Lazy Man and Money

Why Hire a Virtual Assistant?

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I didn’t really intend for this to be virtual assistant week… it just slipped into that way. Originally Beachgirl asked me how I found my virutal assistant and then Blogging Banks did the same. When I gave a quick write-up on how to find a virtual assistant, Single Ma thought that the idea of hiring an assistant is silly. That naturally leads to today’s topic of why one might hire a virtual assistant.

The most obvious reason why anyone would hire anyone is efficiency. Let’s pretend that I like being a software engineer and I’m good at it. People in Silicon Valley would easily paid $100 and hour for this. Let’s also say that I’m really bad at changing the oil in my car and mowing my lawn – especially because this is true. Together these tasks would take me an hour easy. However, an oil change is around $25 (though it takes a few minutes of my time for the quick change place) and mowing a lawn could also be $25 (depending on the size of the lawn and the neighborhood kid I hire) and might take none of my time. Each job is done better than I could have done it. The key factor is that I can write software for an extra hour… and come out $50 ahead, and feel less stress. This is especially true when it comes to hiring some housekeeping services. I’m really inefficient in cleaning and I don’t really care to be more efficent – it doesn’t interest me.

The same concept holds in the virtual world. While I might be able to format, edit, add a picture, and publish my own content relatively efficiently (I do for all Lazy Man branded sites), there are some cases where I can practically be in more places at one time due to the virtual assistant. It goes back to the classic stand-by… time is money. Well, I’m buying more time for my money. That comes down to the value that you are getting for your money. Without a virtual assistant, I would have to be much less Lazy… and that’s a bad thing.

Alternative Income Streams – March 2009

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Another month is over and it’s time to go back and look at how I did with my alternative income in February. The quick answer is that I made $2767.41 after taxes. That’s a nice gain from previous months. Like each month, some income disappeared and some new reappeared. I’m starting to wonder if it’s easier to start 10 websites and hope I can bring them each to $1000 than take my current ones beyond that.

The big news this month is that I have started contracting full time again. I won’t necessarily be working all the time, but as of now, there seems to be as much work as I want at a good price. It will be interesting to see if my alternative income can stay the same. I’m curious to find out if it will. The downside of the new work is that it will be hard to increase it while working full time. I certainly couldn’t go ahead with the 10 websites that I brought up in the last paragraph.

There’s another side effect to this new-found work… I’m trading time for money. Ugh. I’ve said here for a long time that I want to get out of that game. It’s why I wrote about defining alternative income. One way to look at it is that if it’s enough money it’s okay. Would I trade 8 hours of my time today for $5000? Sure! I could put in some ten days of work and have a solid year of income. Of course I’m not getting paid that outlandish rate, it’s just an example of how trading time for money is not black and white – there’s a lot of gray. Now, I just have to focus on getting this money quickly so that I can plow it into the stock market. Dow 6700 intrigues me. Even if it just goes lower from here, I feel that in 10 years I started buying in at these levels.