My get-not-poor-slowly scheme

[Elok]

But then you can use that as a stepping stone to become a full fledged pharmacist.

The thing is, pharma tech is this dinky forty-credit "technical diploma" I could do in a little over two semesters, while full pharmacist is a doctorate. Huge gap there, and I'm already in my thirties, even assuming I could master organic chemistry (and I was pretty crap at chemistry in HS). I guess it could happen, but it doesn't sound ultra-feasible to me.

[Sava]

i bet you'll find a job with nice benefits and a 100k+ salary

[Sava]

What state are you in? Invest in a cultivation license.

[Sava]

If only being a wretched sack paid well

[C0ckney]

do you speak any other languages?

[Elok]

Hablo un poquito de espanol. Nada mas.

[loinburger]

Level one tech support. You don't have to be good with computers and you can talk people through the problem.

Elok: Is your monitor on? Is your mouse plugged in? Have you rebooted the computer? Okay, let me transfer you to level two support.

[onodera]

Level one tech support. You don't have to be good with computers and you can talk people through the problem.

Elok: Is your monitor on? Is your mouse plugged in? Have you rebooted the computer? Okay, let me transfer you to level two support.

Elok has done that. Level one tech support is a good option only if you plan to become second/third level support, but he's not that good with technology.

[C0ckney]

Hablo un poquito de espanol. Nada mas.

ah. i mostly work as a translator. it doesn't cost anything to get into, just a word processor and internet connection. i make very good money for here and what would be decent money there. i can work from home and organise my schedule around my life and family.

to work as a translator you need two skills: 1) a solid command of another language; 2) an ability to write well in your native language. you've got the second in spades, pero desafortunadamente con sólo un poquito de español no se puede tomar nada. but even if that's not an option for you, why not use your writing skills in some other way? there's loads of freelance work out there; although a lot of it is terribly paid, some people are prepared to pay for quality - it's just a question of finding those people. i think aeson does something similar to this (though i may be completely wrong about that - best to ask him) so perhaps he could give you some pointers.

[Sava]

an ability to write well in your native language.

so how did you get into it?

[Aeson]

but even if that's not an option for you, why not use your writing skills in some other way? there's loads of freelance work out there; although a lot of it is terribly paid, some people are prepared to pay for quality - it's just a question of finding those people. i think aeson does something similar to this (though i may be completely wrong about that - best to ask him) so perhaps he could give you some pointers.

Yah, making decent money freelance writing is possible. But it's a volume game to start at least. $10 articles ... you need to write a lot of them and be willing to write about commercial topics. I know people who write 30 to 50 a day. If you do well and/or get lucky you can transition to doing higher value writing. Though the best bet is to do as much of the writing as you can for your own website.

I haven't done any freelance work myself. I started out online writing articles for my own websites or big article repositories (eHow, Squidoo, HubPages, etc). That was slightly different in how I got paid, but the same general principles. Now I work more on web-based apps and do as little writing as I can get away with.

[Aeson]

A website about how to get into PT and hitting on as many specific topics involving PT as possible could be a good side-project with the potential to grow into your main income source. There's a lot of money in health-related topics, but a lot of competition as well. (Also would have to be careful that you aren't giving medical advice, which can make the writing tricky.) If you really do like writing and helping people though, approach it as a hobby on the side and if you're lucky it could grow into something awesome.

[loinburger]

Without hijacking Elok's thread too badly: how do you freelancers find jobs? I've often thought of getting into freelance programming but I have no idea how I'd go about finding work - I've often worked as a proxy contractor where I'm an employee of company A who hires me out to company B where company A's only roles are getting me group health coverage, finding me work, and taking a huge chunk of my paycheck, and it would be nice to cut out the middleman.

[Aeson]

I've never actually done any freelancing myself.

Upwork has gobbled up a few of the competitors (oDesk, eLance) and seems to be the main freelancing market now. I'm not sure how well it works for programmers, more familiar with writers. I'd think that most programming jobs don't pay well though (if viewed individually), since you're competing with people all around the world. Someone in the Philippines or India may be perfectly happy to put a month's worth of work into a project for $1k, and/or someone out there probably has done almost the exact same job before and already has the framework ready to modify for that specific project. So it really drives the prices down.

Plus people who buy apps/scripts generally can't differentiate between good coding and ****ty coding ... so it's hard to distance yourself from the pack that way. With writing it's more obvious to more people what is good and which is crap, so you can differentiate yourself from the $2 articles if you can write decently well.

[loinburger]

All of the contracting I've done has been to help an existing team of programmers satisfy some requirement that they don't know how to satisfy, e.g. they've got a program that's been running on one server for forever but now they need to scale it out to multiple servers, and then once I've refactored the program so that it can scale out they don't need me anymore (assuming I've done a decent job with my documentation).