When you’re in debt, that means that you’re spending more than you’re earning. In order to pay off the debt, you’ve got to earn more money, and apply it to that debt. All of the books, advisers and personal finance blogs will tell you that one of the easiest was to earn more money is to ask your current employer for a raise. But what if you’re current employer is you? That is, what if you’re a freelancer? Then there’s no one you can ask but yourself.
Regardless of your freelance speciality, you can always turn to the internet to find other sources of projects to earn more money. There are too many out there to name, so I’ll leave that to you and your favourite search engine. These websites tend to have many projects for you, from a quite one week project, to a longer term several month long project. They are a great place to search for regular work, but also for additional work to help pay your debt off.
Now that I’m almost 3 months into my new job and feeling more settled, I may just look at a few of these freelance websites to see about picking up some extra technical writing jobs. I’m looking more for the quick jobs, as I do have a day job, but still, I’m going to be out there searching.
One question you’ve got to ask yourself is whether you want to go for a free freelance website or a paid one. Personally, I would recommend the paid ones, because I find the employers there are more responsible and committed to their projects. I was partially burned on a project from a free site when it turned out the blog posts I was producing for the employer were nonsensical SEO-optimized articles that didn’t actually make sense (he just wanted me to write full, complete sentences that included his SEO keywords, except a lot of times the keywords were phrases that didn’t actually make sense.) But I digress here.
The point is, go out there, start hunting, and make some extra cash!
I’ve been a freelancer for almost a decade. Over the past few years, it has become my main source of income. The internet has made the process so easy that it just takes a few minutes a day to look for new opportunities. If you have a marketable skill (writing, editing, programming), freelancing is certainly a great way to put that to work.