Life and Income and Frustrations

It has been almost a year since I decided to get serious about my health and to start losing weight. The journey had been amazing, more amazing in that my wife and I are in this together. I honestly don’t know how I would have done without her encouragement and knowing she is on this journey with me.

But, to get healthy I had to quit my second job.  Let’s just say the lack of that income has really strained us. That, and my lack of communication with my wife on how bad things really are. Now, we are working at cutting back and trying to get some extra income coming in. My boss seems to live in some fantasy land and thinks I can just magically cut back $300 in monthly expenses by cutting power and water usage. We cut our water usage massively in January and our bill went up.  Thanks a lot, City of Portland!  Greedy filthy politicians who only see me as a way to fund their bullshit pet projects.  I honestly don’t see us getting to the place we need to be without some side business that will generate some good income. I know I need to step out and take some risks to get this started, but therein lies the issue.

What do I do?

I’ve looked into how to start an eCommerce site and how to effectively market your products.  That will take a bunch of up-front work and a lot of headaches to get this going.  Will it be successful? It might.  Once something like that is going it would give me the flexibility to manage it from anywhere in the world and work on my own hours. There are some folks out there who will provide tools and training to jump start your business- all for a price. It sounds amazing until you have to put down cash you don’t have.  The old fashioned way of starting from scratch seems to be the option left to me if I want to pursue this path.

I’ve thought about doing some side gigs to generate income.  One idea I have is to do voice work. I think if I worked at it I could do well at this, as my voice is fairly nice (or so I’ve been told).   I’ve also considered becoming a notary and notarizing documents for people. The trick here is I would need to get in with some banks or escrow agencies to make any real decent money. Definitely doable, but I would need to sell myself and keep at it until my business grew.

I could get a second job again. I’ve been exploring this option. Apparently I can’t get a driving job due to a speeding ticket I got two years ago.  Thank my freaking day job for that one. I was getting in bed, got a call from my boss, and had to “fix a problem quickly” which required me to drive to my office and fix it, all for one freaking user who can’t seem to keep regular human hours at the office.  Can you tell this still pisses me off?  All I wanted was to go to bed and tell that user to wait till morning.  I know- I could have NOT sped to work. I’m not rational when I’m tired and angry. I won’t do that again.  So, despite that rant, this quest continues.

Some of my quest is frustrated by my own internal fears. I fear taking risks and stepping out to try something and having that something fail. I need to overcome this fear and do it anyways. The worst that can happen is an idea fails and I learn and grow from it.

My biggest frustrations with my money situation?  I hate not being in control of my finances.  I feel like all I am is a spigot of money that goes everywhere but where I want it to go. I hate having to owe money. I feel like a slave.  All I work for is for other people, not myself.

My other frustration is that I don’t feel like I have any time for self improvement.  I know, there are times when I do try to unwind and play a few minutes of Minecraft and that time could be used for self improvement.  Honestly, my mental state when I take 20 minutes to play is one where I need to unwind and escape or I will go crazy. I have to mentally recharge and shut off the outside world from time to time.   I know this sounds like an excuse, but it’s how I’m wired. I know when my mental energies are low and those times I need a break.  I guess my other frustration in this is that when I’m home and not working I feel like it’s my job to take care of everyone else in the house, which never leaves time for me to do anything for myself.  I can’t just go start a blog or research some business or focus on improving myself because the moment I do someone calls my name and needs 100% of my time for the rest of the evening.  This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I was honestly just interrupted while writing this and had to adamantly demand that I be allowed to finish this blog post.  This makes me feel like my time is not my own, that all I am is a slave at the beck and call of everyone else.  I hate this feeling.

So, what do I do? I think what I will do is have a nice talk with my wife and schedule some time that is me time.  If I can have some “me” time I can use it to work on my skills, my goals, my finances, my blog, and I can use it to start a business or anything.

My kids get to play video games all day and watch movies.  My wife gets time to herself every day- I can’t tell you  the number of Netflix series she has watched while I struggle to find time to watch ONE. My wife is also pretty freaking amazing and task oriented and can get things done, so I don’t begrudge her some leisure time. I’m just frustrated that when I do sit down to do something productive I am always interrupted and never get to finish.

This turned into more of a rant than anything.  I am planning on posting my goals next.

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