The rabbit hole goes a little bit deeper than this though; see, your real goal shouldn't be to get X hours at $Y dollars, your real goal should be to create and scale as much value for as many people as possible (then money will basically find you, rather than you having to find it, it's that old "build a better mousetrap" expression). To understand this, think about walking someone else's dog. That has value. But it only scales a little bit, the most someone can walk other people's dogs is maybe like 8 dogs at a time? So whatever you're doing, you have to figure out how to scale it. Next is perception of value. Different people value things differently. A guy might be in love with some kind of car and be willing to pay $$$$$ for one, but that car to someone else might not be valued more than one which gets from point A to point B. Next is ability to pay. Bill Gates can give you $million$ if you create a value for him; A homeless person would find it difficult to part with a single dollar. Next, customers. Some will give you huge amount of money for simple things and will never waste a minute of your time, others will pay very small amounts of money and expect to be waited on hand and foot from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep. You have to be able to see when customers are taking advantage of you and to make an executive decision to politely but firmly cut them off. Otherwise your life will be hell and you'll be someone else's slave. Next marketing. Why not offer your services for free, but limit the time spent on any one customer per day to 5 minutes? They want more time they pay for it. Use Craigslist and put some ads there. Free sells, but you have to start charging more and more, and cutting off customers as you get better ones. Just remember at the end of the day all of it is business, nothing of it is personal in any way. You are doing what you need to do to support yourself and your family.