3 Passive Income Options for Stay-at-Home Parents

Thousands of women are staying home and taking care of children in a world today that requires a two-person household income. With the cost of childcare at an all-time high, it’s difficult to maintain two incomes without running into issues with being able to actually spend time with your spouse. The average monthly charge for childcare according to children.costhelper.com shows as $647 a month or $7,764 a year. In the state of Ohio, the average hourly pay rate is $17.92 an hour which is $717 a week. Meaning, one fourth of your monthly income would be designated to childcare alone. This does not sound too difficult but for individuals that have issues budgeting or finding jobs with this pay rate, it is.

In 2021 I was a trainer for a clerical company making $17 per hour working 40+ hours per week and bringing home roughly $1,200 every two weeks. We have four children in our household. One of which have not yet reached school age. With childcare prices at an average of $647 a month PER CHILD that would mean our child out of school would cost us a whopping $647 monthly, not including what it would cost for the other three to attend before and after school. I'll give you a hint, it would have been half of my monthly income. It would have made no sense attempting to maintain two jobs and dealing with the stress to end up receiving the same amount I would have gained working part time for minimum wage at McDonalds.

Needless to say, I found this information frustrating and stressful. So much so, it was time to make a change. I put in my notice of resignation at my employer and my husband went back to physical work. I began researching each and every passive income option I could find and began creating an agenda. I wanted to take care of my household and children, while still being able to contribute financially.

I know what you’re thinking,

"Passive income is a scam and sounds too good to be true."

I thought the same thing. How could someone make a substantial amount of money by doing work when they are able rather than on a strict schedule? There are many answers to this question.

I’ve put together a list of three that I have found to be profitable:

1. YouTube: YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, behind its owner, Google. It is a social media and video sharing platform that debuted in February 2005. This website gains over six billion hours of viewing hours a month and it’s still growing. 86% of these viewers are searching YouTube to gain knowledge about how to do something. So if you have a hobby that you excel at or you know how to do something you believe others would benefit from learning this would be your best time to start a HOW TO niche inspired channel of your very own. For those unaware, I want to point out that, in order to start gaining an income from this platform, you need to obtain 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours through your channel.

2. Etsy: People have mixed feelings about Etsy because it is a website where vast amounts of individuals sell handmade or vintage items to others. However, there is one part of Etsy that is simple and easy to gain revenue from. DIGITAL DOWNLOADS! That’s right, earn income by selling packs of digital paper, digital notecards, SVGs (scalable vector graphics) and multitudes of other digital based products that require no packaging and no physical creation. These items can be created on Canva.com, through a painting app, or you could even paint/draw your own designs and scan them to your computer to have a more unique selling option. Create it once and get sales that could grow in the thousands.

3. Low Content books through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): This is Amazon. Com’s self-publishing location that has been growing since November 2007. Authors are able to publish their books directly to the Kindle Store. So, if you’ve been writing a novel for years and have not had the funds to pay a publisher you could upload your manuscript to KDP and start gaining income from it with no knots to untangle. There is another way to gain income on this platform, and it is a bit less work than writing a set of novels. I’m talking about low content books. These books could be a guest book, notebook, journal, word game or crossword book, coloring book, organizer or diary. There are a few more options, but you get the idea. Creating the manuscript and cover for these books can be done on bookbolt.com or canva.com and then all you need to do is upload and wait. PASSIVE INCOME! If this sounds interesting to you, there are hundreds of YouTube videos and blogs that go over how to go through this process. (This one is my favorite)

Of course, I need to make sure to point out that none of these options will work unless you have at least some time you can dedicate to these jobs in order to see an income from them. Meaning, you cannot create one low content book and expect sales to skyrocket, download one YouTube video and expect millions of subscribers or post one digital sale on Etsy and hope to become a millionaire. Although, once they are created and posted you can basically make money in your sleep, it is only profitable if you work at it and focus on your goals. I have to say, working for myself, on my time and with my own created success goals has given me a sense of pride I NEVER had while working for a company. If you choose to start working on one of these three options, please let me know in the comments so I can check out your content and support you! Us moms have to stick together.

Good luck everyone!

🧡Shine Bright, Kayla