Collaboration Chronicles

A cash crunch isn’t the biggest worry if you get a regular paycheck, and your income generally meets expenses.  You can wait for the next check to fix it.

If you don’t get a regular check, a cash crunch can be devastating.  A lot of people have a very limited safety net.  If you fall through it, you might have to swim upstream just to get back where you were before.   Some people don’t make it.  Other people call parents for help.   Who wants to do that?  Even if there’s never a cash crunch, living on unreliable income can cause worry even when times are good.

Here are 3 things to do for more security:

1.  Have a portion of income be dependable, even if it’s lower-paid than other work.  If it’s passive income, great.  It could be a part-time job that doesn’t crowd out other things in your schedule.  Hopefully it can bring other benefits and synch up with other work.  Working-at-work can make time spent at a poorly-paid job even more valuable than time spent on better-paid work at home.  Night clerk jobs are decent for this.  Personally, I watch a lab at a college on weekends.  It allows very useful student discounts; free classes; access to resources for my animation freelance; U.I. (hopefully- I’ll find out on summer break); and a place to work that’s often more relaxing than staying home, where there’s always distraction.  Don’t mention this to my bosses (who are great), but I was also able to negotiate the most beneficial schedule possible, by mentioning my home business (that I work on at work).  I can call it a commitment if I want to, and it pays more than the part time job, so if they really want me to work there…

2.  Have some flexible income.  This work doesn’t need priority, and you can drop it if other commitments come up.   When you decide to devote a lot of effort, it can pay off well.  Maybe you don’t want to do it forever, or it’s not worth devoting too much energy to make it grow, but when it pays it helps a lot.  Personally, this describes my home book dealing business.  The main work is locating stock- after that it’s easy.  So, some weekend mornings if my calendar is free, I stock up to cover the next few weeks or months.

3.  Have a higher goal — a plan or a project to work on that might advance your career, expand your business into new areas, or lead to a higher level full time job you’re not ready for yet.  It can be something to work on when working is easy, like a personal project for the love of it.  Or it can be another kind of flexible income that you will want to do forever.  Personally, that’s animation freelancing.  In the past it has been full time employment- maybe it will be in the future.  If I get spare time I can work on personal film projects that help with skills.  It’s feast-or-famine and competitive, so I don’t expect it to come when I want it (unlike the book business), or know how long it will last.  But, it might have more long term career potential than the other work.

Having 3 (or more) occupations going on means that you can lose one and still be OK, or take time off when they get too demanding.  You can lose 2, and have some resources to look for another without too much worry (or wasted time standing in line for food stamps- it’s a lot of work to be poor.)   Or you can focus on one exclusively when a great opportunity comes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 3:28 am and is filed under Contribution, Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.