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" Who hasn&amp;#039;t fantasized about living the work-at-home life? You can&amp;#039;t beat the perks: flexible hours, a slacker-worthy wardrobe, the precious balance you&amp;#039;d finally strike between work and family. Yet leaving the corporate world in pursuit of this have-it-all lifestyle has traditionally meant a big financial trade-off. Sure, you&amp;#039;d be freer to volunteer for car-pool and cafeteria duty, but you wouldn&amp;#039;t be earning a full-time salary. Working at home, it seems, has long been another way of saying working for less. But times have changed. To find out how you can do it, too, read on.  A recent study by the U.S. Small Business Administration found that home-based companies now comprise 52 percent of all U.S. businesses, and they&amp;#039;re not necessarily run by part-timers who are looking to make pocket change: The National Survey of Entrepreneurial Parents revealed that 22 percent of women who run a full-time business from home pull in $50,000 or more a year, and 39 percent earn $30,000 or more. That&amp;#039;s not to say it&amp;#039;s easy. Bringing your professional and personal lives together under one roof is like introducing two strangers with entirely different needs and expecting them to live together 24 hours a day. The success of the coupling is dependent on the ability of one (the professional you) to coexist in a space originally claimed by the other (the personal you). True, the commute is only 30 seconds (depending on traffic between the breakfast room and the spare bedroom that doubles as your office); yes, you&amp;#039;re free to begin and end your workday when you want; and certainly those Friday lunches with your husband can become more than just a goal. But running the kind of business that will pay you $50,000-plus a year often means you&amp;#039;ll work long hours and sacrifice vacations and other perks during the two years it takes, on average, to turn a profit. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re trying to balance family and career and run a home-based business, you have to learn to work in snatches,&amp;quot; says Beverley Williams, president of the American Association of Home-Based Businesses. &amp;quot;That can mean putting in two hours in the morning, getting the kids off to school, working some more, then taking a break when the kids come home. It&amp;#039;s a new way of life. Myth: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll make a full-time salary on part-time hours.&amp;quot; Reality: Like any new business, one that&amp;#039;s based at home takes both careful planning and a year or two of operation to turn a profit. &amp;quot;A new business is like a new baby,&amp;quot; notes Beverley Williams, president of the American Association of Home-Based Businesses. &amp;quot;It demands a lot of attention.&amp;quot; Myth: &amp;quot;Working at home means I won&amp;#039;t need child care anymore.&amp;quot; Reality: &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll need a child-care plan -- whether it&amp;#039;s a video your daughter can watch while you conduct a phone call, a prearranged play date or a babysitter a couple of days a week,&amp;quot; says Ellen H. Parlapiano, coauthor of  Mompreneurs.  Myth: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll be able to run my business without leaving the house.&amp;quot;  Reality: Home-based doesn&amp;#039;t mean housebound. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t lose sight of the importance of getting out and meeting with clients,&amp;quot; says Parlapiano. Myth: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll have a hard time reentering the traditional workforce.&amp;quot; Reality: &amp;quot;Your resume becomes more valuable, because your home career shows initiative,&amp;quot; says Lisa Roberts, cofounder of en-parent.com. Michelle Mix had one goal when she launched her embroidery business, Mixed Thredz, five years ago: permanent flex time. She envisioned someday attending the after-school events of her daughter, then a newborn. She wanted to stop what she was doing at 2:20 every afternoon, the minute her 5-year-old son walked through the door. She wanted to take Fridays off during the summer so that she and her kids could go to the beach with their neighbors.  &amp;quot;Friends say, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re lucky to be home while your kids are young,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says Mix. &amp;quot;But I want to be at home even after they become teenagers.&amp;quot;  Mix first enrolled in sewing classes at a local textile school and began making children&amp;#039;s clothing and bridal gowns for friends and relatives. The money supplemented her husband&amp;#039;s income from construction, but it wasn&amp;#039;t enough. Then she attended a trade show and saw a demonstration of a commercial embroidery machine. Mix and her husband, Dave, 34, pooled their resources and took out a loan to buy a machine. Then she began calling on local sporting-goods stores that needed logos applied to uniforms, sweatshirts and jerseys. In fewer than six months she made $50,000.   Today Mix owns two more machines plus assorted other equipment, employs two other moms as assistants and handles the embroidery and appliqu\u00E9 needs of four sporting-goods stores through which she helps outfit 25 school teams. Not only has she built a $250,000 business, she is able to work around her children&amp;#039;s schedules. A typical day has her up at 6:30. &amp;quot;While the machines run, I get the kids ready for school, make breakfast, do car pool,&amp;quot; says Mix. &amp;quot;Then I come back home and work. Five o&amp;#039;clock is shutdown time. Everyone goes home to make dinner and bathe the kids; then at 8pm, I start up again. I work most nights until 11 or midnight.&amp;quot;  When Linda Fox was seven months pregnant and on bed rest, she discovered eBay, the online bazaar that offers everything from used computers to antique collectibles. She&amp;#039;d recently sold her share in an antiques business to prepare to be a stay-at-home mom; after watching half a dozen of her own antiques go for $22,000 online, she had a brainstorm: Why not transfer her expertise?  After Emily (now 2 1/2) was born, Fox approached her former business partners and various dealers about letting her sell their collectibles online in exchange for a 3 to 20 percent commission. Last year she grossed $63,000 -- without any of her clients hearing Barney in the background. Fox finds that email lets her juggle the needs of her daughter with those of her clients -- especially important now that she&amp;#039;s separated from her husband. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not like I&amp;#039;ve got a customer standing there waiting for me,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Everything I do, I can walk away from and come back to an hour later. And when I begin to feel that I can&amp;#039;t relax -- the computer is staring at me, the emails are piling up -- I plan a day where my daughter and I have to leave the house.&amp;quot;  Like most entrepreneurs, Jennifer White wanted to be her own boss. But mostly she wanted to live the life of the self-employed. Her husband, Steve, 32, a freelance advertising copywriter, had already claimed one of the two spare bedrooms in their home for his office, and she envied his flexible hours/sweatpants/ zero-commute lifestyle. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t have a grand plan,&amp;quot; says White. &amp;quot;All I knew was that I was miserable in my job and wanted out. I was looking for quality of life.&amp;quot;  White, then a marketing director for a cellular phone company, saw an opportunity in a Good Morning America segment featuring the founder of coachu.com, a &amp;quot;virtual university&amp;quot; that trains executive coaches online. White had never heard of executive coaching, but it sounded fascinating. Graduates made good money, and she liked the part about being able to work &amp;quot;from the beach, from home, by the pool, in bed or at your office.&amp;quot;  White quit her marketing job and spent two years training to become a coach. To keep start-up costs down, she furnished her office with a folding banquet table borrowed from her father and a &amp;quot;ridiculously uncomfortable&amp;quot; wooden chair. (Seven years later, the chair sits outside her office as a reminder of how far she&amp;#039;s come.) Her first year in business was tough. White had cleared $22,000 and was projecting earnings of $70,000 plus, but she was regularly putting in 100 hours a week, which left no time for friends and little, if any, for her husband. Her sleepless nights became his sleepless nights; their social life became nonexistent; whenever they scheduled a vacation, she&amp;#039;d cancel at the last minute.  Over dinner one night her husband told her, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like who you&amp;#039;re becoming. What do you plan to do about this?&amp;quot; She knew he was right -- &amp;quot;I wanted success and a life&amp;quot; -- but wasn&amp;#039;t sure how to make it happen. She and her husband sought counseling.  Meanwhile, White quizzed her clients about time management and began incorporating their suggestions into her life. She started working out in the morning and began turning off her computer and phone at six o&amp;#039;clock. She set aside weekends for her husband. Recently she hired a &amp;quot;virtual&amp;quot; assistant (who works two time zones away) to handle her clerical work, making it possible for the couple to take three weeklong vacations a year.  White, who now coaches executives at Procter &amp;amp;amp; Gamble, Fidelity Investments and a number of dot-coms and oversees a virtual staff of 32 other coaches, recently used her experience to write  Work Less, Make More: Stop Working So Hard and Create the Life You Really Want. Business is so good that she recently found herself reconsidering working at home. Her company, The JWC Group, has projected earnings of $2 million this year; conventional wisdom suggested it was time to set up a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; office. &amp;quot;I had to choose. Either I could get an office with a receptionist and a conference room or continue to stay at home, lead the life I wanted to and find other ways to handle the growth,&amp;quot; says White. &amp;quot;I chose home -- and quality of life.&amp;quot;   When Dayna Wakefield started selling Avon products eight years ago, she was looking to make money to pay a housecleaner. She soon discovered that much had changed in the 20 years since her mother worked for the company. For one thing, Avon representatives now conduct a chunk of their business online. Today Wakefield sells products round the clock via the Web and oversees her own sales force of 330. Last year she earned just over $50,000.  Her work has given her more than a steady salary -- it has also boosted her confidence. After Wakefield&amp;#039;s marriage broke up four years ago, she didn&amp;#039;t have to worry about being a single mom to the three emotionally disturbed foster children she and her husband had taken in. &amp;quot;They were more of a challenge than my ex-husband was ready for,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I couldn&amp;#039;t imagine sending them back into the foster-care system.&amp;quot; Secure in her earning ability, Wakefield adopted all three children on her own. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a perception that you can only earn pocket change selling Avon,&amp;quot; says Wakefield. &amp;quot;I love telling people that I support my kids on Avon.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/money-career/advice/a19/how-i-work-at-home/>