Job Description for a Parent

Position: Parent

Job Description: Long-term player needed for challenging, permanent work in chaotic environment. Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills and be willing to work evenings and weekends and frequent 24 hour shifts. There is some overnight travel required, including trips to primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments in faraway cities. Travel expenses not reimbursed.

Responsibilities: Must keep this job for rest of your life. Must be willing to be hated, at least temporarily. Must be willing to bite tongue repeatedly. Must possess physical stamina of a pack mule. Must be willing to tackle stimulating technical challenges such as small gadget repair, sluggish toilets and stuck zippers. Must handle assembly and product safety testing , as well as floor maintenance and janitorial work. Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and coordinate production of multiple homework projects. Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and levels of mentality. Must be willing to be indispensable one minute and an embarrassment next. Must assume final, complete accountability for quality of end project.

Advancement and Promotion: There is no possibility of either. Your job is to remain in same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you.

Previous Experience: None required, but on-the-job training is offered on a continually exhausting basis.

Wages: None. In fact, you must pay those in charge, offering frequent raises and bonuses. A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 and attend college. When you die, you give them whatever income you have left.

Benefits: There is no health or dental insurance, no pension, no tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and no stock options. However, job offers limitless opportunities for personal growth and free hugs for life.

This article is of special interest to those of us who work out of home. Seeing this Ann Landers column made my think about why so many of us wanted to work out of our homes. One of big reasons being to spend more time with our families. Balancing a family life and a home-based business can be a delicate one, especially when you look at all of duties we have as a parent. Truthfully, it is amazing we get anything done at all.

The last article examined how to calculate your realistic billable hours. If you remember, we arrived at approximately 1100 hours in a year. To earn our mythical $46,000 per year, you needed to bill at a rate of $42 per hour. Now we need to take into account expenses of running a business and see where those put our hourly rate.

Most costs fall into three general categories: business and office expenses; salary and personal taxes; and, benefits and profit margin. In this article, we will concentrate on first category, business and office expenses.

Everyday expenses are part of doing business, and these must be reflected in prices you charge or you will not be in business for long. Expenses to consider are rent for office space. If you are home-based, you will still have an increase in utilities, such as gas and electric over your regular household bills. You will have telephone costs, postage, copying costs, stationery, office supplies, subscriptions and possibly, membership dues.

You will also need to make periodic upgrades to your office equipment and furniture. Items such as computer hardware and software; fax machine, copier, filing cabinets, telephone headsets, etc. All of these items add to hourly rate you charge for your services. You must have a good estimate of what these costs total each year or you will end up cheating yourself. If you do cheat yourself, you are going to drastically increase your stress levels and lose much of enjoyment of running your own business.