Here we go again, it's Thursday morning in September and I am driving to my job the same way that I have done for years and that my father had done before he retired sixteen years ago. Nothing much has changed along the drive it has pretty much been the same for the entire fifteen years that I have been driving it. Driving past the high school I saw some of the really dedicated football players out practicing it was pretty early to be at school so they must really want to win the big game coming up at the end of the month.
As I get closer to where I work I noticed some of our finished goods being trucked away to fill the orders for them that had been placed weeks before. Usually there were three trucks pulling away at this time in the morning but today there were only two. I didn't give it a second thought because I was still thinking about the football players practicing at the school and the upcoming game. When I got in the building I heard people talking about some orders that were suddenly cancelled and we would have to idle two of our production lines so we didn't make too many more of the cancelled products until we could move them out. At our daily morning meeting we learned the whole story pertaining to the cancellations and that were many more orders cancelled that originally thought. To make up for what was turning out to be excess manufacturing capacity the management decided to close the plant on Friday and re-open again on Monday. In addition, we began hearing rumors that the company owners were considering moving everything overseas.
That was a wake up call for me that I need to prepare myself in the event the whole plant closes. We were the last plant out of three in our area that was still operating and now that was getting shaky. When I got home that evening I sat down with the family to discuss what was going on and how we were going to have to make some changes in our lives. My son mentioned that our neighbor across the street started his own home based business when his job started getting unpredictable. He is now making really good money right from home.
I knew that diversifying my income was the answer to the feeling of insecurity that I have been having. My son and I went across the street to speak to the neighbor about his home business. We wanted to find out exactly what he was doing. I had read about various home based business opportunities in magazines and on the internet but I never really knew someone who was doing one. After speaking to the neighbor at length about his home business I decided to check into it further and look for one that was interesting to me. As a family we decided that working a home business together would be fun as we watched it grow with our efforts. We found one that appealed to us so we got our materials together and began our business. We could never have been able to do a business where you have to have a store, that would have been way too expensive. The home based business fit well in our schedule because we could work on it when we wanted to. We didn't have to go anywhere to do this business outside of our home office.
In addition to providing us with an alternate income stream our home business allowed us to take several tax breaks that we never would have been able to do before. Our local tax code allowed us to write off our home office that was used for the purposes of doing the business along with many of our internet and telephone expenses.
When the plant closed for good around two years after we started our home based business we weren't concerned about how we were going to survive at all thanks to our home based business. Starting it for the sake of diversifying our income was one of the wisest decisions that we have ever made. You just can't trust your livelihood to someone else.
After seeing what I have gone through the past few years my children have decided that they will seek employment in the public sector where jobs are secure and you can still retire at a young age with a decent pension and start their own home businesses to help with diversifying their income.
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