Someone please remind me to follow my dream; not dread — thanks.
The Gig Economy Issue 2: The Decision
She sure is pretty…
Let me introduce you to My Lady Silver. She is a 2014 Toyota Camry and, at the time of purchase had 65,136.89 miles. It is clean and wonderful. I am paying a very affordable amount and this car should be enjoyed on the roads for the next fifteen years. I hope by me.
All I have to do is make enough money in my gig economy to pay all my normal bills, (I did not have a car payment before), make a car payment and cover the insurance. Simple.
The reason I need to make all my money from My Gig Economy is because seven days after I purchased the car, I left my corporate job. This sounds like a great idea. Right?
But let’s figure how to I got here.
Uber is all my dreams come true.
Nine months ago, I created Genius Inspired: Complete You Genius. It feels pretty good working with clients and seems to help artists connect their passion to business, so people encouraged me taking things towards the next level. I decided driving Uber/Lyft to make ends meet, would give myself as much energy as I needed for Genius Inspired to thrive. I also could feed my creative soul by doing a podcast with my best buddy Matt and post my writing for people to enjoy.
This soon lead to The List, which I talked about in issue one and I began the motion’s to jump into the world of chasing dreams instead of a paycheck, (which was not really paying my bills anyway).
I own a 1998 Honda CRV, though an excellent vehicle, is not within the high standards of the major ride sharing company communities. If you are going to use your own vehicle, put sixty plus miles on it a year, and have thousands of people sit in your car, then they want to make sure it’s at least a 2005.
So my friends, who believe in me whole heartedly, told me,
“Hey if we can find a 2005 road ready ride sharing hunk of money making magic for you, let’s do it!”
Which would be fine except, then got advice I could look into a lease take over program. Finishing out someone’e lease sounded attractive since I only wanted a car for ride-share purposes and planned to only Uber/Lyft for a very short term. Well, this idea lead me to Apple Leasing because: Marketing, and obviously they would have one of these super lease deal hanging about.
They did not.
What they did have is a whole host of other options for me to lease a new car. We looked at several things and I ran it against the numbers I thought I could make with Ridesharing and my other stuff, and it could maybe work… “Great”, my sales guys says, lets run your credit and see what car we can put you in.”
Now, I will say that the team at Apple Leasing was great, I worked on all my ideas of finding a car with my guy virtually. I did not meet him or see the car until the day I signed the papers; pretty cool. Even so, I am not linking my sales agent on here because I don’t want any chance of my banking institution finding out I am currently making car payments without the job they gave me a loan under.
A car dealership running my credit, should be where the story ends. I am under the impression I have horrible credit, I think I owe everybody. Somehow with the help of religiously paying off my Best Buy and Khols card, I woke up the morning they ran my credit with a 735 credit score! “Let’s put you in a new car”, my salesmen says.
Fortunately, “My math” did not include affording a new car. It did not include a used car either, but somehow I justified it by saying I would drive more. Yes. About driving more.
Once more unto the Breach
When I started my plan, I used advice from friends which assured me driving for five hours a day would net me around $150.00 an hour. I trust my friends, but in 2017, did I bother to use my favorite search engine to find that driving for Ride-share has become more and more difficult to make the lucrative money of even two years ago?
No I did not.
It is a beautiful car, and maybe, I am only making 14$ an hour driving instead of 30$; maybe, I will need to be very creative over the next few weeks to make all the bills I need to make; but, I signed up for this Gig Economy and I am on a spiritual journey, apparently, not a financial one, so here we go.
As a thank you for reading. Here is a little Henry V. What I remind myself every day of Gig’n
