(Note from Tawra: Here's the next article in the Work at Home Series by Patrice Lewis. She writes for my favorite magazine Countryside and I just love her articles on working at home.)

I love to spend money. While I'm not especially fond of jewelry or clothes or makeup, my particular weakness is books. Amazon-dot-com is one of my favorite internet hangouts.

But though I sometimes spend more than I should, by anyone else's standards I'm pretty frugal. Why? Because we have a home craft business, and that means our income is uncertain.

If you have a home business, you know what I mean. You never know where your next dollar is coming from – or, more importantly, when that next dollar is coming in.

We've had our own business now for fourteen years (www.donlewisdesigns.com), and the income it brings in supports our family of four as well as our homestead. We're not rich (no, I can't buy all the books I want...) but we make do.

So how did we manage to find the startup cash to get going? That's one of the most frequent questions we're asked by people who are interested in leaving the corporate rat-race to work at home.

In 1992, when we left California, we were making a combined income of nearly $70,000. No kids. No debts. No kidding. We moved to rural Oregon with a fixer-upper house and four acres. No kids. No debts. No job. No kidding.

We took a look at our goals when we first moved to Oregon and decided to start a home business. It was all part of the Dream, you see. Somehow it didn't seem "right" to move to the country, but still have an office job. We were striving for more self-sufficiency, and a home business seemed part of the ideal. That, and... well... we couldn't find a job.

Trouble was, I was a full-time graduate student generating no income at all (but generating lots of tuition expenses). Don spent about six months fine-tuning our product design and building stock, and generating no income at all (but generating lots of materials expenses).

So we were forced by circumstances, or poor planning, to become frugal. Imagine the ramifications. We went from a high income to zilch, zero, nada. There is no faster way to learn frugality.

It wasn't an easy concept to grasp at first. Ex-yuppies that we were, we had a hard time not being able to go to our favorite restaurant every Friday night. New clothes were out of the picture. Books, furniture, anything requiring an exchange of currency became highly questionable. It also became apparent that any improvements on our fixer-upper house had to wait as well. Buckets and pans on the floor became our roof-repair kit.

We survived, I'm ashamed to say, on my student loans and our credit card – in other words, by going into debt. After two months in Oregon I found a job working 20 hours a week for minimum wage. It helped that our mortgage was low, but there is no doubt that had we continued to live in the style we were accustomed to in the city, our business would have failed within months. As it was, we started our business by doing things backwards.

So learn from our mistakes. Don't do what we did, which was to quit our day jobs before starting our business, thus throwing ourselves on the mercy of MasterCard.

However, it's a myth that it takes a lot of money to start a home craft business. The secret is to start slow and not expect instant success.

Now here's something that will discourage a lot of people from starting a business in the first place: it helps tremendously if you get out of debt first, especially if you plan to survive on the income provided by a home business. While we started our home business by going into some debt, it helped that we didn't have any other debt to start with except a modest mortgage.

So what are some ways to afford to get started in a home business?

First, quit spending so much. Brown bag it at work. Stop swinging by your favorite espresso place to and from. Cancel your cable. Never go to the mall. Get over your pride and buy clothes from Goodwill (trust me, no one but you will ever know the difference). Buy generic or store-brand items at the grocery store.

You've heard it all before – but now you have to just do it. I'm advocating frugality not for frugality's sake, but as a means to an end – as a way to help you start your home craft business.

Take an honest look at your major expenses, such as your mortgage and your car loan payments. Can you sell your house and buy a cheaper one? Living in San Jose, California with a mortgage of $3000 a month will make it tough to ever support yourself by making products out of your home (not to mention any noisy power tools will annoy the neighbors).

Can you sell your car and buy a less expensive used one for cash? Why make a car payment of $500 a month when you can save for a few months and pay cash for a good used vehicle?

These are all life-altering changes, but I'm assuming that you want to start a home business in order to make your life less complex and more independent. Living in a smaller house and driving a paid-for vehicle are excellent steps in the right direction.

Next, start saving to purchase the tools or raw materials you'll need to make your product. Need a table saw? Start saving. Don't go to the tool store and put it on your credit card. Save the money first, then go buy it. The same applies to the yarn, glue, wood, fabric, a computer, or whatever other raw materials you need to make your product. Only buy them when you have the cash in hand.

Start making your products and selling them whenever and wherever possible. You'll make a modest amount of money, and then – here's the tough part – plow it back into the business. Buy another tool you need, or purchase additional raw materials to make more product.

Several years ago, I taught classes at a local community college on how to start a home craft business. Among the many students I met was a woman who, in my opinion, was the only one who would succeed in making her craft business a full-time success. Why? Because she started modestly. She had turned her garage into a workshop (rather than renting a shop). She had mastered the art of assembly-line production. She was marketing her products in appropriate places. She worked evenings and weekends, around her full-time job.

But, most importantly, she lived below her means while getting her business off the ground (I suspect, also, that she simply didn't have time to go out and spend anything!). Any money that she earned went first to purchasing more raw materials for making her product. For the time being her full-time job paid her everyday living expenses. Her plan was to cut back her working hours as her home business took off.

In contrast to this, I know a young man who only purchased the best-quality tools, vehicles, and address (office space) for his business, insisting that customers were impressed by the best. While he may have been right - he lives in a high-end part of California - he also went deeply into debt in order to furnish the trappings of success before he was successful. He had no fall-back position. A bad economic turn, an injury, or any of a number of other pieces of bad luck would have wiped him out. As it was, it took him years longer to "succeed" and pay off his debts because he wanted only the best to start with.

Working outdoors when the sun shines. The center building is the 10x10 chicken coop used as a shop for five years.

So start modestly. Don't project hope into reality. It took us five years to afford to build a proper shop – until then, we worked out of a 10x10 foot converted chicken coop (unheated, I might add). Lots of times, the shop overflowed into the house or the lawn or the front porch or wherever else we could find a spot.

Even now, the temptation to spend beyond our means crops up. Sure, a gang-saw might decrease the amount of time it takes us to do one of the steps in making our tankards, but is it worth spending $3000 or more on a tool that increases our efficiency a bit? Not all labor-saving devices are worth it. A gang-saw would not improve the quality of our product – it would only save us some time. Yes, we all know that "time" equals "money" – but right now, a gang-saw wouldn't save enough time to make it worth the purchase price.

That said, there are times when you have to take a flier on an expensive piece of equipment. We bit the bullet and bought a very nice compound-miter saw a few years ago. It was an experiment, since we didn't know if it would improve our quality or not. However (a) we paid cash for it, and (b) we had an assurance from the local tool-store that we could return the tool if it didn't work out. Fortunately it not only worked out, but it saved us a considerable amount of time during the making of our product. In this case, it was money well spent.

My husband notes that men, especially, must fight the desire for "toyz." Don likes toyz just like every other guy, but no matter how hard he tries to justify a gang-saw or a standing drill press, he remains sensible – and frugal.

No shop? No problem! Work where you can.

The same goes for women. Go easy on the spending until you have both feet firmly on the ground of your home business.

Now for the bright side of things: getting the tools and raw material for starting a home business may be easier than you think. Most people don't just pluck a home craft business idea out of thin air. They start the business by expanding an existing hobby. That means that many times they already have the basic tools or materials or knowledge needed to make the product.

Give yourself time to develop your customer base, increase the speed and efficiency in making your product, and develop your marketing knowledge. Don't sink yourself into debt getting started.

You'll sleep better at night.

Patrice Lewis is co-founder of Don Lewis Designs (www.donlewisdesigns.com). She and her husband have been in business for fourteen years. The Lewis's live on forty acres in north Idaho with their two homeschooled children, assorted livestock, and a shop which overflows into the house with depressing regularity.