My Family’s Money

It goes without saying that money is important. We need it to eat and to have shelter (at least a little bit of money that is¹ ). In addition to using money to meet the most basic needs, most people also use money to indulge in trivialities and other non-essentials, and I am certainly among that crowd – though somewhat near the Spartan left.

If money didn’t decide whether my family and I ate or had a place to sleep at night I wouldn’t work for money. I wouldn’t spend my days doing things that have no lasting value. But work I must until the resources I have accumulated empower me to be able to divert my attention and my energy toward more fruitful and exciting endeavors.

I work a regular job that any college graduate might. I sit behind a desk, staring blankly at a computer screen, getting paid to be bored and fiddle away my day surfing the internet. I manage offshore workers in a data mining operation that breeds a middle-class hopelessness that digs relentlessly into my soul, leaving behind pencil thin columns ready to collapse at the slightest seismic activity. Right now the job pays enough to cover my family’s basic needs and a little bit extra, but not much. At our current clip, work like this is going to last a very long time.

Enter additional income. Right now, this seems like my ticket out of working for pay and into working for the love of others. I can’t get it out of my head. I think about it on my way to work, at work, and on my way home from work. Many of my extra hours are spent working on ways to make an extra buck here and an extra buck there. In fact, I want my work now to pay off into extra bucks for years and years to come that will eventually be turned into food and shelter for me and my family.

I already had some modest goals for earning extra income for this year that I am well on my way to achieving. I set the bar at $100 of additional income to be earned exclusively from blogging. As of right now I am about a quarter of my way toward that goal and already I am making a new one for myself. One-hundred dollars is nothing considering the thousands that my family will need to live off of until the day I die. Instead of thinking in terms of lump sums I am beginning to see my goal in terms of dollars per day.

Right now my family of 2 (3)² lives off of approximately $72 a day. I think that is a good starting goal for me to aim for. If I can cover our living expenses then I can turn my salary ($131 a day before taxes and benefits, $94 a day after) into a mass of wealth that, if managed well, can last forever. Then, once the whole eating thing is out of the way, I can funnel any additional money that comes my way into avenues that can positively impact human lives the whole world over.

Oh additional income, I pine for you.

1. There are some who are essentially free from the need to earn money because they have means to acquire food ‘free’ from the land and take shelter in the land, but even these people required a certain amount of money to get this to happen [↩]
2. We have a bun in the oven. [↩]