7 Ways To Work On Your Own Time as a Caregiver

Homebased caregiving is one of the best fields to get into if you're looking for work in the current employment marketplace.

The jobs are plentiful, many have very few educational requirements, and clients are often in urgent need of service, which means you can usually get started making money in a hurry. Today, we're taking a look at seven ways to work on your own time as a caregiver.

Caregiving jobs generally involve staying with elderly people and children during times when their family members can't be present.

To excel in this field you need the right kind of temperament. Laid-back people with good social skills tend to do better.

And the work isn't easy. If you're caring for the elderly, you'll have to help them with all kinds of basic daily tasks, remind them to take their medication, and be a good companion.

If you're caring for children, you'll be expected to stay constantly vigilant, keep them out of trouble, feed them, and handle many of the same same stressful challenges parents deal with on a daily basis.

Obviously, caregivers have daunting responsibilities. People are putting the safety of their loved ones in your hands, which can lead to a lot of pressure. But for those with the right inclinations, it can be a very rewarding line of work, both personally and financially.

Several online companies have sprung up that will simplify the process of launching your new career as a caregiver by putting you in touch with clients in your area. Most of these companies are basically job posting sites where you offer your services, but some will actually hire you as an employee and set you up with particular clients.

Below we've listed a few of the more reputable sites for offering your caregiving services so you can get started right away looking for gigs.

7 Sites For Offering Your Caregiving Services

#1 – Care.com

This site is basically a full-fledged caregiving marketplace. Clients post jobs here, and caregivers make profiles to offer their services.

There are sections for child care, senior care, pet care, tutoring, and housekeeping. Caregivers are free to either set their own prices up-front, or negotiate pay-rates with customers on a case by case basis, depending on the nature and difficulty of the job.

#2 – Sittercity

A site focused specifically on babysitting. The whole setup is pretty similar to Care.com. Parents post job offers, and sitters make searchable profiles, which means there's two ways to get hired.

Parents will seek you out based on your profile, but you're also free to take a more active approach, browsing job offers in your area and applying to those that seem most interesting.

The average pay is approximately $17 per hour, but it will vary a lot from job to job.

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#3 – Nanno

This company describe themselves as the Uber/Lyft of childcare, because their system is highly automated and mostly works through a phone app. It's easy to get hired – just pass a background check (which they pay for) and you're in.

You can work as much or as little as you like, and it's super-easy to get bookings. Their system intelligently matches jobs to available sitters in a given service area, then sends out a mass text message. If you're the first to respond, you've got the job, and even if the client cancels, you're guaranteed to get 50-percent of your fee.

The pay varies depending on the job, but the average is between $15 and $35 per hour.

#4 – Honor

A senior-care service that relies on employees instead of freelancers. You get paid more for clients who have greater needs, and there's also a pay bump for caregivers who perform exceptionally well over a period of time.

You're able to select from a list of available jobs, and they have a nifty app that makes everything easier by listing the needs of each client, and providing a note-taking system that helps you track things like medication doses.

They pay from $14 to $22 per hour on average.

#5 – Urbansitter

Another childcare focused site with an excellent reputation. There are no fees at all to participate in their marketplace, and the whole arrangement is extremely simple. Just create an account, apply to the jobs listed for your area, and start earning money.

Urbansitter requires parents to verify their identity (for safety reasons) and they have a 24-hour helpline for sitters who find themselves in difficult situations.

According to the sign-up page, their top sitters earn more than $1000 per week.

#6 – Bubble

This babysitting service runs all booking and payment processing through an app, which keeps things simple and secure. You can work as often or as little as you want, and set your own prices.

All clients have profiles with reviews from previous sitters, so you can check them out before you accept a booking, and sitters are provided with liability insurance in case something goes wrong.

#7 – Babysits

This service is marketed as a community platform for connecting sitters and parents. Their system is actually a lot like an old-fashioned bulletin board, with a page for parents seeking sitters, and another page for sitters seeking jobs.

There's a mandatory fee for parents who want to message a particular sitter with a job offer, but sitters pay nothing to participate.

You can increase your visibility on the site over time via a nifty badge system by taking more bookings and proving yourself to be reliable.

The pay varies from job to job depending on what you negotiate with individual clients.

If this kind of work appeals to you, make sure to check out each company listed above carefully. There are all sorts of small details that set them apart, many of which are beyond the scope of this article, so you'll need to do some in-depth research to see which ones are the best fit for your situation.

We hope the list above provided you with some good starting points. If you know of any other great caregiver marketplaces that weren't included, or if you have first-hand experience in this field and want to share your opinions, please give us a quick shout in the comments section below.