LESSON NUMBER TWO

OK - join me in the moment... we had 5 wonderful children, 6 cars, 5 cats, a hamster, and a big 5 bd, 2.5 ba, 2500 sf. house on the hill with a 3 car garage. We had worked hard and reached the height of our careers and whoops! Suddenly we were BOTH unemployed and positively dumb founded by how that could happen. Hadn't we been taught, "Go to school, work hard, get a good job, work your way up the ranks and your company will take care of you"? yeah... Not So Much!!!

We began to think about the "successful" people we knew (or knew of) and tried to figure out what they were doing different. Fact is, they didn't work for someone else... they owned their own companies. They set their own hours and made all the decisions and were "happy" and "rich". Sooooooo... that must be the key. Run your own business!! And that's what we set out to do.

I was an applications programmer and EVERYONE on the planet needed programmers... from every "Ma and Pa" shop all the way to the BIG corporations. I decided to become an independent consultant and do contract work. Sponge did too... he was a mechanical engineer and an AutoCAD guru with plenty of contacts in the industry to provide both references and referrals. We set out to become "sole proprietors" with no need to depend on a company to be loyal to us and take care of us.

Unfortunately, it took a while to get up to speed and in the mean time we spent all our savings and went about $45K into credit card debt. Luckily, I owned 2 rental properties - a condo I had gotten when my oldest daughter started college (for her and her girlfriends to rent), and a townhouse I had gotten back in 1995 when the kids were still little enough to fit into a 1500 sf. place. Face (my oldest daughter) had tired of living with a bunch of giggly girls and had moved back home, so at this point we decided to leave the house on the hill (which we were renting), sell the college condo to pay off some of our debt, and move into the townhouse (which was $1000/mo. less than the house on the hill). We refinanced the townhouse (to pay off the rest of the debt) and continued our quest to become sucessfully self employed.

(Any one reading this should make a note of how we just got out of debt and lowered our bills... it didn't dawn on us until some time later what a gold mine the real estate was).

Well, with time we succeeded! We had enough clients to maintain a fair income and found that we were in total control of what jobs we took and when we worked. That's right... as self employed, independent contractors we could choose any 18 hours a day we pleased to fulfill our clients needs!!! We had to work more hours than we did as employees because now we were paying self employment taxes, Social Security, and Medicare. Oh, and there was the tiny little problem of not having health insurance. Details!

Okay, so working hard for someone else had proven to NOT be the way to go. And now, being self employed was proving to have it's limitations too. It would seem that since the number of hours in a day that you have to "sell" your services is limited, so is the amount of income you're able to bring in that way.

LESSON NUMBER TWO

"Being your own boss is still, really, just working long hours for someone else (your clients)"

Lesson Number Three is what changed everything...