As you know I’ve been sharing lately about How Anyone Can Successfully Work From Home and since my mega-post was getting MEGA huge I decided to start running additional posts to give you even more details on all the different options there are available! I hope you enjoy and find the perfect fit for you and your family!

Today we’re learning what it’s really like to work for Trades of Hope from Kelleigh Macevicius!

If you are reading this you are most likely already looking for a way to supplement your family income. I was once there, looking at all the options, trying to decide the best fit for me and my family. Let me share the top three reasons why I decided to join Trades of Hope.

1.) I wanted to be able to stay home with my daughter, this is why I was looking into a direct sales company. As I looked into Trades of Hope I realized many of their artisans were able to do the very same thing. Mothers who might otherwise have to give their child to an orphanage just for that child to have a chance to survive were now able to not only keep their children but were gaining a sustainable income, business training, and hope. This is just one artisan group of the many TOH partners with and I was given the opportunity to be a voice for these women. I had countless options available to me to hep earn an income and keep my child, they had just one.

2.) The artisans stories! I had just returned from the mission field and was missing the work God allowed me to be involved in there. Introducing me (in seriously a crazy way!!) to Trades of Hope felt like His gift to me. I checked out the “Who we Help” tab on the TOH main website and was really intrigued by what I saw. It wasn’t until after talking with a Compassionate Entrepreneur (TOH consultant) that I realized just how much of these women’s lives I could impact through selling with TOH. I decided that if I could help just one it would be worth the start up cost alone. It might sound crazy, but I didn’t think about how quickly I could “make back” the money I would spend on a starter kit, rather I was thinking “how many women can I help through selling their products?!?!?”

3.) The foundation of Trades of Hope IS helping these women. When I looked at the Trades of Hope founders I was excited to hear their stories and the passion they had for the artisans. I liked how down to earth and personal they appeared and how their first thought in starting this company was not “How can we make money off of these products while also giving American women who already have so much opportunity MORE opportunity to make money….” no, they started this company with the question “How can our lives leave a bigger impact on those less fortunate? How can we go past ‘charity’ and give opportunity to women around the world?” On the website I read the quote “Give a man a fish he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime!” and I was hooked!

Opportunity for myself to make extra money while staying home with my daughter, opportunity for our artisans to work with dignity and the privilege to be one to share their stories, and founders who GIVE BACK (our incentives are things like “do X, Y & Z and we’ll sponsor a child in your name for a year!”) these are just three of the top reasons why I joined Trades of Hope! I hope they will be for you too.”

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This month I have reached a pretty amazing milestone. I normally wouldn’t share but I just can’t help myself!!! I couldn’t be *more* excited because this month I will be bringing in more money by working from home than I did when I was working full time in North Carolina before I had kids. Now, that’s actually not saying too much considering the fact that it was a very low-paying job (not to mention it was awful). But I’m just SO thankful that I’m able to not only live out my dream of being a stay at home mom, I’m able to have the best of all the worlds too! It was a long, hard, slow processes of working for pennies and working my way up, but now that I am to the point I feel that I have somewhat, in some tiny way “arrived” I feel so, so very blessed.

***Update from 4/2015***

I just had to come back and update this that after doing taxes for the 2014 year I realized that I made three times as much working from home for last year than I had ever made working (even full time) working outside of the home. this just absolutely blew me away!!! Also I had one fellow blogger friend that I’ve been Facebook friends and in brainstorm groups with for years share her success in a blog post on a big sight that she made OVER $100,000 blogging last year. Another blog friend from the same group just had her husband quit his full time job to help her out because she’s doing that well blogging. All of this to say that while hard, this is totally do-able if you’re willing to listen to advice, dig in, and try HARD!

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