Uncategorized

Is It Time To Cut Funding For Neglected Projects?

Confession: For two years, I paid for a website that doesn’t exist.

 

When I decided to launch KnowGoodWords.com, I decided to launch another site too. I went to GoDaddy and got hosting and domain names for both, and I continued paying the fees for both.

That’s absurd since I only launched one site.

I selected my WordPress theme for the other site, created and formatted the banner and uploaded one post. I did all that within the first month when my excitement was at its peak.

I never touched the site after that.

Two years is too long to pay for a so-called work-in-progress that I didn’t work on.

In honor of Money Making May, I canceled the hosting service for the website I never launched and I didn’t renew the domain name.

That change saved me about $120 a year, which isn’t a huge sum of money. But there also isn’t any benefit in paying for service I’m not using.

The reason I wasted my money so long is the same reason people waste money on gym memberships but don’t work out. No one likes to admit that they’re not following through on their plans.

But it’s better to confront a bitter truth than to give your money away.

Related: Freelancing Fitness Test. Can You Make The Cut?

If you’re paying for a website you’re not working on, paying for Adobe Creative Cloud to design a book cover for a book you’re not writing or otherwise investing in neglected projects, cancel those services and save your money.

But what if you have difficulty determining if your projects have a future?

It’s not really about whether there’s a future. It’s about how distant that future is.

Consider the last time you worked on the project. Then, be honest about the next time.

Get boss-mode with yourself.

If you were managing a department of somone else’s business, could you justify the spending to corporate? If you survived on donations or investment, could you convince donors and investors to continue funding the project?

If other people wouldn’t be satisfied with how the money was being spent, you probably shouldn’t be cool with it either. And that means it’s probably time to cut the cord on funding for that project.