Tough Right Now

Things are tough right now. I think after earning my entire salary of last in year in just 6 months, I was severely burnt out. However, then I had a contract loss in July that ate up $5K of my normal quota, and then here it is mid-August and I'm at $0 income right now.

However, here's what's going on...

* I'm working out the details for a $10K to $20K contract. This is going to be a tough one. I don't think my client has the $20K to give me if that's what the project hours will end up coming to once I estimate this. However, I'll also have an equity stake on the project for a period of years so that I can get residual income. It's a job seeker site, and those usually do well (I think).

* I started on a project for $500 starter websites made entirely with WordPress and some fancy tricks, and I was going to farm that on Craigslist. However, I got stuck on the time consuming part of building the form for them to choose options, the ad I need to write, and so on -- fine little details that suck time. And then I mentioned it to my UK client (who's like a partner to me) and he said not to worry about those sites for now -- that he can feed me enough $2K projects to keep me going. (I only usually need $6K per month to survive comfortably.)

* I started my first public phpBB forum. It's on an obscure topic, though, and I don't have any visitors yet except one, so it's going kind of slow. However, I'm learning as I go here and my next forum will be better. I'm collecting income from AdBrite and Google AdSense -- so far $0.

* I've got a $3K contract I'm on right now and another for $1500. They kind of bleed into each other in requirements -- I can share code a little. Anyway, I've been dragging my feet to get this moving, and I'm now suddenly forced to doing this so that I don't have a lot of debt. The other trouble is the time consumption here -- I have very little time to earn that total $4500 and move on to the next stuff.