Free · No signup
You've run the numbers before and stopped, because a job means full-time childcare, and full-time childcare eats most of what the job pays. So you'd hand over your days, your schedule, and the pickups, to end up a few hundred ahead.
Here's the part that changes it: working for yourself doesn't require covering nine to five. School hours are hours. Naps are hours. Whatever you did before you stopped, and whatever people already come to you for, can be sold by the project instead of the week.
Which means the childcare you'd need is a fraction of what a job would demand, and the maths stops looking like a trap.
So the real question isn't what a job pays. It's what your hours would have to bill. Two numbers and you'll know.
Say it's $2,400 a month and 15 hours a week. That's $53 an hour, once you've set aside 30% of it for tax.
It doesn't cover what the business itself costs to run — software, insurance, materials, whatever your version needs. That comes out on top.
Don't hold that up against a job's hourly rate: this one carries your own tax, the way a salary doesn't, because nobody is withholding it for you. It's a price rather than a wage, and prices for skilled project work don't sit on the same scale as an hourly rate anyway.
Whether it's reachable for what you can do is a real question, and it's the one the report answers. Three specific ideas drawn from what you already do, each researched against live sources you can check, with a range for what it could be earning by month twelve and what would have to change for it to cover what you need.