I personally have a number of small and medium-sized projects going at any time, and I have a few rules for how I handle the money for these projects. It's important to me that each project pay for itself along the way, or that I gather start-up funds specifically for each project. If I need start-up funds, I'll usually write a couple articles for the Yahoo! Contributor Network until I have the $10-20 sitting in my PayPal account that I need to get started.
From there, I like to have a separate spreadsheet for each project which lists the funds I've earned specifically for that project and all of the expenses I have for the project. This method of budgeting my money forces each project to have a positive balance of profit. It also helps to never feel like I'm wasting money by working on any of my projects.
Once the project is earning money on its own (because I really like the idea of passive income, no matter how small), then I can reinvest the money it makes into scaling up to make even more money over time. This way, I make a small up-front investment of time and effort by writing a few articles for the Yahoo! Contributor Network, and I get to see a return on that time investment over and over again. This really helps to keep me motivated, especially when I don't feel like budgeting money responsibly.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Investing Money
This diagram shows the idea of an investment feedback loop and gives a visual to show why saving money is so important. The idea is that eventually your earnings off of your investments take over your income, and you can quit your job because you'll be making enough money from your investments to cover everything.
When You Need Money Now: Tips to Help You Cope
When you're in a bind for money, it can seem like the world is closing in on you. All of a sudden every penny becomes critical and every expenditure hurts. This can cause you a lot of emotional and psychological stress, so here we're going to look at some tricks you can use to help stabilize your emotions and deal with the fact that you need money now.
Here's the deal. Financial trouble bothers us so much because being broke and needing money is the closest we can get to dying without really dying. Money pays for food, shelter, health, and everything else we need to live a productive and fulfilling life. When you take money away, all of those needs still remain, so when you need money now, that represents a gap between what you have and what you need, and the gap is threatening to end your life.
When you realize that the reason you're panicking when you need money now is that you associate needing funds with death, it helps to take a bit of the edge off. What you need to do next is slow down and look at all of your resources and figure out where you can cut and save to create positive cash flow towards whatever it is that you need to pay for. There are two ways to do this: create income, or lower other expenses.
A great way to lower other expenses when you need money now is to reduce your expenses by cutting away some monthly bills that you don't absolutely need. A common example of this is having your television service turned off for a few months. Another common example is by not eating out for a set period of time. Both of these ways are based around lowering your expenses by changing your habits.
In terms of creating income, you can always sell things you don't need on eBay or Craigslist, or get a part time job on the side to help make some more money. While some people think this is beneath them, it's their own spending habits that often get them in the hole to begin with, and that's why they need money now, so they should be willing to go the extra mile to do something about it.
Here's the deal. Financial trouble bothers us so much because being broke and needing money is the closest we can get to dying without really dying. Money pays for food, shelter, health, and everything else we need to live a productive and fulfilling life. When you take money away, all of those needs still remain, so when you need money now, that represents a gap between what you have and what you need, and the gap is threatening to end your life.
When you realize that the reason you're panicking when you need money now is that you associate needing funds with death, it helps to take a bit of the edge off. What you need to do next is slow down and look at all of your resources and figure out where you can cut and save to create positive cash flow towards whatever it is that you need to pay for. There are two ways to do this: create income, or lower other expenses.
A great way to lower other expenses when you need money now is to reduce your expenses by cutting away some monthly bills that you don't absolutely need. A common example of this is having your television service turned off for a few months. Another common example is by not eating out for a set period of time. Both of these ways are based around lowering your expenses by changing your habits.
In terms of creating income, you can always sell things you don't need on eBay or Craigslist, or get a part time job on the side to help make some more money. While some people think this is beneath them, it's their own spending habits that often get them in the hole to begin with, and that's why they need money now, so they should be willing to go the extra mile to do something about it.
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