Step 1) Do 50 hours per month of rails contracting at $50/hour.

Step 2) Use your extra 110 hours per month to build a business that makes money.

Step 3) When said business reaches $2500/mo in profit stop doing #1.

Some of those 110 hours would have to be spent originally getting the 50 hours of rails work.

More like 75 hours due to the government and their infernal taxes.

Adjusting the contracting rate as needed to get $50/hour after taxes is also an option.

You are so awesome.

Unfortunately it's not very easy to have a passive $2500 income a month. Unless you have a lot of money to invest, or worked hard AND got extremely lucky. $2500 is not an insignificant amount of money. Getting it passively for only doing 2-3 months of work is a dream for most people.

If you are young, you may be able to fall back on family to help you out with expenses for a while.

Is there any reason why you cannot actively work for the income?

Thanks for your reply. I have no problem working for it. I'd just like something where I could build a product or something and charge for it.

I'm sorry, I should edit the passive out. I'm totally ok with working for it, I'm not really looking for passive, I'm more looking for something where I can work 5-8 hours a day on a product which I run and have $2500+ a month.

I used the wrong words, I'm sorry, I've been through a lot of stress and can't even think properly...probably that's the reason why I posted this to HN for some help.

Regarding family, I unfortunately can't as they already rely on my for financial help.

=/

There's no shame in needing money. It may be to your benefit to use your real hn account and make a posting to see if anybody is looking to hire. Maybe someone in the HN community is looking for a Rails developer. It's definitely worth trying. (Though, I recommend posting at a time when most people aren't sleeping already or should be.)

Another option would be to take a job working in retail or food industry. There are usually more openings in those fields and it will provide income until you find something more suited for your skills.

Good luck with everything.

I don't want to sound like a douche or anything, but I really like to focus on the product side. Bulding something and charging for it. I can easily get a job as a designer or rails dev somewhere, but I'm having trouble building a product which people will pay for enough to give me $2500 a month.

You're asking how to build a business. Getting a product to generate 2,500 USD a month is non-trivial. In fact, going from 0 to 2,500 is probably going to be easier than going from 2,500 to 7,500 or 10,000.

Start simpler. Ask yourself how to build a product that can bring you 20 USD a month. Think of something that you can realistically envision yourself selling a couples of copies of a month right away. Then figure out how to go from there.

By the way, running a business isn't going to reduce your stress. And whether or not you'll be able to make money from a certain product / service is really speculative. You'll eventually get something to work if you keep working at it, but it can take time to figure it out. Maybe you should just consult in the short term.

As someone who's been desperate for cash before, I don't think starting a product business in order to obtain fast money is a good idea, unless you have experience selling to your target demographic and are really confident about your idea. Or unless you don't have any opportunities to actively work for the money, but you say you can easily get a rails dev job.

I honestly think going from 0 to 2500 will be harder than 2500 to 10000. Lots of people don't get to that first 2500 because their products aren't in demand, but if you do, you'll realize there is demand for your product and from then on you start scaling.

I'm sorry, my head is on wrong today. I totally agree with you. I meant to say, the first 2500 are the hardest by far. If you can make that much, scaling is pretty easy.

s/probably going to be easier/probably going to be harder

If you're desperate, perhaps you should do enough of the work that you can easily do (rails dev, designer) to make the money you want to, and use your spare time, as suggested above, to build a product/business that will eventually replace your job. If you're still at the stage of turning down jobs (or not seeking them), then you're probably not desperate.

I agree. Generally, "desperate" means taking any (reasonable) job offer you can get.

Right, I totally agree with you. I have such a drive to build a product...but again, it might not be as good of an idea right now.

Do you know what that product is? If not, it's going to be a difficult slope for you. Wanting to build a product to make money vs building a product to serve the needs of a community are vastly different.

Hopefully someone will help you out with some rails contracting.

Are you getting the boot from you're parent's place? (i.e., $2500 live on own funds)

How are you at marketing? If you can do marketing for a Saas app, let me know. We might be able to work something out.