Furlough Preparation: Paying off Car Loans with Ebook Sales

This post on paying off car loans with ebook sales is post #5 in my series on financial freedom and spirituality.

In my last post, I talked about using near-zero-interest-rate savings to pay off a big chunk of my car loan. With a safe cushion in the bank and all but the last 9 months of my car paid off, I needed to come up with around $3300 to own my car free and clear.

Furloughs and Part-Time Jobs…if Legal Counsel Approves

With the looming sequestration and a 20% cut in pay in my Federal job (translating into 25-32% take home cut, depending on whether I still fund my retirement, I’m not as free as most people, including most Federal employees, to pick up a side job wherever I want.  In my career field, I have to have special permission to work elsewhere so I don’t have a conflict of interest with my job.  That means I can’t work for any company or in competition with any company that might either benefit or be harmed by my employment.  For example, if I work in an office that buys construction services, I would not be able to take on part-time work doing dry-wall repair because I might choose to give myself the work rather than my competition.  That makes sense.  Then again, a coworker who doesn’t have anything to do with buying health/wellness services was told she couldn’t work as a yoga instructor on her furlough.  I still haven’t wrapped my mind around that one but legal counsel isn’t budging.  Like I said, it’s not necessarily easy to pick up a second job to make ends meet during sequestration because the decision is out of our hands.

As for writing, I received official documented permission around 1993.  I couldn’t write about anything that wasn’t info available to the public, which was much more restrictive before every 12-year-old had a smart phone in his hand and a wifi-connection to Google.  I could write military heroes in romantic comedy (Top Secret Affair), alternate realities (Access),  guides for dealing with bereavement (Working through Grief).  Essentially, based on what I was writing at the time, I just had to make sure I didn’t work in a lab where we were finessing time travel or teleportation through worm holes.  The same holds true 20 years later–I’ve asked not to be put in charge of the super secret bunker of the world’s most dangerous books, discreetly hidden inside a University Library in a non-existent Florida educational institution.    (Joking–that’s the premise in The Secret Lives of Librarians series).

Writing to Pay for Sequestration’s 20% Cut

If I am indeed furloughed in April, I’ll be forced to work only 32 hours a week, by law.  That means, I’ll leave after only 8 hours a day and go home.  No working late or taking work home with me every day or on weekends.  It means I’ll have evenings free, weekends free, plus one day a week.  That re-discovered time will go to writing as my part-time job.  I’ll easily have an extra 20  – 30 hours a week to devote to legally mandated time away from the office.

So at least I have a plan for trying to make up the 25% difference in take-home pay.
Most of my royalties already have a place, but in figuring out how to zero out my car loan, I decided to take what I had in the bank at the end of the month for a particular book and apply it to my debt.   I emptied out the account and paid the rest out of my wallet.  The book that paid off my car was titled, aptly,Give Your Life Direction.