I'd suggest going into a part-time business. Heck - do taxes.
I've been doing seasonal tax work all along. About 1997 I gave up my client base to go corporate (bad choice
, but I didn't know it yet) Lemme back up. Sometime in the late 1980,s several of my tax clients were realtors who consistently earned upwards of $100k. I wasn't making anywhere near that. Plus, I was in a depression (didn't know that, either) and had just gone through a divorce and lost my house.
I looked at them, looked at the numbers and said to myself "hell,
I can do
this". So I got my real estate license and went to work. Right off, I had two strikes against me (yet another thing I didn't know then). First, I had no idea how to sell real estate. Sure, I had a license, knew the mechanics, rules, law, ethics of a real estate transaction, but that was it. I had no idea how to get listings (which
shouldhave been my focus). Instead, I wound up driving 'buyers' (ha!) around three counties. I didn't know how to sell, I didn't qualify them, I wasn't working with a loan agent. Nada.
Second, the recession of 1990 hit, then Saddam invaded Kuwait. Interest rates went up, real estate activity went down, and I was screwed, blued and tatooed. I jumped over to working for a mortgage broker selling loans and refis. Unknown to me, the broker and his wife were involved in some shaky deals, were on the verge of divorce and coked up to boot. I didn't sell many loans, and didn't get paid for some I did sell. My meager post divorce savings were rapidly dwindling.
Onward. I still had the real estate license so the obvious next choice was property management. I earned a wage rather than a commission. Did everything, screened tenants, did move out inspections, prepared rental agreements, served notices, evicted tenants, prepared owner's financial statements, reconciled bank accounts, etc. After about 5 years, I was approaching burnout and the owner's wife (who worked in the office) was becoming a real PITA. One day, she caught me at the wrong time and I said 'take this job and shove it' or words to that effect, cleaned out my desk and left.
My next job search turned up a corporate accounting gig in Orange County, about 300 miles from here, so I gave up my tax client base and relocated. Paid a nice starting salary. It wasn't too long, however, before I saw the light. High, high stress, overtime hours with no extra pay (they called me an Accounting Manager-ha!), and volatile clients. Mommy I want to go home.
Next stop was Santa Barbara where I worked preparing multiple financial statements for a lawyer who managed mobile home parks. Won't even go into all the snaky sideways deals in
that business.
Anyway, the next job took me back home (into corporate accounting again, but I didn't know it at the time). Went to work for a small community hospital, a non-profit. Good starting pay, bennies, stable work environment (ha! double ha!) It wasn't long before I figured out what was going on. This hospital, and two others were owned, and being sucked dry, by a group of shysters in San Diego. These guys had big cars, bigger boats, and even bigger houses, under the auspices of a 'non-profit'. Bankruptcy was the final step in their business plan. Then a sale to an interim owner, who spun off two of the hospitals to a huge west coast healthcare provider with dozens of hospitals (another 'non-profit'). They relocated me 50 miles from home and brought in a series of high paid 'consultants' and idiot sycophant supervisors. They brought in one chucklehead who had been the CFO of a small local HMO that went broke due to mismanagement, and left it's physicians and patients high and dry.
Anyway, they put this yutz in a position between me and my boss, where there was nothing for him to do. So, he started taking work away from me, to justify his existence. The bastiche was stealing my job and there was nothing I could do about it. Pretty soon, I had very little to do except keep track of assets (which sounds like a lot of work in a hospital but isn't. The software does all the depreciation and amort, schedules, etc. All had to do was add new purchases and subtract retirements once a month). I kept asking for more work to do, but got none. Had time on my hands and spent a lot of it on THR, working up to 7k+ posts. Then I got busted.
Unknown to me, the waddling fatass twinkie munching nerds in IT had been monitoring and recording my internet use for several months, and had a complete record of all the sites I visited. Got called into HR where my idiot boss gleefully showed me the thick stack of records tracking my internet usage. There followed a lot of head shaking and clucking about 'guns', 'assault weapons', etc., and I was escorted out of the building by security. That was my last job. (They fired that guy several months later for complete incompetence. He couldn't read and interpret financial statements let alone prepare them. Hell I could have told them that two years earlier)
