49 more weeks

As you may know, I started my current job in August, 2010. It is a temporary position, but it's typical that people work for the company for years as a temp. I think it's because the company I work for would rather not have to provide benefits and they like the ability to drop employees if they needed to. It's not such a great benefit to the employees though. I work for the paycheck and that's all I get. No paid vacations, no paid sick time and paid holidays are only after 6 months and only if you work a certain amount of hours the previous six months. You have to work 1,000 works for the previous 26 weeks before the week of the holiday. So that only allows you to miss 40 hours in that time frame - and you don't get credit for the holidays during those 26 weeks since you don't actually work those days. So for example, counting back 26 weeks prior to Memorial Day the first week included in that is the week of Thanksgiving, so if they make us take off Thursday and Friday of that week then I'm already down 16 hours, then I'll miss another 8 to 16 hours for Christmas depending if I work Christmas Eve or not (it's on a Monday this year) and then I'll lose another 8 for New Year's Day. So there is the 40 hours I need keep my holiday pay. So basically if I even miss a half day I won't get paid for Memorial Day. So paid holidays is tough to get on my job.

Anyway, another thing they do because of some legal loophole, they require the temp workers to take 60 unpaid days off once they have worked there for three years. I just passed two years and I am already counting down the weeks until I get a break. I only have 49 more weeks left! I have this internal conflict within myself because as much I need the extra money I am really looking forward to taking those 2 months off. I dread going to work and I'm not really sure if I even want to go back once my 2 months are done. Or if they will even take me back. I've heard sometimes people don't come back after their 2 months off. It's stressful not knowing what I'll be doing this time next year, but I think I'll welcome the change. I'll probably take some of my time off to look for other job opportunities, if I don't already find something before then.

New Rules of Money

I am currently reading the Robert Kiyosaki book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". It's making me think a little harder about money and working my 7 to 3 job, taxes, good and bad debt and more. "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" was written in the mid 90's, so some of the info is outdated. I found some videos online about his "New Rules of Money" which are still a few years old, but the information presented makes you think about how to make money.

Extra cash challenge - July

Here are July's results of the extra cash challenge:

Part time job: $29.79
Amazon: $13.38
Advertising: $123.61

Total: $166.78
Difference from last month: -$94.46

Well as you can see I didn't do as well as last month. I don't want to give away what my main blog is, but the traffic really depends on how much the topic is in the news and this July was a slower month than June. I anticipate it'll be pretty slow for the rest of 2012 as well. So some of the income is out of my control. My part time job really slowed down again as well. My part time job is basically updating websites, and two of my main customers are summer festival and a county fair, but which are in June and July, so most of the website updates are done in May and June in preparation for those events. Now that those two events are done for the year, I expect that income to slow down too. So I should be trying to think of up some new ways to bring in some extra income. Any ideas?