Tutoring from Home to Earn Good Money

Tutoring from Home to Earn Good Money

Article by P D Hurd

Tutoring students from your home can be both challenging and rewarding, and it could be a great way for you to earn good money.

Challenges of tutoring from home include:

1) Distractions from other family members. I solved this problem by assigning older kids to look after younger ones, and assigning them to which room they could play in for 1 hour. I supplied snacks, activities and toys.

2) A home office or quiet room to tutor in. I never had either one, so I always used the kitchen table. The table was right by an outside window, and the kitchen tends to be a very public place in the house, minimizing the chances of ever getting accused of inappropriate behavior. Another way to solve this problem is to simply meet in a public place, such as the public library.

3) You don’t have the services of an agency supporting you, so you must look after the following tasks yourself: advertising, collecting payment, finding and copying tutoring worksheets. I found these tasks to be much easier than they sound. Advertising was mostly word of mouth, I made an agreement with my students about prompt payment, and I prefer to make my own worksheets anyway.

Rewards of tutoring from home include:

1) Pure satisfaction when your struggling student achieves success in school.2) The flexibility in your schedule that working for yourself provides.3) Financial rewards; because you work for yourself, you decide how much you make.

Tutoring from home as a way to earn good money:

Before you start tutoring, you are going to decide how much money you will make per hour, and what kind of discounts you will give. Having some discounts is a good idea because your students’ parents will see this as a good way to save themselves a little money, and so they will likely buy more tutoring hours from you in order to get the discount. You will also want to decide on a penalty for no-shows, to discourage students from not showing up, which costs you time and money.

First of all, what will you charge per hour? Find out what the going rates are in your area and pick one somewhere near the top end of average. It is worse to under-price yourself than over-price. Both will result in less business for you. Let’s say you have decided on per hour.

The second thing to think about is your discounts. Let’s say that most students will want a 1 hour session weekly, which is 4 sessions for most months. If you want more tutoring, you could offer per hour for the fifth and each subsequent hour in a month.

Another type of discount is for multiple students. If you have 2 or 3 students for the same subject, offer them the price of for the first student and half price () for each student after that. If you really want to do group tutoring, then encourage your students to give you referrals.

Now to the issue of no-shows — Sometimes things happen in life and a student is not able to come to a previously-booked session. You must have a fall back plan in place for this. Students who habitually are late or miss appointments and contact you after the fact can really mess up your schedule and your home business.

For my late students, they needed to learn that I couldn’t just start the full 1-hour session at the late time. That would run into the time for my next student, or put my own schedule out of balance. So, if they were late, they just got a shorter tutoring session; we still ended on time and they paid the full amount.

For no-shows, my students would call me 24 hours in advance to reschedule and avoid a penalty. After that, they would pay 20%, or . If they failed to call at all before the missed appointment, they would pay 50% or for the missed appointment. Before I had this policy in place, I had problems with students not showing up. After I put the policy in place and told everyone, I never had a problem. You may never need to use it, but make sure you put it on your parent handout and have them sign a copy of it for you to keep.

Tutoring from home really is a good way to earn money, and it can sustain you financially for many years of you build your business with integrity and invest time in yourself. Continually learn what you can do to become a better tutor and it will really pay off for you.

About the Author

LOOK here first for how to be a tutor now.

How to be a tutor – today’s fastest growing work-from-home!

Learn simple letter writing techniques and tools, like self-made worksheets and booklets, to teach your kids the correct way to write letters in this free video clip on education. Expert: Matt Moskal Bio: Matt Moskal is a free-lance artist with a BA in Elementary / Special Education. Filmmaker: Christopher Rokosz
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Related Home School Worksheets Articles