Tag Archives: income

Giving Yourself a Raise

If you have ever worked outside of the home, then you have probably looked forward with eager anticipation to your annual raise. You might have even worked a little harder in the days or weeks leading up to your annual review in order to make a good impression. Well, even if you work only in the home or would just like some extra money somewhere, you could give yourself a raise. After all, you’ve earned it. To give yourself a raise just work a little harder to have more available income. There are several ways to do this, so you … Continue reading →

Chasing After Payments

In a perfect world, we would provide our services or sell our goods to our customers and clients and they would pay us. It sounds simple and it is the very foundation of a business. However, as many of us know, it does not always work that well. Many of us find ourselves hounding customers and chasing after clients. It is never fun, but often a necessary part of running our own home businesses. When I first started my home business and working on my own—I had two clients who were less-than-professional and just didn’t want to pay me (or … Continue reading →

Are You Making Any Money?

We talk about just nearly every aspect of organizing and running a small home business here in the Home Business blog; we talk about budgets and clients and customer service. I thought that we should probably talk about the bottom line here today—let’s talk about that question we may either want to ask or ourselves or are avoiding facing the truth: Are we actually making any money? I know that money is not the only indicator of success and many of us evaluate our home businesses with other criteria in addition to revenue. We may not be looking to make … Continue reading →

Charting and Mapping Income

I have made no secret about the fact that I am a big fan of the spreadsheet. While I am not someone who knows how to do really complicated things with my spreadsheet software programs, I can do some basic accounting and organize different things quite nicely in them. One of the tasks that I do about once a month that I find very valuable for my home business (and personal finance) is to chart and track my monthly income. I choose to track my income in a couple different ways; I track it by source (client) and then I … Continue reading →

Do You Keep Track of Your Hours?

Now that we are operating our own home businesses, we may be thrilled that those days of punching time cards and tracking hours and minutes of work are behind us. We have other ways of measuring our productivity, right? On the other hand, keeping track of the hours we are actually working at our home businesses might not be such a bad idea… I have spoken with other home and small business owners who confessed that they didn’t want to actually figure out how many hours they were putting into their businesses because if they did, they just knew they … Continue reading →

Getting Ready for the Holidays

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The key to enjoying the holidays, and all the great foods that we seem to have around the holidays, while sticking to a healthy eating and lifestyle plan is moderation. Yes, everybody says it and everybody certainly knows it, but few of us actually manage to put it into practice. For those of us who can’t seem to manage the moderation thing, here are a few tricks and tips to get you through the holidays without having to gain the usual ten pounds that the average American gains between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. At Home: Plan some diet friendly … Continue reading →

Talking About How Much You Make

Perhaps I am a little unusual, but I LOVE getting together with other freelancers and home business owners and talking about income. I think it is because I can get pretty isolated in my little world over here and am apt to beat myself up thinking that I am not doing a good enough job or generating enough income. It is good to get with other folks in similar circumstance and compare notes on the revenue side of our businesses. Of course, this demands that we be able to comfortably talk about money and income. It took me a few … Continue reading →

Do You Have a Dream Salary?

Do you have a dream salary or annual income figure, that you know once you reach it that everything is going to be okay? You will never have to worry about money again, because once you make $100,000 a year your worries are over. You may be surprised to realize that while many people feel that way, once they reach that income level things change and they are just as worried as they were before. Generally your spending level increases with each raise. So that magic number is not going to solve your problems, if you are overspending at $40,000 … Continue reading →

How to Budget with a Fluctuating Income

Many families have to deal with an income that changes each month. Whether mom works a seasonal job for extra money, dad is paid on commission, or they both run a business where employee payroll is doled out first, there are many situations where a family’s income is different each month. How should you budget in this type of uncertainty? The key is determining a base amount to rely on and start with as your foundation. This dollar figure will depend on the type of income situation you are in. However, the important piece is finding a base monthly income … Continue reading →

Pay Business Bills On Time Too

You might be thinking that personal finance and business finance are two completely different worlds. Well, there are some big differences and it might take some time to learn how to do your business bookkeeping and accounting, or you may choose to hire a professional to help keep you on track. Still, there are some basics that are the same for both. Keep in mind that your business can have a credit record too (or your business accounting can affect your personal credit record and financial reputation) and it is important to pay your business bills on time too… If … Continue reading →