We don’t want to be all doom and gloom here but if you’re looking for a job that will let you work from home , or if you’re thinking about starting a home based business , or launching a freelance career, you need to consider how the state of the economy fits into your plans. As we said a couple of days ago, the future ain’t what it used to be .

Like the proverbial frog in a sauce pan, many people haven’t noticed that our economy is in hot water because the bubbles have taken some time to rise to the surface. Fact is though, the dollar is in a world of hurt, our trade deficit is growing, and a recession is on the horizon—if not already here. The consumer boom we’ve enjoyed for the past five years has been largely financed with credit and that chapter is about to end.

Face it, people use credit to plug the gap between their lifestyle and their income. In fact, household debt has been growing by $4 billion every day for years. Americans are now “saving” a net negative 0.4% of their disposable income. Simply put, we’re spending more than we make. And we’re talkin’ we the people here, not government—that’s aother whole story.

The real estate crisis has clobbered the banks in a ‘what goes around comes around’ sorta way, and it’s making stock markets nervous although so far, inexplicably, they continue to climb. The mortgage crisis will soon spread to credit card providers, we suspect, and then to car manufacturers, furniture makers, appliance sales, and others that depend on consumer credit.

Meanwhile, believe it or not, the Federal Reserve has encouraged banks to go on taking risks, and has been adding cash into the banking system for about 6 months so that consumers can keep on spending.

Now, if our economy were doing well in foreign markets this all might not be so bad; but it isn’t, and hasn’t been for a long time. The dollar’s weakness makes imports into the U.S. more expensive and makes our exports cheaper in foreign markets, so you’d think we’d be doing great. But we aren’t. Manufacturers are finding it hard to sell their products, and the trade deficit has continued to grow. We imported $62 billion more than we exported in February alone, an increase of 6% in just one month. Gulp.

Still not convinced we have a problem? Consider these facts from Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?

• The US share of the world’s leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing capacity dropped from 36% to 11% in the past 7 years.

• Chemical companies closed 70 facilities in the United States in 2004 and were in the process of closing 40 more the following year. Of the 120 new plants costing over $1 billion each that were under construction at that time, 50 were in China and one was in the United States.

• The U.S. Big Three automakers announced the closing of 26 plants in the United States over the next several years, while Japan-based companies are opening four new plants in the United States between 2006 and 2008.

• In Business Week’s ranking of the world’s information-technology companies, only one of the top 10 is based in the United States.

• Nearly 60% of the patents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia.

• Once-mighty Ford and General Motors both have junk-bond ratings, and each has laid off over one-third of its dwindling North American workforce in the past 5 years alone.

• Toyota brought to an end the notion of the U.S. Big Three automakers when it sold more vehicles in the United States than Chrysler, and the next year ended General Motors’ 75-year reign as the world’s largest auto manufacturer.

• Only one of the 25 largest initial public offerings last year took place on American exchanges.

• China is on track to build 108 new airports between 2005 and 2010, including the world’s largest. The United States, in spite of stifling congestion, has built only one major airport in the last third of a century.

• Low-wage firms, such as Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, created 44% of the new jobs in America during one recent period—a period during which high-wage firms produced only 29% of the new jobs.

• In 2000, the number of foreign students studying physical sciences and engineering in U.S. graduate schools surpassed, for the first time, the number of U.S. students.

• The Los Angeles Times reports that in the past 16 years two high-rise buildings were constructed in Los Angeles as the city executed its accelerated urban-renewal plan. In the past 10 years, 5,000 were built in Shanghai.

• Some foreign universities are now conducting their engineering and business classes in English to promote recruitment of faculty and students and simplify access to technical information. In contrast, the working language in the back halls of many U.S. engineering schools is Chinese.

• The United States is falling relative to its economic competitors in broadband Internet access. As recently as 2000 it was in first place; now it ranks 16th in the fraction of citizens having broadband connections and 61st in the use of mobile telephony per capita. South Korea has nearly twice the broadband penetration (subscribers per capita) of the United States.

• Toyota now has over 5 times the market capitalization of General Motors and Ford combined.

• The United States ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.

• Foreigners finance about two-thirds of US domestic investment, compared with about one-fifteenth a decade ago.

• China has supplanted the United States as the world’s number 1 high-technology exporter.

• The German firm that a decade ago purchased one of America’s Big Three automobile makers, Chrysler, for $36 billion decided after 9 years that it didn’t want the company after all and in effect paid nearly $700 million to get someone else to take it away (along with its pension liability).

• Of the new R&D sites planned for construction in the next 3 years by the 177 companies queried in one recent survey, 77% are to be built in China or India, often using US corporate financing.

Okay. Now you’re convinced. The point is that if we realize it, we can plan appropriately. If there’s anything America’s entrepreneurs have proven, it’s resilience. Good times and bad, there is opportunity. The important thing is to have your eyes open not just croak blindly along until one day you wake up and find it’s too late to do anything about your predicament.

What businesses and opportunities do you see in a declining economy? Do you think our economic woes will foster or impede the growth of work-at-home jobs? We’d love to hear from you.

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If you work from home, freelance or telecommute you’re a likely target for a variety of fraud attempts so listen up.

Since you are a company of one–Exec, Admin, HR, Marketing, IT, Central Supply, and even the grounds keeper you have to make decisions about computers, telecommunications, banking and all the other facets of running a business that big companies spread over dozen, hundreds, and even sometimes thousands of people. So you’re a good target for people who want to take your money.

In fact, the FTC received over 800,000 complaints during calendar year 2007. Consumers reported fraud losses of over $1.2 billion (at an median amount of roughly $350 per person).

Shop-at-Home/Catalog Sales was the leading complaint category, so if you buy online (and you do) be sure you know who you’re dealing with. Internet Service rip-offs were the second largest category followed by Foreign Money Offers (those idiots just don’t give up do they), bogus Prizes/Sweepstakes and Lotteries, Computer Equipment and Software, and Internet Auctions (can you spell eBay?). Health Care, Travel, Vacations and Timeshare, Advance-Fee Loans and Credit Protection/Repair, Investments, and Magazines and Buyers Clubs fill out the list.

Wire transfer problems continue to increase. It used to be you could assume a cashiers check was good, but not any more. So wire transfers becomes the option of choice. But 28% of the consumers reported wire transfer as the payment method involved when they were scammed.

But here’s the (almost) bottom line: Half the fraud complaints where electronic mail related. We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again: if it’s spam it’s a scam.

Let’s be careful out there!

Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison with the Department of Management and Organization at Penn State conducted an meta-study, reviewing 46 other studies involving almost 13,000 employees that work at home. No surprise to us, they found that working from home is good for business and for people; but now we have quantifiable proof.

One key benefit of telecommuting, they found, is that it lets workers take control over their work and work environment. They can control when they take breaks, what they wear (hey, this is Undress4Success, after all!), and how they arrange their office space. They can choose decor, temperature and ventilation, lighting and even music. Most of all they get to decide when and how they do their job as long as the work gets done

Another real advantage of working from home is people can decide when they are going to work and what their going to do. But more, they, they can combine work and family obligations and reduce the tension inherent in those competing demands. Taking time to go with the kids to sports or pick up groceries can be scheduled into the day along with work “to-do’s”.

One surprising finding of the super-study was that researchers found that telecommuting had a positive effect on supervisor-staff relationships. Apparently both employer and employee apparently make an extra effort to keep each other informed. Working from home may mean supervisor and subordinate see each other less, but the quality of their contact evidently increases.

Stress reduction is another plus: less heart pounding traffic jousting, less out of pocket lunch money, less spent on business clothes, better supervisor-staff relationships, combined with less tension at home make working from home less stressful.

No surprise this, but people who have more control over their work, who can spend more family time, and who enjoy autonomy are more satisfied and less likely to quit their jobs. Having the opportunity to work at home also promotes a sense of loyalty to the organization, it turns out.

In fact, people who are ready to quit most often say it’s because of tensions between work and family, lack of employer flexibility and difficult supervisors. But by finding a way for people to do their job working from home and lower their stress, companies can keep valued, experienced people on the payroll.

Employers who oppose work-at-home arrangements often claim productivity will decrease, but the contrary is true. People who work at home are actually more productive. The researcher clearly contradicts the concern that not being seen in the office is career limiting. In fact, participants in the studies did not consider their work arrangement a liability, ands reported that working from home work may actually help advance their careers.

In a previous incarnation, back in the ’80s, I trudged up to our System Development Director’s office anticipating the usual power plays, political jousting, and red tape just to get a simple programming task accomplished. I wasn’t disappointed.

What should have taken a few minutes discussion and a couple of hours of work by one of our talented gurus turned into a month-long project with an official project leader and cast of thousands. More money, time and effort was spent creating the team and administering it (thus expanding the Director’s empire) than was invested in getting the work done.

Last week we decided we needed some straightforward PHP and mySQL coding done to make it easy for you to see the results of our research on financial, petroleum and CO2 savings that are possible from telecommuting.

I posted a brief but detailed description of the project on eLance.com, specified that we wanted a bid in 48 hours, and stated that we needed the work done in a week. Within a few hours I receive a mockup that was even better than what I envisioned, there was some give and take by email, and a few days later the job was done. By a very professional programmer in Alexandria, Egypt. For $100.

Whether you freelance, work from home, or run  a home based business–or want to–these songs will mean something to you. They were hits at ITAC’s 1999 Seattle conference by The Remote Rascals (Joe Licari, Dee Christensen, Bob Fortier and Eddie Cain).

PROUD TO BE TELEWORKIN’
(to the tune of CCR’s Proud Mary)

Left a good job in the city
Rushin back n’ forth ev’ry nite’n day
You don’t have to worry, you can still make money
Companies are learning there’s a better way
Big world a-keep on turnin’, proud to be teleworkin’
Tele, workin’, now I love my job more

The big boss had to see our faces
Sitting at our desks ev’ry single day
Then for business reasons, no longer was it treason
Higher productivity and some R-O-I
Big world a-keep on turnin’, proud to be teleworkin’
Tele, workin’, got the best employer

Lead Break:
Tele, workin’, now I love my job more
Tele, workin’, got the best employer

If your company wants to see some changes
Recruit’n more employees and keep what you got
No it ain’t no fallacy, go out and set a policy
Its time to make it happen so now give it a shot
Big world a-keep on turnin’, proud to be teleworkin’
Tele, workin’, now I love my job more

Tele, workin’, now I love my job more
Tele, workin’, got the best employer

WORKIN’ GIRL BLUES
(Bluegrass style)

I got the early Monday mornin’ workin’ blues
Put on my business clothes and expensive business shoes.
I could do this job from home, but I can’t choose.
When the Lord made the workin’ girl, he made the blues.
Well, I’m tired of drivin’ back and forth to work each day.
When I’m finally home my energy’s slipped away
I can’t get work done at the office cause it’s a zoo.
And that’s why I’ve got these workin’ girl blues.

A-da-lel-de-la-de-la, telework would work great for me
I could juggle work and home – and save my sanity.
And I’d get more work done at home, so my boss won’t loose.
And I’d get rid of a little bit of these workin’ girl blues.
Well I came to this conference to learn a thing or two
And I joined as a lifetime ITAC member too.
I’ll find a new job where the boss won’t refuse
To let me work at home & end these workin’ girl blues.