Frugal Moms

How frugal is it to have a second job out of the home?  It really depends on how much you can make and how much it takes to make that money.  Any time you go into a venture to support your family, the expenses related to getting to work, staying professional, and extra’s should be taken into account.  For example, taking on a second job as a pizza delivery boy in an SUV making 7 dollars an hour plus tips might not be the best idea with gas at 4 dollars and rising.  In the end you might have to pay for the priveledge to work in this scenerio.  Sure 7 dollars an hour 5 hours a night 5 days a week might help, but how much are you actually making after fuel costs?

Here’s another scenerio.  Perhaps you decide to work at home selling your services as a really good writer as a second job.  At  first you find work where you might get paid a dollar per 100 word article.  You can only write one article per day, so you can only make 30 dollars extra per month.  However, this 100 word article takes about 30 minutes to write and it doesn’t cost anything more for you to do it, unlike the pizza boy scenerio.  Sure 30 dollars a month isn’t enough to make a budget, but you aren’t limited to working only for one company.  After a while you find 2 or 3 more places that will pay you about the same amount for the same amount of work.  Eventually, you can make a couple hundred a month with different articles here and there. Will you make more?  Who knows, but at least what pay you do get isn’t going to gas or car repair, and your job doesn’t depend on the price of gas staying low and your car being in perfect shape all the time.

Sometimes I hear people say being frugal is hard.  It is to some, it was for me.  But one of the easiest frugal tasks I have ever decided to take on was working at home instead of working out side of the home.   In 2006 my husband lost his 11 dollar an hour job.  We had credit card bills, loans, etc…  We went from having a good income that we could pay everything and then some on time to almost nothing over night.  I applied at every job I could and even though I have an Associate of Arts I couldn’t find anything more than fast food work.  I worked at the fast food place until my first pay check.  I had actually spent 10 dollars more in gas, just to get to and from work, than I got paid for the week.  I looked at my husband and said, “Honey I know a better way.”

I went online and applied as a psychic reader.  I am clergy in this area and so knew quite a bit about this.  With in two weeks I made much more than I did at the fast food resturaunt.   After 3 months I was making about 150 dollars less per week than my husband was making a week.  I worked 70 hour weeks trying to build my client base.  I still work on my psychic line, even though my husband has recently gotten a job.  (Recent as in October of 2007)  I will always work my line because when I needed it, it was there.  It didn’t cost me anything to start it because I had the knowledge.  So you see sometimes working at home is a much more frugal way to go about things.

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