I was out for a walk the other day and noticed gasoline prices. I have not filled up my car with fuel in over a month and was shocked at the cost of gas. The fact that I have a full time home based business saves me probably thousands a year in commuting costs I would otherwise be paying if I was still working at my previous employment of 12 years ago. And when I do travel, I try to ensure that I have a business reason as well as a personal reason for traveling so that some of those travel expenses are deductible.

The savings in not having expenses commuting to work everyday allows me to do many other things that I would rather do than spend an hour each way going into work while burning money through the gas tank. If you’re not that ambitious, simply consider your expenses traveling to work five days a week – the fuel costs, vehicle repairs, insurance and add that all up. If you simply want a business that will maintain your present life style, then you don’t even need it to grow to the point where it is bringing in the same revenue as your full time job.

Often, people do not look at time as a currency. In fact, time is really all you have. When you choose to do something, you are trading everything else you could be doing for what you choose to do at that moment. If you choose to spend two hours watching TV, you are therefore choosing to not spend that time working on your goals. Think about all the time you spend and how you spend it, and start thinking about how those chooses mean that you are also choosing not to do something else. Which is more valuable to you in the long run? What activities will bring you the most “profit” in the future? Here, profit may be thought of as anything you want in the future; more money, better health, better relationships, more personal skills in a sport or skill.

What does this have to thinking about when it’s time to quit your day job?

If you are earning $40,000.00 a year from your full time income, and have chosen to spend much of your time outside of work on building a business, as pointed out above it is quite likely you could live fine on less than $40,000.00 a year simply be decreasing your expenses. Transportation could be a major expense that you could decrease substantially. There are probably other things you can think of for your own situation.

When you do quit your “day job” and begin to work on your business, you will now have more time to build it at a rate even faster than what you could while working at your previous job. You will have larger blocks of time to be able to spend on your business.

When I quit my job, it was at the point where my part time business (now my full-time vocation) was earning about 60% of my job. At that point, my business was able to sustain my expenses that I needed to pay. I cut my housing expenses by moving to a less expensive area.

Others could probably do this with their businesses earning less than 60% of their full time job. I had a very large monthly child support bill to pay and therefore, my priorities for being able to quit my job were that I could guarantee myself that I’d be able to pay the child support, pay the rent, and have enough money to purchase healthy food. Upon quitting my job, I now had 24 hours a day that I could choose how to spend – and could devote the time I was working for someone else to my own business interests.

One other consideration:  If you’re part time business has been generating some revenues for you while you are still working full-time, hopefully you’ve been putting some cash aside into a savings account.  Having 3 to 6 months of cash in the bank will be helpful if you have a couple of bad months as well as provide you with confidence and something you don’t have to worry about.

If you are serious about wanting to change what you are doing now, you can do it! And it might not be as hard as first it seems.

By the way, I have previously written about how important it is to write out your goals. I had set a goal two years prior to quitting my full time job that I would be working full time on my business by the January of two years into the future. I handed in my resignation almost 4 weeks prior to the deadline I had set for myself and my last day of employment was two weeks prior to the goal I had written out for myself.

Have you written out your goals yet?

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