things a little easier for me soon… But it’s too soon to tell and in the mean time I need an income source that won’t drive me into the ground!
I’ve been compiling creative ideas for how to make extra income, which I’m planning to write a separate post about when I get more info about them. In the mean time, I’d definitely like to know more about your call center work, and wondering if you could post some basics about it in the comments thread, if you don’t mind? Like the format of scheduling, ability to work variable/flexible hours, technology required, benefits if any, pay scale if you don’t mind sharing… Feel free to private message me (adding you), but I’m guessing everyone has similar questions! Thanks for being a resource, I am SO eternally grateful to this community for being not only here to listen, but also to guide, as I’ve struggled so much in my first year of diagnosis. I actually do pretty well tolerating my symptoms and the new realities of this disease; what I can’t stand is the games and eroding criticism from the only people American society has deemed responsible for helping me through this financially!