Why I Love My Virtual Debit Card

Like most VAs, I work by the hour. Unlike most VAs, I get paid upfront and have zero bad debt. But hourly work presents many problems, not the least of which is the fact that you get paid after the work is done. With some clients, it also means constantly chasing them for a check. Luckily, soon after I began working as a VA, I came up with the idea of a virtual “Debit Card” to charge for my services.

In this episode of The RocketGirl Show, I'll share how "Debit Card" works.

TRANSCRIPT 

I'm Belinda Sandor, also known as RocketGirl. And today on The RocketGirl show, we're going to talk about why I love my virtual debit card. A lot of virtual assistants asked me about how how to get paid. I hear them really struggling with invoices and pricing and how much for this task and how much for that task. I think there's a lot of struggle about packages, all the things. Right. All the things around pricing. So I want to tell you about my super simple way to get paid that I've been using for the last ten years in my RocketGirl business so that you can skip that struggle.

It's really important just to make it super simple. Okay. So I have something called the RocketGirl debit card. It's a virtual debit card. All right. So clients prepay for my time, so they pay me upfront for five or ten-hour chunks. Okay. So they prepay me. So I call it a debit card, but it's like a virtual debit card. There's no actual debit card. It's just they're putting hours in the bank. Okay. So they prepay. They always know where they stand. So what happens is every Monday morning, I track my time all day. And then every Monday morning, I send an accounting of how much time is left to my clients. I don't tell them everything that I did. I don't do that. That happens via email as we're working together. But it's very simple. I'll say dear. So. And so you have this many minutes, this many hours, and then what happens is I send them a link so they can reload. Okay.

So when their time gets low, they buy more. And it's so easy for them because they do it when they get the email. So every Monday, people who have 30 minutes left or an hour left buy more time. So it's great in terms of cash flow and knowing when money is going to be coming in. So when they buy the debit card, they automatically get a receipt. If you can see how easy this is, I track my time all day. The clients buy my time ahead of time. I let them know how much they have left, and then they buy more time, no fuss, no mess, no invoicing, no chasing bad debt like none of that. And I charge the same rate whether I'm doing marketing automation or scheduling a meeting. It's just my RocketGirl rate, and my clients love it. They love it. And I have had more than 200 people work with me this way over the course of ten years. Okay.

Let's get into some more details. The time on a debit card is good for a year. So here's how that works. Let's say someone buys 10 hours and they need me to use time with me about 2 hours a month. All right. So when that time is up, they buy more. I have other clients who buy a debit card about every ten days. They need, like, on average, an hour a day or something for me to get their work done. And it takes the pressure off because what happens is clients buy the time when they need it, right? It sort of separates the money from the work in a way that's really nice. It's really nice. So like I was saying, some buy a debit card every two weeks and others once a year, and it also enables me to have many, many clients at once because they all don't need me the same amount. So when the time runs out, so let's say I'm in the middle of a project and there's no more time left on the debit card, I simply email the client and say, I'd love to keep going on your project. Your debit card is empty. Please reload so I can keep going. Simple. So you can hear how throughout the entire interaction with the client, I don't talk about money. There's no real money conversation. It's just about loading up their debit card and me doing the work. So I hope you'll think about that. It's been a great system for me. After a while, when you're doing it for a while, you'll notice that the dollars coming in sort of even out so that you're making a consistent amount of money every single month. All right.

So if you're not already, I'd love you to come over to my free online classroom on Facebook. Just type The Virtual Assistant Connection in the search bar at the top and click the join button. You will find a lovely community with almost 17,000 people who are either already a VA or thinking about it. The community is warm and friendly, and there's a ton of information there. There are videos, blog posts, all kinds of information, so I hope you will join me over there. I'd love to have you. I'm Belinda Sandor, signing off until next time. Bye bye.