We need some money honey!

Once Tiffany came on board with the idea, things really started to move swiftly. First things first, we needed start up money. While small business loans are available, don't be fooled into thinking that you can simply finance your entire business and not have to have some money of your own to invest. And you can forget right now the idea that somewhere, somehow you can get a grant to start your own business. I don't care how many sites out there say there are grants available and that Uncle Sam just has money available for the taking; you will quickly learn that the government is not giving away free money, or at the very least, you won’t qualify to receive it. Don’t pin your hopes on this or fall for the scams out there telling you to order their tell-all guide/e-book/exclusive membership for the low low price of $24.95 and get your FREE MONEY today! If you really want to start your own business, you’ll have to have some skin in the game as they say. So, back to what I was saying, we needed money and there was no hope of grants or business loans.

In the History page, I stated that my husband and I were coming off some difficult financial times and certainly didn’t have piles of cash stashed around so we had to get creative. Since my husband was no longer in the drywall business and he was going to trade in his sheetrock mud for sugar and flour, we decided to sell most of his drywall tools. We also sold two older vehicles and some other odds and ends, mostly on Craigslist but also through the local paper. It turns out we had more cash available than we expected to have which was a good thing since the actual expenses for getting this business off the ground were more than we initially anticipated.

That is really the first warning I need to give you (well besides the grant money scams which I hope you weren’t foolish enough to fall for). It will cost about twice as much as you initially estimate to get started. I know you don’t want to hear it but in our case it was absolutely true. There are so many additional costs that just blindsided us but we’ll talk about those in another post.

The second warning or bit of advice I will give you is to go ahead and open a business account and put all your startup money in this account and not your personal account. We ended up spending some of the money earmarked for the business simply because it was in our personal account. Operating even before the business opens with a business account makes all the expenditures transparent and easy to track.

Now with our funds in place, we were ready to begin right? Not quite…

M