When I recently became a stay-at-home mom, I gave up some pretty desirable benefits to focus more on raising my children and maintaining a household. Recently, there was an article on Yahoo Finance entitled “How Much Is A Homemaker Worth?” This article proposed that a year’s worth of work as a homemaker could earn someone approximately $96,261 taking into account careers that involve related services. This astronomical figure didn’t surprise me. Being a stay-at-home mom is a time consuming job that is both labor intensive and mentally challenging. Let’s get real though, homemakers don’t get paid, and if you’ve postponed your career like I have it can be a hard pill to swallow when the paychecks stop coming in. After focusing on a career for twelve years, I can’t help but miss earning a salary.
Last week, a stay-at-home dad friend of mine and I were discussing the benefits of being able to stay home with our younger children and be there for our older children when they got home from school which of course led into the inevitable cost-benefit analysis discussion of leaving a career in order to do so. We both expressed the desire to contribute financially to our households, and he told me about a few part time jobs he had lined up. Then he asked if I’d ever heard of Amazon Mechanical Turk as a way of making money from home. I hadn’t, but the mention of making money while being at home with my children piqued my curiosity. It also didn’t hurt that Amazon is such a well known and reputable company considering the many work from home scams out there.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a site where one can choose from thousands of tasks posted by businesses, developers, and researchers which can be completed from home. These tasks are known as HITs or Human Intelligence Tasks. A worker on this site has the ability to work from home, choose when and how long they want to work, and get paid for every successfully completed task. It seemed pretty simple, so I decided to give it a try considering all you need is an Amazon account which I already had. Immediately after logging in, I was able to peruse the HITs.
HITs vary in the amount they pay, the time they take to complete, the level of concentration that is required, and the amount of time allotted for completion by the Requester. That first day, I completed the following types of HITs: Transcribe 1 Min of English Audio, Extract Company Name and Mail Recipient, Copy Text From a Business Card, Correct and Format an Audio Transcription, Psychology and Economics Survey, and Answer a Short Survey About Gifts and Decision Making. These particular tasks paid anywhere from $.02 up to $1.50. The highest paying hit I saw paid $17.50 however it was one that required a particular qualification. Some qualifications must be earned through the Requester, but many of them are earned simply based on the type and percentage of your successfully completed tasks.
After spending approximately eight hours searching through and completing HITs over the course of three days, I’d earned $27. Not bad, considering I was able to do the work while my kids were napping, playing, watching a movie with their father, or once everyone was down for the night. Should someone expect to make tons of money as a Mechanical Turk Worker? Absolutely not. However, there is the potential for a stay-at-home mom or dad to make a decent amount whether it be to pay a monthly utility bill, create a Christmas gift fund, or save for the yearly property tax bill. Every HIT completed adds up and every little bit earned helps when it comes to getting the bills paid.