Spark an Idea that Motivates: The Big Payoff

Welcome to Spark an Idea Thursday.  Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers.  We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog!  If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

While money is certainly not the only motivating factor for freelancing, it is a big one. If I could realistically live the life of a SAHM instead of a WAHM, I think I’d be OK with that. Unfortunately, the need for cold, hard cash is a reality here in Freelance Parent Land. I recently used that to my advantage, and the payoff (pardon the pun) was really worthwhile.

I guess that in order to tell this story properly, I will have to admit that my life involves a fair amount of debt. Both my husband and I attended a very pricey university, and I was crazy enough to go back for that Master’s Degree. We should probably pay off our student loans right around the time we start putting our own kids through college. Yeah, that’s a fairly depressing thought.

A couple of months ago, I decided to use those student loans to motivate myself to see what I could do with my freelance writing business. I set a rather ridiculous goal to try and pay off one of my husband’s student loans. The goal was $13,000 in five months. I started last November and had hoped to pay the entire thing off by the first day of spring.

Having that goal made me much more productive. Whenever a job came in, Tamara and I would determine if it was something she wanted or not. When neither one of us has the time or inclination for a particular project, we turn to our writers to see who would be a good fit. For those five months, however, anything that didn’t go to Tamara “defaulted” to me. As a result, I put in far more hours than I ever had before, and I got myself on track to pay off that debt.

Having that student loan bill as motivation was really inspiring. I could watch each month as the next statement came in the mail, reflecting all the extra payments I had made. Rather than having the money just disappear (as is common when there’s no true set purpose for it), I was able to funnel it right into the perfect place. In fact, I would find myself doing “mental math” from time to time. “So, if I take this project for $800 and those other two for $400, that’s an extra three months’ payments on the student loan…”

I have to confess, however, that one thing did get in the way of my plan…one client left me on the hook for about $3,500. We’re still working to recoup that money, and it has been quite a lesson. Not only did that mean that I had $3,500 less for my overall goal, but it knocked a lot of the wind out of my sails and derailed my progress. Remember, I was trying to earn $13,000 above my normal pay.

In the end, I paid about half of it off, which is still quite an accomplishment. It was a lot of extra work, but it’s the kind of thing I can see doing every once in a while…maybe when we get close to paying off the next student loan, for example, I’ll kick it back into high gear for a couple of months. The point here is that by finding one place to focus my financial efforts, I was really able to motivate myself to stay quite focused and to get more done than I ever had before.

That said, I would absolutely love to know what types of things you all do to get that extra motivation! What ideas can you spark?