I am a single man shop developing a handful of desktop applications and websites. I started using GIT for version control a few months ago, and I am reasonably happy with it, bu
I think for your purpose exactly how you use it is fine. Branches are created in the same repository as your working copy.
Maybe you should consider making some backup copies for your git projects to another machine. Then you can just push your changes there and don't loose your work if your computer crashes.