There goes my freelancing dream

Well, my dream of going into full time freelancing goes for a bit of a six, at least for a little while more.

I took a 15 year mortgage. This requires me to make a hefty payment every month. I do not want to take a risk of a fluctuating income putting my repayment capacity in jeopardy! I signed a piece of paper giving the bank to right to auction my property if I miss my payments. So there's no way that i can take that kind of a risk right now, considering the fact that I have only paid one installment out of 180!

And also, it was a prerequisite for me to have a permanent, full time job in order to get the loan. And they even made sure that my company transferred my salary to their bank, through the SWIFT banking system before they approved the loan! So one month down the line, if they suddenly realize that there is no fixed amount coming into the bank and that is also not coming through a SWIFT transfer, I might be in their radar! It's a bit too soon to get into that.

Then there is a current market slow down in the US. Well, actually there has been a bit of a slowdown on oDesk also lately. oDesk may refute this, but something I noticed was now, oDesk budgets for projects are on the decline. There are a lot of jobs that are getting posted putting low hourly fees as prerequisites. I always considered oDesk to be more of a high value market than RentACoder. It was RAC which used to have postings asking for a clone of eBay for $500. Now oDesk seems to be getting there as well.

Just the other day, there was a posting asking for the best PHP programmer in the world. But there was a condition saying the rate has to be less than $ 10. Also there was a post for a maverick project manager for less than $5/hour! How funny can that be! Anyway, more on that on a separate post.

Getting back to the subject of this post, so my dream of going freelance seems to be getting pushed back a bit. In the meantime, I am looking into the possibility of getting more high worth projects to help me pay off my loan ASAP.