Budget

The Mountains were calling, but I had no Cell Service

Maybe Thursdays will be blog days.

So Far This Year

I think that this year I have a pretty good start on my business goals. I am making headway with some photography and screenwriting. I’m budgeting more and making better schedules for shoots and timing my wood burning deliveries better.

I think that the biggest thing that will help me as a small business owner will be figuring out how many jobs I need to take on to keep my budget accurate with how I want to live and how I can save up and progress my equipment locker. I have not always been great with budgeting because I often had to turn around and spend what I made, or I would just to indulge myself.

Anyways briefly touching on budgeting. I tried to make a budget on my own a couple months ago and made it based off of the income I had coming in. After looking over income and budgets and just financial strategy with my siblings, and the Dave Ramsey videos, and I realized that I needed to budget in a different way. I have a very irregular income as a freelancer and I decided, with advice and help, that I should make a budget on the kind of lifestyle that I’d like to lead. I am making sure of course to keep savings and categorize in detail and all that good stuff. What I want to talk to you about thought is that I wanted to share that I find it more motivating this way to budget out how much I need then follow that with how much many jobs or things I would need to get the budget.

Looking at my life expenses plus some for some more for additional travel. What I’ve found with budgeting like this is that it makes me more motivated. I think setting it up this way lets me see what I need to get done and pushes me to promote myself and reach my goal. This also lets me set lofty goals and push myself month by month to reach them. It’s also interesting to look at the budget and realize how many of each kind of job I would need to reach the goal. For example, I could look at the month and think I need 9-10 real estate shoots or 5 real estate shoots and 20 wood burnings and such. I realize some people with irregular incomes figured this out a long time ago, but I’m just a little late to the game on budgeting. I am happy to share my journey and say what’s working for me, Its a simple budgeting strategy, but I think I share it mainly to let you know what is motivating me to look at my finances.

I will write more on budgeting coming up and how I want to deal with an irregular income and making my plans as far as travel and equipment around this style of budgeting.

Sleep

I’m also getting on a much worse sleep schedule lately so something I’m battling is being productive and taking on more jobs and trying to still reach out and be social, but also sleep. I often choose to sacrifice my sleep before I would delay getting photos to someone and before I’d leave a wood burning unfinished. It’s very unhealthy and something I realize trying to be creative while I’m tired doesn’t really work for me.

I feel like I’m my most productive either early in the morning or really really late at night and sometimes I let those times slip together. I will be trying to go to sleep earlier and wake up before the sunrise. If anyone has any tips bout waking up quickly or easily leave a comment. I have the hardest time with no exact routine that I could stay in bed as often as I want. I often take advantage of this when I don’t want to. Its always so easy and nice to sit in bed and be comfortable, but an hour later when I actually get up I feel unproductive and like I’m behind on the day. My only thing I’ve been doing lately to combat this is to set my meetings or shoots in the mornings and it makes me have to get up earlier. I just wanted to share a little bit about this obstacle I’m figuring out, as everyone does. Getting enough sleep is rare and to the people that do, good for you, now help me.

Thank you for reading my blog and I’m happy to be here sharing some things I’m learning on the way.