May 2019

My family’s financial life has been … challenging for the past few years, especially since the birth of my son, which was dramatic and traumatic in multiple ways, including financially. About a year after he was born, we had miraculously finished the payments to the hospital and doctors for his care and mine, only for him to end up in the emergency room. About two years after that, we still have paid only about half of that bill.

I have been a full-time freelancer for ten years, and for most of that time, things have gone smoothly. Work was as heavy or as light as I wanted it to be, and clients paid on time. Around the time my son was born, all of that changed. Work either flooded in or nearly dried up, and clients became erratic in their payments. So, in addition to recovering physically from a major surgery, I was nursing my son, trying to continue to work full-time, and still be a good mom to my daughter—all while chasing down clients to get paid for the work I’d done.

In the three and a half years since, things have not gotten much better. My husband and I have gone through times of financial hardship and times of relative plenty in our sixteen years together, so we have learned how to live frugally, but the past three years have been very trying, especially because we now have two children to support.

I’m no stranger to the “side hustle.” I worked three part-time jobs simultaneously while attending college full-time. As soon as I was out of college, I was working part-time as a freelancer, even while being employed full-time.

So, when things got tight(er) after my son was born, my husband and I both started exploring other options for bringing in additional income. We’ve been exploring and exploring, working and working, for about three years now, and let me tell ya, it feels like we’re losing instead of gaining. Certainly, our “side hustles,” meant to increase our income, are being unsuccessful at increasing our income. We spend money on supplies to build these jobs, and then the money that is “supposed” to arrive as a result (according to others’ advice about how it’s “always” worked) doesn’t happen. The rules keep changing.

That’s the way it’s been our entire adult lives, we finally realized. We were born in 1979 and 1980. Throughout our childhoods, and even our college years, we were told that a college degree and a strong work ethic would get us whatever we wanted. It would pay to have a college degree, because people with college degrees earned more over their lifetimes than people who chose to start working jobs directly out of high school. The American Dream was to buy a house, have a family, save money for our kids’ college funds, save money for retirement, and still live comfortably—working hard, but also having opportunities to play hard.

Unlike a lot of my peers, I don’t think it was a lie.

But I do think the rules have changed.

These rules have been in basically constant flux since sometime during my college years. I think it was during the Enron scandal when one of my business-school professors told me and my classmates that things were changing and that we might be one of the last few generations to be guaranteed good jobs after graduation.

Oh my God, was he prophetic (except about us being guaranteed good jobs)!

I got a good job. I had a decent-paying job right out of college, and I quickly received a promotion and a raise. But less than two years later, the company closed its doors. I was in financial straits, so I moved in with my boyfriend—now my husband—and spent the next two years in grad school. I was still following the old rules.

Almost immediately after finishing grad school, I was hired—on a two-year contract with a hiring agency, not as a full employee of the large corporation I would be working at. I was earning about what I had been earning before grad school. But I was promised that if I did a good job, the corporation would hire me directly as a full-time employee with excellent benefits.

I did a good job, and I was hired as a full-time employee. The benefits were good. The pay, however, decreased.

I did an excellent job, and then my function in the company was essentially eliminated because it was “unnecessary.” Basically, more work was being shifted to the writers so the company could eliminate editors.

No problem. Right away, I found another job with even better pay. Government position. Still only a contract position: six months, extended to twelve months. When the contract ended, I couldn’t get placed in the job I had helped to create—had even written the job posting for—because I was not a veteran, was not disabled, was not a government employee. So much for getting an “in” with the government.

I had been freelancing steadily since graduating college, so I turned it into a full-time opportunity. And that brings us up to date with the beginning of this post …

Let’s consider this: Despite the fact that I have a master’s degree, the longest position I have held—other than my freelancing career—has been for two years. Just two. Part of it as a contractor, and part of it as a “real” employee, both in the same position.

I am thirty-eight—nearly thirty-nine—years old, with a master’s degree and two children. My husband has a master’s degree and was only one class away from having a doctorate. And we struggle. Because the rules keep changing.

Because of the difficulty I’ve been having getting clients to pay, my husband and I have been exploring other options. Mine are limited because I am legally blind; I can’t drive, so I must either work in the home or find some sort of transportation.

Articles abound online about how you can earn money from home.

Let me tell you, most of the options suck.

A great number of them use you and your resources to save themselves money, and they pay diddly squat. You’re in competition with a global workforce for pennies—literally pennies. I looked at one listing of tasks available one day through one company—a huge global company—and the highest-paying task was 8 cents. For a task allotted up to thirty minutes. Sure, I could likely finish the task in one minute instead of thirty—earning myself the princely sum of $4.80 per hour.

That may be a great amount for somewhere else in the world, but here in the “good ol’ ” U. S. of A.? Well, not so much.

And these days, just about everyone my age or younger is working some sort of “side hustle.” And still, employers lament not being able to fill jobs.

If things get tight enough—we’ve actually gotten close enough to look into the options—my husband might consider applying for a $15/hour job. But then I will be left essentially unable to work because I will need to care for our children, and he will have to leave work if our daughter gets sent home sick from school. And that employer paying him $15/hr. will probably require forty hours a week from him and want to control (though they would never outright say such a thing) his life: when he works, how he dresses, his behavior, how much time off he gets. They may even require twenty or more hours of overtime.

The thing is, for decades—maybe longer—we’ve given this control to employers, to companies, so they now think it’s their right. If you were a housekeeper for some neighborhood lady and she tried to set down those kinds of rules, you’d call her crazy. But some company does it, and it’s okay?

You might say my husband and I have become spoiled by our freedom in my ten years and his five years of full-time self-employment. But we haven’t—we just have higher standards now. As much as it sucks to have to chase down people to pay us what we’re owed, and as unstable as that sometimes feels, we’ve learned that it’s an illusion that we have a better or worse life than anyone who is employed full-time by someone else. And it’s definitely wrong for anyone to think our life is less stable because of that.

Because the rules keep changing.

But at least we have the freedom to keep changing right along with them.

We’re frustrated as hell right now, and we know that the time we spend with our children is often time when we’re not earning money, but we have that choice now, unlike when he had “stable” employment …

 

November 2019

I wrote that all back in May, intending it to be a blog post, but then I went on vacation and things shifted inside us. I’ve written about that here and here.

Here it is, a little more than five months later, and things are different, yet the same.

I got things worked out with my main client, so I’ve been getting paid a consistent weekly amount.

I took on another client that paid very quickly—usually within five or six hours of completion of the job—but very poorly. And the quality of the projects was … disheartening. After I finished my second project with them, I calculated my effective hourly rate and almost cried. I recently “fired” that client.

My husband and I doubled down on his YouTube channel for what we call the October push, investing a lot of extra time and money to help him reach one of his big goals. We have just completed the special project, and now we’re waiting to see the results.

Thanks to a friend, I now have a physical space in which to meet local Reiki clients, but I’m still building a local base and have few in-person clients.

I’ve become a MyDailyChoice/HempWorx affiliate (about one month in).

It’s hard to keep our faith and invest money in ourselves and our businesses when we see our debts—which we had nearly eliminated before our son was born—grow. But we’re focusing on all the lessons we’ve learned in those four years from books like The Miracle Morning, Sleep Smarter, Think and Grow Rich, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Three Magic Words, Start with Why, and dozens more. We are in this life for the long haul, and we’re doing our best to take the long view.

In the short view, of course, we still need to be able to pay the bills.

So my husband did look for a job outside the home. He spent weeks replying to job postings and help-wanted posters. Weeks of getting zero responses from employers who were “desperately” in need of workers. He finally got a “lucky” break on a Monday, had an interview on a Wednesday, had a job offer on a Friday, and started the job the following Monday. It pays $18 per hour, which is kind of ridiculous, given the requirements of the job. But here’s the thing: Not even two weeks in, he really likes it. He likes the people and the work. It’s refreshing. It’s a really small business, run by a husband and wife, so everyone feels like family more than employees. And the company is growing, so he’s being groomed for a leadership position.

The team I found with MyDailyChoice also feels like family—an incredibly positive and supportive family.

Despite all the hard work we know we’re going to have to put in over the next few months (or years) to pull ourselves out of debt, my husband and I are finally hopeful again, because we feel like all the effort we’ve been putting into personal development in the past three or four years has finally started to “pay off.”

We are in a better headspace, we’ve learned how to erect good boundaries and how to stand firm on the treatment we will and will not allow ourselves to receive, and we know the money will follow, because we will ensure that it does.

Let’s Talk

Let’s support each other here. How are you doing? What kinds of trials have you been going through recently, and how are you climbing out? Or are you still feeling stuck, without a plan in sight? Let us (me and your fellow readers) know; maybe we can help.

***

To book a distance Reiki session with me, visit srsstringham.com/services/reiki-sessions.

For an in-person Reiki session with me at Crawfordsville Massage Therapy, 1982 Indianapolis Road, call or text me (765-307-0871).

To learn about the products of the network marketing company I have joined—MyDailyChoice/HempWorx—visit https://www.mydailychoice.com/srsstringham.

If you want to learn more about how MyDailyChoice and HempWorx can help you change your life, visit https://www.premierabundance.com/srsstringham.

To experience an intuitive reading with me, click here.

Have you written a book that you think can change the world? If so, I would love to edit it. Learn more about my editing services at www.empoweringeditor.com.

Watch this video if you are curious about how I prepare for all of my readings and Reiki work, and how I perform readings and conduct conversations with Spirit.

Find Me Elsewhere on the Web
YouTube
Facebook (Intuitive Counseling and Reiki)
Facebook (MyDailyChoice and HempWorx)

My Story: My Year of Shadow and Light
Audio/Video (YouTube)
Written