Compared to a lot of online or at-home jobs we’ve covered, these don’t involve starting your own company or your own website. I’m focusing here on jobs that are already set up by an organized company that require no experience and you can start within a week.
We also thought it was important to address the first steps to take to reach financial independence… and also acknowledge that not everyone is currently in a position to get to financial freedom. The truth is, ‘just save more’ or ‘be frugal’ are not adequate pieces of advice if you’re in a tough situation. Sometimes, you need to do more than just cut back on consumerism.
In the next five minutes you can start a blog or purchase a $1,000 course. But that won’t give you a business.
That will give you a thing that can become a business, once you take the time to actually plan, consider your goals, and do the work.
I want to protect you from wasting money and hours, months, or years of time hustling for a business that isn’t right for you. From facing setbacks you could have avoided had you asked the right questions. From buying thousands of dollars of MLM inventory your friends don’t want.
Personally, it took a lot for me to come to this conclusion. Wrapping my head around the numbers and making deciding this may be the right fit for me was hard enough. An equally big part of my struggle has been reconciling feelings of shame and guilt.
My decision goes against what many articles in personal finance community, especially financial independence section, recommend.
I always say there are two resources when it comes to investing for your retirement: time and money. Money, most of us don’t have when we’re young, right? So you don’t have a lot to invest, but you do have a lot of time, and you should take advantage of that, because the more time that your money is in the market, is invested, then the more it’s gonna grow.
So you don’t want to necessarily give up on those years of investing—at the same time, you have this debt to contend with and it seems kind of silly to… start investing when you’re still paying off debt, right? I think that’s kinda the psychology that most people have.
I began tracking every penny that went in and every penny that came out. And although I didn’t feel like I could control my finances yet—because I was making so very little money that I didn’t have many choices about what to do with it—it gave me the sense of possibility someday. You know, if I kept this up and figured out how to earn a little more than what I was making as a telemarketer. Someday this would pay off and I would be in control of my money.
Tanja Hester’s Work Optional hit bookshelves a few weeks ago with a promise to guide us there “the non-penny-pinching way.” Is it really possible …
I was about to walk into my boss’ office and ask for my first pay raise. Somehow, I managed to negotiate my rate from $7.25 an hour to $7.75! *cha-ching*
As a reader, I never really gave a thought to how I could tell a good actor from a bad one. If I enjoyed the blog, I would read it. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would stop…
I never gave a thought to their ethics, or ethical standards of blogging. Why would I? I enjoyed all this free content. It kept me entertained, educated me, and helped me in my financial path. I was grateful for all these strangers on the internet that spent so much time creating helpful information for me to consume.
We’re all working so hard to save up as much money as we can, but how are we actually protecting that money from hackers and people who are looking to steal it?
I keep myself busy, and that keeps me from really feeling what isn’t working in my life. And that can allow me to plow ahead and not listen to voice that says, ‘Ahhhh… this is not working. This isn’t working.’ I’m like ‘Shhhhhhh! I’m working! I’m not gonna listen to you now!’ Because it can be scary, to look at what’s not going on.
The reason our last budget didn’t work is because it was too much work to track & manage. The problem was that we didn’t have a system in place that would work for us.
So I recently set out to come up with a system that would fit our needs.
Because at the end of the day, the most effective budget is the one that you’ll stick to.
And it clicked with me at that moment, I knew that we had given our life away, given our freedom away. We had given control over our life to someone else—our employer—for a little bit of health insurance, a little bit of job security. And this person thought because they paid my paycheck and bought me that insurance, that they could tell me what was more important than my child.
It turns out that for the most part, we all like shopping – even when we are buying things we don’t actually need. When we are feeling depressed going to the mall on a spending spree can give you a feeling of relief. Although just temporary, it feels good – so much better than having to deal with our problems all of the time.
I’m sharing my investing journey and current and past investment strategies in an effort to normalize the conversation and provide ideas as to what, why, and how I’ve done some of the things I have.