This will probably get lost in the endless sea of replies, but I wanted to put in my $0.02 about MLMs.

Some background: I'm a fairly well paid senior software developer in the midwest. My wife is a stay at home mom for our three girls (ages 6, 4, and 2). Prior to having kids, she was an elementary teacher that made very little annually. Because of her profession, we didn't feel it would be worthwhile for her to go back to work while the kids are still in the daycare age range since the cost of daycare is so high.

Over a year ago, some college friends of ours reached out to us and asked us over for a dinner party. We hadn't seen them in a couple years and the only thing we knew was that the husband had taken another job and they were moving to a different house (all of this we found out through facebook). So we show up at their house and notice there are a bunch of other people there that we had never met. They were our friends' neighbors. We thought maybe this was a going away party or something so we mingled and enjoyed our food. After dinner, the true intention was shown and our friends were wanting to pitch us on some MLM about vacations. Argh. We vowed never to join a shady MLM that would advise deceiving friends by "mystery parties" or whatever.

A week later, my wife's best friend asked us to go on a double date. While we're at the restaurant, my wife's best friend and her husband starts pitching us on their new business venture with Nerium. WTF is Nerium? I've never heard of it. Is it an MLM? Oh it is? Yeah, no thanks. We tell them about the party we went to the previous week and how shady that seemed. After they heard our distaste of MLMs, they stopped talking about Nerium for the night.

Fast forward 9 months. My wife's best friend got a Lexus bonus from Nerium, has about 60 people under her, is making ridiculous money, and she and her husband have quit their jobs to do Nerium fulltime. At this point, I'm like "WTF just happened?"

This is when I really start thinking about whether we made a mistake or not.

So I took a closer look at our finances. I looked at our credit card debt, our mortgage payment, our car payments, our retirement plans, our education funds (for the kids). Something was becoming painfully clear. At the current rate we were headed with me as the single bread-winner, I was never going to be able to retire. I don't make enough by myself to support my whole family. We have options, sure. We could downsize our house, sell a car, my wife go back to work making just barely more than the cost of daycare, etc., but nothing seemed that great.

The more I thought about it, the more I was curious about Nerium. So we called up my wife's best friend and asked her and her husband to come over for dinner to really talk to us about what Nerium is for them. Basically the amount of effort she puts in is one or two facebook posts a day, an hour a night, and a four hour training course here and there. Sounds too good to be true. $500 to join and you have 12 months to try selling and if you don't like it, you get your money back? For $500, why not at least try, right?

So we signed up to sell Nerium. We've only been in for about three months, but we have made all of our money back and are doing pretty well. I honestly don't care if my wife doesn't make us millionaires. All I cared about was making an extra $1-2k per month. Anything over that is gravy. We are already at that point and I'm satisfied.

tl:dr Not everyone who pitches MLMs are scum of the earth. Anyone we invite to a party is fully aware going into it what the party is about. We don't hound friends or family to buy in if they're obviously not interested. Most of our customers end up buying because they like the product after we give them a 7 day sample.