My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [7]
There are those who think that freelancing is a quaint little hobby for kept women (and men) who want to do quaint little projects a few hours a month, rather than a viable career path that can support a woman with a mortgage of her own, let alone an entire family of five. But I’m here to tell you those killjoys are dead wrong.
Over the years, I’ve met and interviewed countless females—some of them single mothers, some the sole breadwinner in a two-adult, multi-kid household—who pull in an impressive income by working for themselves full-time. There’s Erin Blaskie, a virtual assistant from Ontario, Canada, who started her business at age twenty-one and was making six figures by age twenty-three. There’s paper-cut artist Nikki McClure from Olympia, Washington, who feeds her family of three with the proceeds from her popular artwork, calendars, and books. There’s single mother Elizabeth Mance, who started her Seattle-based boutique accounting firm in 1997 and has since hired eight employees (not to mention put her son through college). There’s Alisa Geller, a personal trainer in Denver, who bought a home of her own while living single and working solo. There’s Sherri Schultz, a San Francisco-based editor with fifteen years in the freelance trenches, who doubles as caregiver for her elderly aunt and her father. And on and on.
Freelancing is a job, a business, just like any other. It doesn’t matter how much you enjoy painting murals, playing in nightclubs, or putting on charity auctions. You still have to take your business as seriously as the CEO of any multimillion-dollar start-up would. Hold on to your creative, artistic ideals, yes, but don’t let them rule your wallet entirely. Unless you don’t mind living on rice cakes and that vague hope that Oprah will, miraculously, stumble upon your chapbook, eBay store, or YouTube video and give you a call.
What’s My (Bottom) Line?
I know you’re probably anxious to get to the good stuff—how to find clients, how to negotiate a contract, how to work from home without winding up like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, talking to a volleyball. But none of that does you any good if you don’t have your bottom line in mind.
As the CEO of your own freelance venture, your first order of business, if you haven’t done so already, is to figure out how much you need to earn—as in, how much you need to live on for the next year. If you’ve never committed a personal budget to paper, it’s moment-of-truth time. Track each bagel and beer you buy for a month to see where all your dough goes, then multiply by twelve to get a tally of your annual spending. Don’t forget any one-time expenses you’ll have for the year, like vacations, car registration, and holiday gifts. Because until you get real with how much you need to live on, you can’t accurately determine what to charge for your freelance projects and how much you’ll need to work each week in order to make enough green to survive.
One of the downsides of quitting your 9-to-5 is forfeiting that free or employer-subsidized health insurance. We’ll talk about options for buying your own health insurance in Chapter 15, but in the meantime, you can price plans on eHealthInsurance .com to get a rough number to plug in to your budget.
Don’t worry about the costs of running your business