Unemployment negotiations

On Tues­day night, my wife and I dis­cussed my unem­ploy­ment. Don’t worry, I’m still hap­pily employed. The prob­lem is: I don’t want to be!

My goal for a long time has been to make enough money from my own busi­ness to be able to quite my day job and work from home full time. My wife is very sup­port­ive of this (really, she is!) but she is also right­fully con­cerned about our family’s finan­cial well-being. So we sat down, talked it through, and came to an agreement.

I can quite my job (or at least, sig­nif­i­cantly reduce my hours) and work from home once the fol­low­ing con­di­tions are met:

1. Becca must be employed (being a grad stu­dent counts) and earn­ing an income.
2. Becca must be able to obtain health care for the two of us through her employer.
3. My busi­ness must be earn­ing an aver­age of $770 per week (gross) for 8 con­sec­u­tive weeks (roughly $40,000 per year) — or in other words, at least $6,160 over an 8-week period.
4. To keep things sim­ple, the $770 per week includes any money that Becca’s web­sites earn.

I have a ways to go. $770 per week is a lot of money, but I’ve made some really good progress over the past year in increas­ing my earn­ings, so I’m con­fi­dent that I can get there in the next 3 to 5 years.