I don't have a lot of margin between income and outgo, and it seems that there are so many more things that require more outgo. In the past few months the bills for the electric service, the water bill, my cellphone bill and the inevitable car repairs have been hitting hard.
My blood pressure has gone up.
I'm trying to get more (and better) sleep.
I'm drinking chamomile tea before bedtime, and using more vitamins.
What I suspect will be the real handling is that I'm trying to create more income to answer the shrinking margin.
I spent a good deal of time yesterday taking pictures of my original hand knit designs and art work. Later today I'll be editing my website to add them to the store section. Then, the work will be directed towards promotion.
Rule changes and/or rising fees for sales websites like Etsy, eBay and Amazon have given me reason to decide to avoid using these sites.
For instance, the nature of eBay is that used - pennies-on-the-dollar - items will sell far faster than new items.
Etsy recently changed their rules to allow art manufacturers from China access to the marketplace. This tends to snow under the individual artist, and lessens my willingness to offer my work there.
Amazon has a monthly plan that my sales would not yet cover, so that is not a good business decision.
Instead of sales websites, I'll be listing my items on my own website and doing consistent promotion over my social media sites.
The one exception to this will be listing my original knit design patterns on Ravelry. Since Rav is both a social media forum as well as a sales site, this makes sense.
Future plans include getting a good video camera so I can make knitting instruction videos for YouTube, doing more demonstrations of spinning technique at festivals, and getting more of my artwork into galleries.
