Saving money is always challenging because there are so many other things that you can do with money versus just popping it into your savings account.

There are just so many exciting things to spend your hard earned cash on…

…like ______________ (you can fill in the blank here)

I do try and avoid spending too much money and currently I have this laser like focus on saving money because, quite frankly, I want to be financially free as quick as I can.

Being financially free means that I can be time rich. The time that I have then purchased by my saving and investing is then mine to do with as I please.

Being time rich is my goal and I am on my way to achieve it and that is a journey, a marathon and definitely not a sprint. I have been at it for a while it seems.

I am getting good at the saving marathon though… but it can be boring and…

…sometimes I stray and I spend a chunk of money on something new, and that’s ok.

Living a little now and again is perfectly acceptable for the soul. I can always justify the purchase, most of the time.

Now, I bought something unusual the other week. Actually it was a service that I paid for, but essentially I still bought it. Money changed hands.

I bought a five minute video edit from an online freelancing site. It was all a very straightforward transaction and a real pleasure to use and it was a first time for me to use such a service.

I could have done the video edit myself, but I decided to pay someone else to do it for me, as an experiment as much as anything else. mmm!

I was just curious to see what I would get for my money and I wanted to asses the quality and how to use the service just in case I needed to use it for a project in the future. You just never know.

The video edit that I paid for was every bit as good or better than what I could have done myself.

Truth be told…. it was an excellent job.

A job well done and worth the cost.

It was also a brilliant lesson for me in how to go about contracting out some work, but it was also contracted out because, if truth be told, I couldn’t be bothered to do the video edit myself.

I was having ‘an off’ day on productivity and ‘an on day’ on surfing the internet, learning and being curiously lazy and finding out how things worked – hence the experiment on contracting out.

Yep, it was one of them days. We all have them.

I actually did have the time and I have the skills, the reality is that I could have done the edit myself, the missing part on that day though, was that I did not have the desire to do it.

That’s essentially what I contracted out.

I contracted out my ‘desire’ to do it, or my need to get it done but my lack of energy to do it.

I paid to extend my procrastination.

This got me thinking…

What if I paid myself for doing it?

The video edit cost me £30 and it would have taken me roughly 3 hours to do, so £10 an hour.

That’s acceptable for me.

The question then is, could I have unlocked my desire and killed my procrastination through incentivising the work by paying myself the £30 for carrying out the video editing service?

I don’t mean just paying myself mentally in my head as a token gesture or by doing something like moving money from one of my trouser pockets to the other…

I am talking about sending myself a contract, following this up with an invoice once the work was completed to the deadline that I agreed with me myself. After the work is delivered to my specifications, I would then spend some time in writing out a review on me.

I know, nuts right!!

But I think it can work.

Pay myself and then accept the money. Job done!! I am paid, the job is done and I have gained a sense of fulfilment…

I can then put the money that I earn from myself into my ‘freelance money earned account’… all in the name of making the act of saving money more fun.

This is a good idea and it could also work as a blueprint for the things that I might want to explore more of in the future. Remember if I am time rich then I might need explore things to do and things to sell, services to offer.

This idea of paying myself would help me learn for a possible online opportunity that I could explore, where I was someone else’s freelance worker. That could work.

Through this way of ‘working for myself’ I could discover a whole lot and answer some fundamental questions that I might have for what comes next.

For starters.

I could work out how much I would charge as an hourly rate if I was to be a freelancer or even try and put a single price on a ‘job’ by estimating completion time multiplied by my hourly rate.

I would then be able to see if I could get better at evaluating my own worth over time by being honest with me, the contractor, and by measuring out the examples.

I would also be able to see if I could improve on how to be good at pitching for a job. The price is right is half the challenge sometimes.

This is definitely a good model for getting in some practice.

This could also be an interesting new savings model for me to build up more momentum in stashing my cash and could also be a way to learn something as a safety net for a future digital nomad life.

I am exciting about this idea as it works on so many fronts.

Like all of my ideas, I have to ask the ultimate question. What is my next step?

I might need to design the invoice and the contract paper work.

What would be my branding, company name?

What would be my logo design?

I think I need someone to do this work for me, I wonder who I could get to do that and how much it would cost?

Checks mirror.

Motivated.