Business Calculator and Small Business Tool Collection

While the primary purpose of this online calculator section is to assist small business owners, the ultimate goal is to help unhappy business owners become happy business owners, and non-business owners to become business owners.

If you don't own your own business then not only are you missing out on the incredible tax benefits of owning your own business, but you may also be missing out on the pure joy that comes from earning a living through your own creative self-expression (as opposed to being a slave to an employer's creative self-expression).

Or, if you do own your own business but you're miserable working in it, you likely chose your business for the wrong reasons -- the most common of which is the pursuit of more money.

The Financial Profit Chase

I have been in business for myself for most of my adult life (I'm 52 as of this writing), but only recently discovered the secret to being happily self-employed (you can read my story here).

For years I chased after business opportunities that promised more money because I thought more money would lead to more happiness. But in almost all cases I ended up with less money and less happiness.

Eventually, through a process of trial an mostly error, I discovered I had been chasing after the wrong type of profits. I had chased after financial profits instead of chasing after emotional profits.

Financial Profit Vs Emotional Profit

Since you can quantify money, tracking financial revenues and expenses is easy. In turn, this makes figuring financial profits and losses a relatively straight-forward process.

Unfortunately, emotional revenues and expenses can't be quantified, so they never show up in start-up business plans or year-end reports. None-the-less, not only do they exist, but if left unchecked can leave you emotionally broke no matter how much money you are making.

Before I actually experienced it for myself, I had always thought it would be impossible to be miserable while earning a 6-figure annual income. If you don't believe it's possible, I suggest you park outside the Betty Ford Clinic and take careful note of who is getting in and out of limousines that pull up out front.

The bottom line is this, if the emotional revenues you get from your work or business fail to exceed the emotional expenses your work is generating, you end up with an emotional net-loss.

How to Choose the Right Business to Own

For me, the key to eventually becoming happily self-employed is when I began chasing after emotional profits rather than financial profits. And that meant changing my focus from making more money to making more happiness. In other words, I stopped making my business decisions based on how much money I could make, and I started making them based on the following criteria:

• Will I enjoy the work?
• Am I naturally and genuinely interested in the field I'll be working in?
• Do I believe in the mission of the business?
• Will my work cause others more good than harm?
• Will I still be able to put my family's needs ahead of my business time commitments?
• If I had all the money I could ever spend, would I engage in this work without pay?

If I cannot honestly answer "yes" to all of the above questions, then I know from experience that any emotional revenues I receive from any financial gain will be diminished or wiped out by the emotional losses stemming from the questions I answered "no" to.

As evidenced by the existence of this page, the decision to start free-online-calculator-use.com met all of the criteria with flying colors.

Of course, choosing the right small business to start is only half of the "happily self-employed" equation. The other half is learning to live within whatever means that business provides. Because the more lavish and more leveraged your lifestyle, the less freedom you will have to run your business in a way that makes you the happiest.