A friend of mine often thought of ways to make money quickly and joined various online programs to achieve it. Investing in the stock market; setting up a blog for affiliate advertising, creating a self help book full of royalty free articles. He’d tried pretty much everything you could think of and nothing worked. He didn’t make large amounts of money quickly in fact they had the opposite affect, less money and wasted time, but he kept trying. I never understood his perseverance, his drive or his desire.

Hannah quit her job and became a freelance graphic designer April this year. I was an incredibly proud husband when she told me she’d done it. Her previous job cause a lot of stress, anxiety and loneliness, being one of two employees at a small graphic design studio wasn’t doing wonders for her health and wellbeing. Since leaving she has become a much happier and less stressed person, however being an employee of a company is one thing and being the only employee of your own company is another.

Finding clients, figuring out pricing, doing your own admin and self promotion are things that an employee would rarely have to do all at once, but a freelancer might have to. This is even before any actual work (in this case graphic design) has taken place which is a lot if you’re starting out.

It’s been over three months of Hannah being freelance and she now has a good amount of work under her belt to keep her going at least for the next four months which is fantastic. Although her overall earnings from being a freelancer so far is less than what she earned as an employee I’m still incredibly proud of her and I know that number will increase as she becomes a better, more confident freelancer. We’ve become a bit more frugal because of this and we tend to do more thinking and questions asking before money is spent. Can we afford going on holiday outside of Europe, inside of Europe, or should we not go on holiday and save what we have? Should we get the car fixed or just take public transportation for a while? Should we eat out or stay in for our date nights?

We’re very blessed to have what we have and live in an area of the country with such abundance. It’s easy to look at others and wish we could have the same, but our situation has made me think of the less fortunate, those who can’t afford what we have already and live off benefits. Those who don’t have a roof over their heads, a bed to sleep in. Those who are already deep in the red and have to work multiple jobs to keep up with their rent. As the thoughts of not being able to afford something I previously would have been able to creep into my mind I think of how worse of we could be and thank God of our present circumstance, however, it were all taken away from us, if both our bank accounts were completely emptied out I’d like to think I’d still have an optimistic view of life, that I would still thank and appreciate God, that I would continue to put all my faith in him but, I don’t know.

As I see YouTube adverts of successful businessmen making X million a year selling tickets for their seminars on how you can do the same, then see the hundreds of video testimonials from the people that have made seven figures from following their program I know it’s something that benefits the owner of the scheme more than the participant, I know there’s more chance of it failing than succeeding, and I know as a Christian I shouldn’t look to money to solve my problems but, sometimes I get the feeling that everything would be much better if we could make more quickly somehow. Even-though I know He provides for the birds of the sky who have nothing which means He’ll definitely continue to provide for me but every now and again the thought pops into my mind that making more money should solve everything.

My friend often thought of ways to make money quickly and joined various online programs to achieve it. Although I don’t think I’ll understand why he continued after his attempts failed over and over again, I can relate a bit more to him, and others like him as to why they went down that route in the first place.

Thanks to Christian Dubovan and Unplsash for the image.