10 Reasons to Max Out Your Credit Cards

Everywhere you turn, you are going to find advice about how to be smart when using your credit cards. Your parents, your friends, your co-workers, your spouse and anyone else who talks to you about money is going to have an opinion on what you should and shouldn’t do when it comes to credit cards. Even turning on the television or browsing through the Internet, you are going to be bombarded with messages about how to get yourself out of your credit card debt and use your cards more responsibly.

It’s hog wash. Okay, not exactly. It’s true that credit card debt can cause a lot of problems in your life and that those problems should be avoided whenever possible. But the reality of your life is that you are going to need money that you don’t have access to immediately through any other means than using your credit cards. You could choose to be responsible and not rack up any credit card debt. But that would mean working a basic 9-5 job, budgeting your money and severely limiting your options in life.

That type of plan just doesn’t work for everyone. Many of us find ourselves in a position where we want to be really creative. We want to set our own hours doing work that we love. We want to get out of the cubicle and move our offices in to our homes (or better yet, into the virtual plane so that we can take a laptop to a foreign country and still earn an income). Working for yourself is a noble goal and it’s one that many people manage to make a reality. But it’s really hard to do if you have to work a full-time day job and live on a budget while trying to launch your career.

Everyone around you is likely to tell you that it’s a bad idea to quit your day job and live off of credit cards until your career becomes a reality. Ignore them. To get yourself ready to make the leap, here are ten good reasons that it’s perfectly fine to rack up debt while learning to work for yourself:

1. You can commit yourself to your new work full time. People who spend only a small portion of their time working at something usually only keep those jobs as hobbies and not as careers. In other words, if you’re going to work a full-time day job and then try to write novels at night, then you’re probably just going to have writing be your hobby and you’re never going to make a living off of it. By freeing yourself from the 9-5 and allowing yourself to live off of credit, you can immerse yourself completely in the new work and really make it work.

2. Your creativity will flourish. You know what kind of energy level you have after working a forty hour week at a job that requires a commute. It’s simply not conducive to creativity. By quitting your job and launching your new career, you’ll be able to access the kind of time and energy that allows your most creative ideas to thrive.

3. You give yourself permission to follow your dreams. Many people who want to work for themselves but don’t are people who simply haven’t given themselves the permission to do what they really want to do. By making the leap to living on credit for awhile in order to support your dreams, you’re telling yourself that those dreams are valid. That goes a long way towards making your new career work for you.

4. You will have access to the materials that you need. When you live on a strict budget, you usually can’t afford the things that you need to make a new business work. A graphic designer needs a good computer and software. A painter needs canvas and paints. A home office needs furniture and phone lines. To get those things, you need money. When you commit to using your credit cards to fund your home business, you allow yourself to get the things that you need to make your leap into a professional career.

5. People will think that you’re crazy. Believe it or not, that’s a good thing. For one thing, it motivates you to show the world (or at least your family) that your approach will work. More importantly, if people already think that you’re nuts then you aren’t so afraid to try new things that seemed too nutty before. This is where real innovation can happen and that’s one thing that creative businesses need to have.

6. You’ll feel crazy. The truth is that this is a hard choice to commit to. Who just lives off of credit?! This will cause emotional mood swings that have you flying high one minute and completely stressed out the next. For a limited period of time, this kind of up-and-down energy is going to be really good. During manic periods, you’re going to feel like you are on top of the world and that’s the kind of feeling that will increase productivity and allow you to create a new business. Unfortunately, this has to be balanced with some down times so the key is really to develop a way to force away those doubts and convince yourself that this is the right thing to do.

7. You will have time to wander. Not every moment of every day is going to be filled with creative actions taken to launch your career. But the great thing is that it doesn’t have to be. When you work full time while trying to launch a home business, you have to use every spare minute to try to get that plan off the ground. When you choose to give up that full time job, you have enough time to just take some downtime. Read magazines, go for walks, sit and daydream. It is these moments that allow our creative wells to fill up and our ideas to come to fruition. Pay your bills with credit cards so that you can have a few hours each day to just be lazy.

8. You are more likely to define a goal. When you work full-time, you have this vague idea of what you would do if you weren’t working. You’d “write a book” or you’d “design a clothing line” or you’d “decorate the house”. Once you actually commit to doing that full-time, you get a lot clearer about your goals. You figure out what kind of book you want to write or who you want to design for or how you wish to turn your love for home decorating into a career.

9. You will feel brave. The people who do things in life are the ones who get up and do them. That may sound easy but it often takes a lot of courage. It’s easy to get up and go to a job working for someone else every day. It is much harder to define the life that you want for yourself. By making the choice to do this, you are standing up for yourself and the creative career that you desire. That can make you feel strong and brave and those feelings will allow you to move forward with the decision.

10. The sink or swim approach is how stellar swimmers are born. Ultimately, you’re going to run out of credit that you can access to fund your home-based business. Not only that, but you’re also going to have a mountain of debt that you need to pay off. The knowledge that this kind of desperate situation is facing you is going to compel you to work five times as hard to make sure that your work-at-home career is a success.

There are certainly negative aspects of living off of credit cards as a means to launching your freelance career or home-based business. The people in your life who think you are nuts for doing it will freely share those aspects with you. However, people have successfully used credit cards as a way to start doing the work that they love. In order to do it right, you need to commit to it completely and remember the above reasons that it’s okay to do this. Doubt can kill the best of plans. You also need to make sure that you set a time limit or a budget in which you are going to reach a certain level of success. You can’t live off of credit cards forever! But you can use them to get yourself into a better position in life despite what those people around you might say.

Question of the Day: What would you tell a spouse or family member who wanted to quit their day job and live off of credit cards while pursuing a full-time creative career?