My #1 tip for freelancers
What you need will evolve. Invest in it anyway.
Before we begin: I am seeking a cat lover to sublet my femininomenal Austin apartment August-December. Details over on Insta. Please share with anyone who’s looking!
Over the last three years, I learned to do something that used to feel very hard, risky, and even out of the question. I learned to invest in myself.
In 2020, a first-second-of-the-pandemic layoff rendered me a freelancer in an instant. I had no idea I would still be one more than five years later.
I basically didn’t work for a year (that’s a whole other story). Then I moved to Austin in June 2021 and told myself, “I’ll give it a year to see how it goes.” I lived mentally trapped in an anxious limbo between “I guess I’m doing okay as a freelancer” and “I need a full-time job again right this second.” I often applied to (and interviewed for) full-time jobs — which took up a lot of my time and energy — mostly out of fear.
But I finally turned a real corner into fully embracing my life and future as a freelancer after working with wealth activist Stella Gold.
In 2023, I made about $75,000, which was $20,000 less than I’d made as a freelancer the previous year — and a lot less than I made in my final year in the corporate world. I did not feel financially spacious or secure in any way. Still, I chose to invest $6,000 to work with Stella for half a year.
At the time, this felt like a lot of money to me (still does!). My knee-jerk reaction was to believe that I simply could not afford it. I mean, it was a whopping 8% of my gross income that year.
But the more I thought about working with Stella, the more I knew that this was an investment I needed to make. I was ready to get serious about building my freelance business, and thinking of it as such. I had no real visibility on my spending and saving, so I felt financially lost and anxious all the time. I felt like I was flailing, and needed a stabilizing rudder. I was throwing spaghetti at the wall with no intention, so little was sticking. I needed a damn plan.
I was ready to choose myself, and cultivate the life I envisioned. So I went for it.
In my 2023 Freelance Year in Review, I wrote:
The best decision I made as a freelancer in 2023 was working with Stella Gold at My Gold Standard to power up my business. They helped me form an S Corp, get a business checking account and credit card, set up a Profit First savings system, and make countless other decisions to set my business up for the next five years. This was a big financial investment for me, so it took some soul-searching for me to commit, but I am overjoyed that I did, and the rewards I reaped from working with Stella are priceless.
At that moment in time, I needed the support that Stella was offering me most.
After Stella helped me get my business in order, there was a new thing that I needed most: to rebrand and get a website that represented my current freelancer self, stat. I had been procrastinating on this task for years, and doing myself a major disservice by keeping a website that embarrassed me. I finally accepted that I was never going to have the time or skills to create the kind of site I envisioned.
So I invested $5,000 to work with Ashleigh Keith, website designer and developer extraordinaire. She brought my Barbiecore vision to life with a website that pops, shows off who I am, and constantly garners me compliments. She helped me create my services page, and I launched my first instant bookable offerings, which jump-started my ultimate vision of making more of my own money. And she designed all the graphics you’ve come to know and love here in the newsletter, and made me signature signoffs I still drool over. I mean, LOOK AT THESE!
If you’re keeping up, you’ll notice that I invested $11,000, or almost 15% of my gross income, into my business in 2023. That meant I had to decrease my spending in other areas of my life. But it felt nothing like a sacrifice; it felt like the most worthwhile gifts I’ve ever given myself. It felt like my creative Christmas morning. And it definitely helped that because I’m now set up as an S Corp, these costs were business write-offs.
Once my shiny new site was launched, I felt more confident to present myself to more potential clients. But there was a creative aspect, particularly around writing and pitching, that I felt was missing.
So I invested in my own creative coach, Catherine LaSota, at $350/month for all of 2024. We met once a month to talk about my creative goals and writing practice, and she sent me Tarot prompts every Sunday. She taught me to make creative projects as FUN and EASY as possible, which helped curb my perfectionism. She also helped me see that I was always taking on too many projects at once; three big goals are all I can handle at any given time, at most. Now I can more easily catch myself when I’m setting unrealistic output expectations.
Catherine also taught me an invaluable lesson: instead of holding onto guilt about not doing something, like buying an online course but never taking it, I can just…let it go. I can decide, at any time, “This is no longer a priority, and I’m not going to do it,” then put it down and never look back. That had never occurred to me before!
Most importantly, Catherine was my own personal cheerleader, a kind and gentle mirror in the face of my own self-criticism, demands, and disappointment. That was what I needed most at the time.
In the new year, the thing I needed the most was a business cohort. So I joined Cody Cook-Parrot’s Fieldwork creative advising program, along with 19 other creatives, for $250/month for three months. This program and these people are incredible. I dreamed big in these three months, got inspired by others’ business plans, and got so much useful feedback. I soaked in Cody’s wisdom about marketing, online teaching, thinking and talking about money, pricing offerings, and writing a damn good newsletter. My time in Fieldwork pushed me to refresh my lead gen, my free list of 142 of my favorite resources for freelancers, and launch two new offerings I’d had banging around in my skull for years: Write Your Pitch in One Hour and a month of Pitch Perfect Coaching. Thanks to my time in this group, plenty more is on the way.
Not all of these investments had a direct financial ROI — but that wasn’t the point then, and it’s not now. Yes, it’s absolutely important to me to keep building a sustainable, comfortable life as a freelancer writer and editor. It’s important to live within my means and my values. But it’s also wildly important for me to nourish myself creatively, go after audacious writing goals, and keep choosing myself, even when the world feels like it’s closing in. Especially then.
All the deep thinking, intentional action, and confidence-building I gifted myself with over the last few years has brought me to this point: I’ll be quitting a financially significant job, traveling for five months this fall, focusing on learning Spanish, and working less (and making less money). This leap of faith is what I need most now.
At this moment in particular, the world feels out of control and scary. Being a freelancer feels very much the same. So here’s my #1 piece of advice for freelancers who are struggling with a scarcity mindset:
Invest in the thing you need most right now.
The thing you need most will evolve along with you, your creativity, your goals, and your financial situation. But every investment in self begets the next one. Each time you choose you, financially or energetically, it’s like you’re inserting some coins in your existential piggy bank, and it just keeps expanding. When you treat your deepest desires as actual needs, things change for the better. Instead of instantly shutting your desires down, you find ways to bring them to life. You dream, then maneuver, then find the right people to support you along the way.
It’s hard out here to make it all by yourself — thankfully, you don’t have to.
Ready to invest in yourself? I’m ready to work with you!
