Working at Home While the Kids Are There, Too

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Jan, 1998 by Ronaleen R. Roha

Working for yourself, especially at home, requires the skill of a juggler and the versatility of a short-order cook. How can you balance your family's financial needs with those of your enterprise? How can you satisfy your business's insatiable appetite for your time without depriving your family of attention?

This trio of books can help you build your business while you keep all the balls in the air. Each is aimed at a different audience. The first is an excellent hands-on course in financial management written for the entrepreneur who's ready to harness computer power as a business tool. The second is a soup-to-nuts survey for anyone thinking of launching a home-based enterprise. And the third will lift the spirits of work-at-home parents whose children are at home, too.

AN ALL-AROUND WINNER

Author Linda Stern, a financial writer and syndicated columnist, begins Money-Smart Secrets for the Self-Employed (Random House, $20) with the premise that "working for yourself is the most fun you can have and get paid for it." Judging by her sense of humor and down-to-earth writing style, Stern is certainly having a good time, and she even manages to make it fun to learn smart business techniques -- no small feat.

Her book is like a paper version of a good site on the World Wide Web: You always know where you are and you can find your way around easily. Clear headings and graphics lead you from major topics to subtopics.

This package of goodies will become dog-eared as you follow Stern's directions on how to set up a budget and a cash-flow system that works, price your products and services, raise money, hire employees, and even plan for retirement. Particularly noteworthy are Chapter 11, on midyear and long-term planning; Chapter 13, on how not to run your business; and Chapter 14, a program for annual checkups. The section on "100 strategic saving secrets of the self-employed" -- which covers ways to save on everything from phone bills and business equipment to travel and printing costs -- is itself worth more than the price of the book.

"Secret" boxes, indicated by an icon of a fist clutching dollar bills, signal special tips. For instance, if you label late fees on a client's bill as "interest," you risk running afoul of banking regulations. In other boxes the author cites the advantages of choosing one accounting system over another and summarizes all the tax deductions available to businesses.

Stern discusses software that's specifically designed to conquer small-business bugaboos and shows how to use your computer for business planning and analysis. Her "computer solutions" boxes typically highlight two spreadsheets, one that spells out formulas you can immediately plug into your own program, and one that illustrates how the formulas work with real data. You can use them to track expenses, figure your estimated taxes, calculate a billing rate for your time, and figure out how much you can save by hiring family members.

A SERVICEABLE PRIMER

Written by a team from Entrepreneur magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine: Starting a Home-Based Business (Wiley, $19.95) lacks the vibrant, hands-on style of Stern's book. But as primers go, it's readable (the tone is friendly, if rather pedantic) and covers most of the issues you'll face as a home-based business owner.

The authors direct the first few chapters toward would-be home-based business owners who still need help figuring out what they want to do. But the rest of the book is a valuable trouble-shooting refresher for those who are further along. The authors cover some topics very well: how to do market research (a mystery to many entrepreneurs), how to price your product or service, and how to use financial-management and record-keeping tools.

As with any survey course that hits the highlights, however, you will be left wanting more details on complex subjects such as qualifying the home-office tax deduction, finding health insurance or dealing with family issues. Resource lists at the end of the book direct you to more information.

The book would have benefited from more worksheets and checklists to help readers put its general advice into practice. For example, an excellent rundown on ways to price a product or service lacks a worksheet to let you try them out.

And you can't rely on this book to bring you up to speed on technology. The authors take the position that home-based businesses may not need to computerize early on -- a risky point of view nowadays. And a 9600-baud modem or a computer with only four megabytes of RAM is a questionable purchase, especially if the Internet (barely discussed, by the way) will play a role in your business.

A PERSONABLE CHEERLEADER

Loriann Hoff Oberlin, an upbeat, practical, divorced mother of two young boys, offers "advice, coping mechanisms, and hundreds of tips I've learned about integrating a home-based career with raising an active family."

In Working at Home While the Kids Are There, Too (Career Press, $12.99), Oberlin's style is conversational and her advice is sometimes downright homey. She includes basic how-to's on launching a home-based business, promoting your enterprise and saving both time and money in your work and family life. But her target reader is a mother who is looking for emotional support and encouragement for the decision to work from home while her children are young. Often through anecdotes and lists of tips, Oberlin tells how to cope with housework and other distractions; carve out family time; choose child care; get your children involved around the house and in the business (with a suggested list of age-appropriate jobs); simplify mealtimes and holidays; and keep children occupied (with a list of crafts and games and, if necessary, occasionally even with TV).