How to Have a Prosperous Life as PHP Developer

In this article you will learn:

2. Why Would You Want a Prosperous Life as Developer

3. How to Have a Prosperous Life as Developer

3.1 Calculate Your Minimum Cost of Your Life

3.2 Make Sure You Have Multiple Sources of Revenue that Do Not Generate More Than 50% of Your Cost of Life

3.2.1 Reduce your cost of life for instance cutting needless expenses

3.2.2 Optimize your earnings from the current sources of revenue that make you less money

3.2.3 Add more sources of revenue by creating your own products or services

3.2.4. Invest on other people work

3.3 Gather Savings That You Can Use During Periods of When You Loose Revenue Sources

3.4 Avoid Risky Investments

1. What is a Prosperous Life as A Developer

Prosperity is related to finances. A prosperous developer makes enough money to have a comfortable life doing great work as a developer.

Being prosperous is not about having millions in your bank account. That is what some people call being rich.

Nobody needs to be that rich to be happy. There are a lot of unhappy rich people.

When you are prosperous, that means having enough work to be paid regularly for your work so you can have a good quality of life.

You can have that kind of life anywhere in the world, although it may sometimes help you to move to another city or country.

2. Why Would You Want a Prosperous Life as Developer

IIn general, it is not precisely money that brings you a happy prosperous life. It is more good emotional states like joy, love, peace, and enlightenment.

There was a scientist named David Hawkins that elaborated a scale of emotions on which we can see which are the higher and lower level of emotions. There is an article here about the Hawkins scale of emotions.

Money is a means to an end. That is the happiness state that you reach when you go through nice emotions.

For instance, you need to love yourself by taking care of all your basic needs and desires. You need for instance least to have food to eat, a house to live in, electric power to turn on lights and devices that you use, etc...

If you do not have a way to produce all your basic needs, you need to buy products and services from others. That is when you need money to pay for those products and services from other people or companies.

You can earn money honestly from your work. If you have a prosperous life, you can pay for all of your expenses using the money that you earn from your work.

3. How to Have a Prosperous Life as Developer

Some people believe they have a prosperous life if they have a job with a great salary. In fact, they are vulnerable if the salary is their only source of revenue.

If they get fired or if for some other reason, they stop working for the company that paid their salary, they lose the only source of revenue until they find another job.

The same can be said for people that work as consultants or contractors if they only work for one company at a time. If their contract ends and it is not renewed and they only had that contract as their only source of revenue, they are also financially vulnerable.

In general, depending only on one single customer or a few customers that are responsible for generating more than 50% of your revenue, make you fragile.

If you are in that situation, you need to change your mind and be more careful with the way you work and organize your finances.

Here are some steps that your should follow to be more comfortable financially and have a prosperous life.

3.1 Calculate Your Minimum Cost of Your Life

The cost of life is the minimum amount of money that you need to survive.

To calculate your cost of life you need to add several types of costs that you pay every month, like food, rent, taxes, energy bills, Internet bills, mobile phone bills, etc...

If you have a company as a sole proprietor, you also need to add the cost of maintaining your company like an accountant bill, Internet servers that you hired, etc...

The easiest way to make these calculations is to get your bank account statements into files, import them into a spreadsheet and then add only the amounts that correspond to the expenses mentioned.

In the future, I will provide a more detailed step-by-step tutorial that you can follow.

3.2 Make Sure You Have Multiple Sources of Revenue that Do Not Generate More Than 50% of Your Cost of Life

Sources of revenue are basically customers that pay you every month. They can be customers that pay for your work, rent of houses that you hire to other people and software that you provide as a service to others for instance subscription-based services, advertising payments, etc...

You can use the same bank statements that I mentioned above to get the amounts of those sources of revenue.

You should create a list of sources of revenue and the amounts that you get from each last month.

Add the amounts of all the sources of revenue to get last month's total revenue.

Then calculate the percentage of each revenue source compared to your monthly total revenue.

If there is a single source of revenue that represents more than 50% and the remaining sources of revenue total represent less than your cost of living, you are vulnerable.

In that case, you can do several things to get out of your vulnerability situation:

3.2.1 Reduce your cost of life for instance cutting needless expenses

Needless expenses can be for instance frequent traveling or frequent expenses to eat and drink outside of your home.

These are services often provided by other people that want to be paid fairly. You can make a great change in your cost of living if you cut these needless expenses gradually.

3.2.2 Optimize your earnings from the current sources of revenue that make you less money

For instance, let's say you have a blog where you like to write nice articles or a podcast that you record to talk about your favorite topics.

Consider adding advertising from programs like Google AdSense, join the YouTube partnership program, or find sponsors to pay you for talking about their products in your blog articles or podcast episodes.

3.2.3 Add more sources of revenue by creating your own products or services

As a developer, you probably may have written some Open Source packages. Many Open Source projects are stopped because developers do not know how to make money from their work. Still, a lot of users are benefiting from your work for free.

If you have some popular packages, you can offer paid versions of those packages turning the packages into APIs.

You can still offer free versions of the API with a limited set of features. Then you can charge a subscription from each of the users that make more intensive use of the API. Charge a small subscription fee to attract more potential customers.

There is more today about doing this in practice. I will get back to this topic in the future.

3.2.4. Invest on other people work

There is an old African saying that states that "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together".

Some projects require that people that work on those projects have many skills. In that case, it is better to hire specialists to split the work between them.

When you do that, the quality of your work will be better, and the work can be done faster.

What you can do is negotiate with customers to manage the project with a team of people. Ask for quotes from each team member.

Since you also need to do people management work, you can add a profit margin on top of the cost of the work of each team member. Then add all the quotes and use that resulting amount as the base for a proposal to present to the customer.

This is a bit more complex because it involves tax calculations, payment fees for each team member, contracts, people management, etc... So I will get back to this in the future with more details.

Right now, I am working as a manager for software projects that customers ask us for. You can work this way, or if you are too busy, you can delegate new projects to a third-party team.

If you are in a situation where you cannot take on more projects yourself, contact me so I can evaluate working on your project as a manager of a team to whom you can delegate the project. You can act as a sales intermediary and keep a commission.

If you are interested in evaluating this possibility, you can use the contact buttons on the side of the page of this article to contact me by email, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger.

3.3 Gather Savings That You Can Use During Periods of When You Loose Revenue Sources

XIt is normal that you may go through rough periods with less revenue in your life. You should be prepared for those periods that may take months.

What you should do is like ants. They work during the Summer and store food that they can use during the Winter when they cannot work for some reason.

Some common reasons may be, for instance, having health issues that require longer treatment, or for instance, pandemic seasons that prevent people can travel to the offices of customers.

Ideally, you should gather savings that pay for the cost of the life of 6 months of yourself and your family members that depend on your revenue to survive.

So, just use the cost of the life of your family and multiply by 6. The result is an amount that you should have in cash in your bank for immediate use. 

3.4 Avoid Risky Investments

When you have some money in your savings, it is tempting to use that money to invest in other people's businesses, like, for instance, company stock, virtual currencies, land, houses, etc...

Those investments are what we call speculative. That means that whoever tries to sell you those investments always claims the investments may return X many times the money you invested.

That may be true only if you figure out the right time to sell.

You may have learned about the stories of people that invested in virtual currencies like Bitcoin and then did not sell the money they bought near the moment of the peak of the valuation of those currencies. As time passed, the financial losses were enormous.

Remember that you no longer have money when you make those speculative investments. You cannot pay for your cost of life using virtual currency, company stock, land, houses, etc.. until you sell those assets.

So, I have two pieces of advice for you:

3.4.1 Learn before you invest

It would be best to learn when it is the right time to buy and sell those financial assets.

Do not invest if your savings are less than six months of your cost of living. You need to have money in your savings in case of a bad financial period.

3.4.2 Diversify your investments

These speculative investments may allow you to have significant gains or losses. If you put all your money into a single type of investment, you may lose all you have.

If you invest money in your savings that is above the six months of your cost of life limit, invest your money in different types of investments. If you lose all your money put in one kind of investment, you still have the other types of investment you may use to profit.