I have been writing about college, scholarships, grants and so forth for a while now and I will continue to share items of interest about college occasionally. But as of now my focus is to give specific information on how you can pay for college, either for yourself or your kids, by working at your own business, primarily home based.

Anyone can get a job working for someone else. Most people do and it’s perfectly good.  However, as a busy single mom, you need more time an more money than a trade dollars for hours job can provide.

If you’re interested in keeping your current job and making extra income by working at home, great.  If you need to get a day job for a while, then by all means take care of yourself.  Hopefully soon you’ll become so successful that you won’t have to keep the regular job if you don’t want to.  Then you can do whatever it is you want, travel with your kids and stay in nice places and not have to worry about the expenses, pay for college, whatever.

Working for yourself to pay for college can be a huge struggle.

If you’ve found something that has really made you successful financially overnight, I want to know about it. So send me an email.  I have found that any reward is going to take effort.  But the great thing about having a leveraged business is that the rewards can be larger than your input over time if you plan well. And you get to keep them.

Looking forward to sharing what I learn about how to pay for college in the hopes in will benefit you too.

I just read a great book by Timothy Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek. It’s a must for any person who wants more say in their life. The ideas are different than usual.  Instead of dreaming up ways to cram so much more into your life Ferriss recommends eliminating a lot.  Read it for yourself.

So you’d really need a lot of help to get to this point.  I’d need a lot of housekeeping help, help with dinners and someone to clean up after all my pets.  So if you are only working 4 hours a week, you are really going to have a lot of extra time.

I’d probably end up working more because I like to work.  Maybe I could then work on things that were more interesting than home maintenance and chores.  If you like what you are doing, is it work?  Not sure.

I have noticed though than when I check my email lees or later in the day I get more done.  When I go on vacation and take my computer along I hardly ever check the email.  Of course then there is a huge pile of it when you finally log on again.

One thing I used to do at work is file a week worth of email into a folder.  Then after another week passed I’d delete the whole thing.  I did have a sort for direct emails from my bosses though.  But there were only a few of them and that is manageable.

One thing he teaches is to stop looking at email all the time.  It’s fairly addictive in my opinion.  Save time – Ditch your email to become more productive.

Regarding work and life most people fit into one of these four categories:

(1)  No time, and no money.

If you are an employee, chances are this describes the way you feel. You can’t go shopping on a Tuesday afternoon or tell your boss to take a hike. How will you even be able to afford to send your kids to college, save for retirement or even think of having a life today with no time and no money?  You want time and money right?

(2)  No time, lots of money.

Some “successful” self-employed, professionals and small business owners are in this category. They are slightly better off than the employee because they earn more, but they have to work even harder than employees to keep up with the diminishing profit margins, competition and servicing their customers. As a single mother, do you want to spend much less time with your kids?

(3)  Lots of time, no money.

A lot of farmers, villagers, college dropouts or bums have lots of time but no money. Maybe ignorance is bliss, but without a stable source of income, how long can you last many days forward? If you’re a single mom, you know that your kids will need food, clothes plus medical care for that broken arm or leg. Not a great place to be in my opinion.

(4)  Lots of both time money.

It is the category that big business owners, landlords, investors are in. Imagine, not having to work for money, but having money to work for you by investing them and earning profits by using your money to make money. Also, you’re smart enough to hire the best people so you don’t even have to work. Just think about how many people you could help out in the no time, no money category A lot of people like it there.

Here are Two Questions for You

• Which one of the four categories best describes your current situation?

• Which one category would give you the most opportunity to be a great single mother?

If you answered with time and money you’re the kind of person that stands a chance of getting there. Because as Henry Ford put it “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Yes you can do anything you want and with the internet and all the information and services readily available there is every reason a determined single mom could be in the time and money category rather quickly.

• Trading Time to Make Money for College – employees, self-employed

• Manifesting & Using Creative Ideas – inventors, artists, programmers

• Leveraging resources and other people – business people, leaders, systems

Let’s focus on leveraging your talents. Anybody can get a job. It’s what most of us were taught and all we know. Stepping outside the box we can try new ways of living.

If you are a professional, have you ever explored writing an e-book about your field of expertise? If well written, it could provide a new income stream, instead of you selling out your time serving your clients. The effect is leveraged once you build your automatic system for making the transaction and advertising.

You can repeat the process each time you create new information products.  After time you could build a membership site and offer all of your great products and ideas to loyal customers that will pay a small monthly fee to have access to your great information.

How about a computer programmer? You can come out with your own revolutionary product instead of selling your ideas to the company you work for. How about making a small utility program that helps out internet entrepreneurs? You could design an easy to use program that generates friends in multiple Web 2.0 sites.

How about real estate, instead of selling houses, you can pool financial sources to buy houses cheap, increase their value and sell them off at a higher price. It just takes a little time and research to find good ideas and locations. And watch the market so you can time your purchases for gain, not loss.

Is money a problem? Seek out loans if you can take the risk. Pool money from many investors or seek a grant. The sky is the limit when it comes to making money.

Sometimes your credit card company will offer short term, no interest loans for about 6 months.  This might be a great way to generate short term cash for a specific project. However, do not take this offer is you are not able to pay it off before the due date.  The interest penalty is usually huge and defeats the purpose of making money.

So once you’ve decided on a way to have time and money then you are free to explore the creative ideas category to its fullest.  You’ll have the time and money to do it.

Life is pretty darn short. And your kids grow up quickly.  I don’t know about you but I want to live my life now and when I’m 65 ½. If you are looking you will find ways to join the having time and money crown, the new rich. See you there! You need to make money for college and life in general.