My thinking has changed considerably in the last couple of years about outsourcing and money in general. I used to find it very hard to pay someone to do things that I could do myself. As a matter of fact, I found it hard to spend money at all – even when it was something that I really needed. All my life I’ve been taught to be really tight with my money.

Christmas before last I bought a new house. Spending that much money was hard for me as it is with most people I’m sure. And then having to go buy washer and dryer, refrigerator, furniture etc. was even harder. It wasn’t because I didn’t have the money, I had more than enough. It was just hard to spend money. But, an event changed my life that Christmas and has since changed my whole way of thinking.

I was at a furniture store looking for furniture to go in my new home. My husband and I had just divorced and I was literally starting over – he got the house and everything in it, which was really fine with me, I was ready for a new start. But, that meant I had to buy all new furniture. Again, I had more than enough money for this – a result of the divorce settlement, but it was still hard to let it go. Finally, I decided on several items that the young salesman was trying so hard to sell me. Once I reluctantly signed all the papers and paid the young man, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “THANK you SO much! Now my children will have Christmas presents.” He didn’t tell me this BEFORE the sale to try to get me to buy from him, but only after I had decided on my purchase.

At that point, it really hit me that MY purchases really were helping people and helping this economy in general. Not only were MY children going to be SO excited to be getting this new furniture for Christmas, but now this young man could provide presents for HIS children. His purchases would in turn help someone else have enough money to buy presents for their kids, and so on and so on…

Not long ago, I hired a young man to help me part-time with websites. I wasn’t paying him a lot since he was only working part time. It was totally worth the money to me because I was so far behind on the websites. One night he came online and thanked me for allowing him to work for me part time. He told me that because of the extra money I was paying him, he was finally able to do some basic things that I never think about doing without. Again, a light bulb went off in my head – when I use the money that I have to hire out work that I need done, I am truly helping someone else. If I had offered to give this young man the money to take his wife out or to get new clothes, he would not have taken it. He wasn’t looking for a hand out. Now, I can’t wait to hire people. Which means I must charge people for the services I provide so that I can afford to hire more people.

I must take in money so that I can let it flow through me. And the more I take in, the more that can flow through me. I used to feel guilty about charging for my services. But, now I realize that I am providing quality service to my clients and customers – just like the young man provides me with quality service and help. I WANT to pay him. My clients WANT to pay me because I am providing HELP that they NEED. Hiring other people has really changed my whole perspective about money and looking at things from the other side.

Another thing that I realized the last year or so is how my SPENDING really affects this economy. The economy is bad because people don’t have money to spend. They don’t have money to spend because everyone is afraid to spend. There was a day a couple of years ago when I was at work and someone came running in the office saying, “If you are going to get gas, you better go get it! The gas stations are running out of gas!” This was when the gas prices were so incredibly high a year and a half ago or so. On my way home that day, I noticed several gas stations were truly out of gas and the gas stations that did have gas, had LONG lines of cars waiting to get gas. Some of those people in line were even fighting because they were afraid they wouldn’t get gas.

When I got home and watched the news, I realized that Nashville was the ONLY city in the nation that had run out of gas. Why? Because somehow that rumor got started and since everyone ran out to get gas, they made that rumor come true. If people had just ignored the rumor and not run out to get gas, the rumor would have been false.

I have a feeling that our economy is a lot like the gas rumor. Yes, we are in a bad economy, but mostly because people BELIEVE that we are in a bad economy. We’ve made the rumor come true. The people that have money are afraid to spend it because they believe we are in a bad economy. That keeps the money away from the people that need the money. Businesses that need to hire people are afraid to hire them because they believe that we are in a bad economy and they believe that people won’t spend money for their services. People aren’t spending money for the businesses services because they don’t have money to spend because businesses aren’t hiring. It’s a vicious cycle.

Many of the people I’ve hired to do websites lately tell me something like this: “I would work more but I can’t afford internet service right now and I have to work at a coffee shop when it’s open and I don’t have gas money to drive to the coffee shop.” Or, “I would help you with that design but I don’t have the software I need to do it on my computer.” I remember that I used to think the same way. What they don’t realize is that if they spent the money to get internet service or the gas or the software, they would make way more than enough to pay for the gas or internet service or software and still have more than enough left over. Not only that, but then the coffee shop and the internet service or software company can afford to stay open and continue passing the money through the economic system. I think of that often when I need new software or to hire someone that could potentially make me way more money than the cost of the software or the new hire.

I think if we all started talking about how great our economy is doing and started spending the money we have, then the economy would get better. I am realizing that the more money I spend, the more money I seem to make. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying to go out and spend just for the sake of spending, but spending when I need to spend and when I have it to spend instead of making myself do without just because I might need it some day or because we are in a bad economy. I trust that God will provide it when I need it.

I am learning to treat money like air. I don’t go around holding my breath so that I won’t use up unnecessary air. And I don’t go around breathing in the air as fast as I can because there is so much available to me. I don’t tell my children to be careful and save up the air for a rainy day. We all use the air as it’s needed – no more and no less. We use it without even thinking about it. Our lives don’t revolve around the air we breathe – actually, our lives DO revolve around the air we breathe, but we don’t plan our days and our lives around the air that we are breathing. We trust that it will always be there in the perfect amount that we need.

I think money should be the same way. Many of us say that we believe God will provide but then we rarely ACT like we believe that God will provide. We think we have to work hard to make that happen. I used to believe that I shouldn’t care about money and that I shouldn’t be focused on making more money because that took it away from someone else. I wanted to believe that money wasn’t important and I shouldn’t be focused so much on money. I shouldn’t want to make a million dollars. But, then I would catch myself spending MORE time and energy worrying about money because I didn’t have any! It caused me more stress and more grief and more arguments than anything else in my life.

If I treated money like I treat air, then the stress and grief and arguments would be gone. I have learned so much about my beliefs about money and how those beliefs were ingrained in my head lately. It has truly changed my life. I now realize that by charging others for my services, I am allowing them the opportunity to spend money which brings them more money. It’s called ‘currency’. I like to think of it as a water current. It has to flow THROUGH me. I can’t expect more to come to me if I’m damming it up on one end and not letting any out.

I used to keep my beliefs about money all to myself so I could avoid the hard looks from others or so I wouldn’t have to hear their disapproval. But, I’m finding that to truly be myself I can’t keep holding back my true thoughts and beliefs. It seems the older I get, the less I worry about what others think. And my main goal is to be happy. I won’t be happy unless I am the complete person that God made me to be. I won’t be happy unless I stay in touch with Jesus who lives inside of me. He made me the way I am and I’ve spent way too much of my life trying to be something I’m not so that others would like me more or not think bad of me. I’m learning to trust that still small voice instead of many of the louder voices I hear externally

I’m not totally ‘there’ yet, but I’m progressing

Anybody else want to make more money?
I’m offering a free webinar to learn HTML (the language used to build websites). You can read all about it and sign up for the free webinar here: http://cullen-web-services.com

I’ve been seeing some Wordpress blogs that are somehow getting hacked. I’m not sure how it’s happening, but if your blog seems to suddenly redirect to another page that you didn’t intend, this might help.

When I looked at the source code of the infected blog, I found this just after the <body> tag:

<script language=javascript>document.write(unescape('%3C%73%63%72%

I found the offending code in wp-content/themes/theme-name/header.php where theme-name is the specific theme name.

I took out the script and all appears to be working well again.

It would be smart to change your passwords too.

Hope that helps!

I launched a site last week that I’ve been working on for over a year. It is the biggest site I’ve launched as a free-lancer. It has been a tremendously rewarding experience, a great learning tool, and a great experience all the way around. You should check it out here: Word Music

We still have lots of tweaks to make it the best it can be, but it’s up there and it’s live and THAT is a huge relief. I have a great time working with the people at Word Music as well as the great team of free-lancers that I’ve worked with to make this happen.

Friday was a BUSY day launching a site like that. There were a lot of pieces to put in place. For those of you that don’t care anything about the technical details of what I learned from this launch, you will probably want to quit reading now Just check out the site and give Word Music some of your business. They are great folks to work with.

For those of you that are still reading, I assume you are interested in what I learned from this launch. This was a little different from the other launches I’ve made in the past. The easiest type of launch is, by far, the new domain name. They don’t have a site up yet and when we get it running, we get it running. We set the DNS a couple of days earlier than scheduled launch and then when we get the code ready, we upload it to the site, set up configuration for the database and BAM! There’s your site!

Then there are those that have a site already running. If the site is to be on the same server, then I don’t have to worry about DNS at all. When it’s time to launch the site, we just replace the old code with the new code, set up configuration for the new database, if needed, and BAM! There’s your new website!

There are also websites that are replacing an already running website but on a different web server or host computer. These are the tricky ones. If the client doesn’t really care about the exact minute that the site launches and isn’t concerned with the DNS propagation throughout the internet, then this isn’t a big deal. I just wait until the code is ready on the new server and set the DNS. Eventually, the client, as well as the rest of the world will start to see the new site instead of the old. Of course, since the DNS isn’t refreshed at the same rate and time thorughout the internet, they may see the old site one minute, the new site the next and then the old site again the next. This bouncing back and forth could last a couple of days. And if the client is cool with that, then my job has been done. But, there was never a ‘BAM!’

The situation I had with Word Music was that they already had a website on a different server. Their new website is on a new server and they wanted it to ‘go live’ at a specific time for the whole world. They wanted a ‘BAM!’ I respect that decision – it made the launch very exciting. It was almost like an unveiling. When they sent out announcements, they didn’t have to warn people that they might not see it right away.

So, how did we pull it off? Those of you that do this a lot are probably thinking this was a no-brainer. At first, I thought it was a no-brainer too. I had the DNS changed to the new site a couple of days early and then I set the .htaccess file to redirect everything back to the old website. Of course, since the DNS was in the process of being changed, I couldn’t redirect to the domain name, I had to redirect to the old IP address.

This worked really well until I had to start testing. How was I going to test the site while everything is redirecting back to the old site? This is where I had to use more of my brain power. I ended up setting the redirect back to the old site in the index.php file instead of .htaccess. I then created a new php file that would act as the index.php file.

Since I’m using the MVC model, this was a little trickier. The index.php is my front controller. If I ever lose the script name through the code, it will redirect back to the old site. Since we are using mod-rewriting on the site, we did have a few of those problems because the script name was getting lost, but for testing we could just substitute the script name in the address bar of the browser. At least we could get to the site and make sure that all the configuration was working and everything was looking good.

At 2:00 launch-time, I just had to take the redirect out of the index.php and let the traffic flow to the new site. Word Music announced the launch of their site and all is well. It was an exciting time!

A few things you may want to also note, I added a check for the IP address of those that were going to be testing so that even if someone did find my testing script that would allow me to bypass the redirect, they wouldn’t be able to get through.

I thought this might help someone else faced with this same type of launch. It worked really well for us and I wasn’t doing quite so much scrambling as soon as the site came up to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything while who knows how many other people were looking at the site for the first time.

It was a good day. I want more days like that one!

I am trying my best to get out of the rat race. I don’t like trading time for money. One of the best books I think I’ve ever read was Robert Kiwosaki’s ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad‘. It really woke me up to a LOT of things. I learned that trading time for money keeps me in the Rat Race. I’ll never be able to really relax. And that made me start questioning a LOT of things that I have grown up believing.

His next book, “The Cash Flow Quadrant” was even better and helped me see the difference between being an employee, self-employed, a business owner and an investor. I originally read those books to help teach my children what they needed to learn, but ended up being the student before I could be the teacher. Reading those books changed my life. Totally.

Now, I’ve bought the board game Cashflow 101 and my life is changing again. I play it every month (by myself if I have to ). It’s an expensive game but I think it’s already been worth the price I paid. I’ve already learned a LOT about me and about money and ways I can change my way of thinking about life and money. It’s a lot like monopoly, only better.

Robert says in the game instructions that he built the board game so that we could learn from our mistakes in the game before we go out and make the same mistakes with our real money. I like that idea!!

Learning the principles from this book has already helped me to quit my job and work from home. Now, I’m slowly but surely getting out of the rat race and learning how to let my money work for me instead of me constantly working for money. Now, I work for fun. Can it even be called work?

Anyone up for a game of Cashflow??

I certainly learned a lot from yesterday. It seemed as though every where I went yesterday, someone must have read my post for the day and was trying to help me learn from my mistakes. Or they were trying to make me mad. Or something. It was a true Monday.

Or maybe it was just me?

At any rate, I’m certainly learning from my mistakes. And I won’t be making the same ones twice. There are often consequences from the mistakes we make and sometimes the price of that education is high. But, that’s a good thing, right? Because the higher the price, the madder I get, the bigger the consequence, the better I learn not to do that again.

THANK GOODNESS I’m learning to clear to zero every morning and get in a good place before I start my day. I hate to think what things would be like if I let my anger grow, or let my self-doubt grow, or let my resentments grow, or hung on to my grudges. Maybe I shouldn’t have any of those to begin with, but I do. The trick I’m learning is to not let them last quite so long. Each day has enough trouble of it’s own, so no need to carry over the trouble from yesterday.

Sometimes even clearing to zero only lasts for a little while, but that’s still much better than just picking up my anger, doubts, etc. where I left off the day before.

I get knocked down, I get back up again. As many times as necessary. And each time I get back up, I’m stronger, I’m smarter and I’m more confident.

Bring it on! I’m ready for the education. I’m not afraid to fail. Failure can be a very good thing. I’m not afraid to mess up. It will just make me better. Bring IT!