Whenever many of us think of working at home, we think about working a full-time job to earn an income so we can leave our present jobs and work for ourselves. But there is a middle-ground that should be considered as we try to make the transition from working for someone else to working at home for ourselves. In addition to generating additional income and residual income with work from home opportunities, I also work a 9-5 job that provides me a little security, insurance for the family and more. Some of us don’t mind going to work each day, but we just want a little more out of life, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

If you have a savings account, I’m sure you can identify with the fact that earning 2% on our money is not going to do much for increasing our wealth. We must look for other opportunities to help supplement our income or inflation alone will continue to drain our money faster than we can earn it.

There are lots of opportunities to generate extra income if you know where to look. You must also be very careful because there are far too many schemes out there that are purely designed to separate us from our money and steal what we’ve worked hard for. I’m sure you’ve heard of the terms Ponzi schemes, Pyramid schemes and whatever the scheme of the month is. These programs are designed to attract people with promises of riches, to just disappear one day with the poor folks at the end of the program losing everything.

There are however programs available to folks that can help generate additional income, so we can start working toward our ultimate goals. The key to working with these programs is diversification and moderation. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and don’t bet the farm on one program, no matter how great or foolproof it appears. Diversification is key to any long term financial strategy whether it comes to purchasing stocks, mutual funds, 401k investments, etc. Online opportunities should be no different.

When working with a few online business opportunities or online investment programs, your first objective should be to get back your initial investment. Once you accomplish this, you can simple invest the gains you’ve made and if the program goes south, you’re out nothing but your time. You should also keep taking out regular profits and reinvest a smaller portion so you will always have profit to show for your time in the program, and at the same time, increasing your wealth and profits.

The reality is there are far more bogus programs than legitimate ones. That’s the way it is and the way it will always be. There are scam artists who want nothing more than to steal peoples money from the start. Many are professionals and do this over and over again. You need to do your homework before joining any program. This can be as simple as typing the name of the program into a search engine with the word “scam”. Read everything you can about the program you may be interested in. If there’s bad news about the program, you will find it. Visiting online forums is another great way to learn about what programs work and which one don’t.

It would be great if we could all earn enough money with our bank accounts, money markets, CDs etc, but the facts are, the gains we get from these are not very good. They’re actually pathetic. It does take some risk when it comes to rewards, but there are ways to minimize your risk and maximize your rewards. Hundreds of thousands of people are generating a nice income while working with multiple online business opportunities. You can too if you know where to look and know what to look out for.