Two CNBC references in one day.Yesterday Walt Mossberg was on talking about a service called Chacha which, as I understood it, allows you to call in (assumes you are away from an internet device) and ask them to search for information you need. Then they will search for you and then text you the info.
They have employees who do the searching and texting from their homes.
This concept sounds familiar to me, I'm not sure if I heard about this company before or someone else doing the same thing.
I think this sort of thing ties in with the ongoing retirement thread about needing to think outside the lines about working in retirement. As a society more of us are making our living on the internet (including me). This trend is not going to reverse. In the future there will be more work like this available. True it won't be lucrative for the workers and there are probably other things about to criticize too.
Any time I talk about working a part time job (like operating the backhoe, driving the airport shuttle, working a few hours at your gym--all part time endeavors) in retirement people rightfully bring up the fact that for many people physical limitations will get curtail the ability to do these things. This is of course valid but a Chacha type of job goes a long way to mitigating the issue (said the guy who works on the couch in his PJs with a laptop).
Obviously the pay for this sort of thing would be low but I think the mind set needs to be that if you need $4000-$5000 per month in today's dollars to live on in retirement, can you cover 10-15% of that with some sort of part time work? If that work can be done from home then you could possibly do it for more years than being a tour guide of some sort.
Relieving some of the burden from your portfolio with this sort of thing can only be a positive.
2 comments:
The "guides" get paid 20 cents to get the answer to your question. I would starve to death at that rate of pay, but I bet my search techniques would improve a lot before that.
One use case: Your tires blow up when you are on a ski trip in Lake Tahoe. You would like to find the best deal for your tire replacement from the near store. Just call a computerized call center that dispatch your request to a surfer who collects information from web and makes call to check garage and gets a price quote for you. Then the answer would be sent to your phone with text message. This actually happened to my friend who called me to ask for help. I didn't get paid but I have my normal paycheck:-)
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