How Much Time Should You Invest in your Part-time Work?

How much time is a part time job worth?

Do you freelance after you get off work?  I know a lot of people who do.  Most of them write blog articles and they get a few cents per word.  That's hard work and it takes a lot of time.  Unless you need the money to pay the bills you should save it up and wait until you need to take time off from your main job before you dip into that money.  I will explain why.

Some of my friends are working 4-6 hours a night 6 nights a week on their blog careers.  I think that is way too much time invested in writing articles for other people.  I'd rather spend about 3 hours a night 5 nights a week doing this work.  I am even thinking of cutting back to 4 nights a week.

Until I actually need the money I can just put it away in savings (well, keep it in my Paypal) so that I am not tempted to use it in my monthly budget.  I admit there are months when it is hard to make ends meet.  When you are raising a family everything is expensive and we miss a few bill payments.

But we pay those bills and meanwhile I am putting money aside for an emergency.  Eventually I will have enough money to pay myself to start blogging seriously.

If you work too much and still don't make much money then I think what you need to do is cut back on the work hours and extend the work months.  If you're making $200 a week blogging you can save up $800 a month by not spending that extra income.  That's over $7000 a year.

I can't live on $7000 a year but I sure sleep better knowing that if someone blows my employment status I'll have money to fall back on.   Sure, I'll have to look for a job but I'll also spend more time working on my own income.  Maybe I won't need a full-time job any more if I have enough money to start with.

But what I don't want to do is burn myself out.  One of my buddies did that last year.  He was writing blogs every night and turning in the articles as fast as he could.  He made some money but it was never enough to make him feel like he was accomplishing something.  He finally decided that his quality of life was more important than those few extra bucks a month.

By this point he had paid off all his little debts and so he and his wife decided they would just live on a tighter budget for a few years.  They see happier now.

That, to me, is the price of doing too much part-time work.  You pay with your quality time, and sometimes it's just not worth it.