Last summer I was doing some writing work for a client who I really liked and he asked if I had time to do a writing assignment for a friend of his. This was easy – 5 blog posts – so I said yes.

All freelancers reading this, PLEASE learn from my mistake!

Being the trusting soul that I am, I did not require payment up front nor did I even think to ask for half payment upfront. I was more focused on doing the job and getting that extra $100 into my bank account that it never crossed my mind. Afterall, I had never had issues with clients and non payment before so why would it start with this client?

Foolish attitude!

After I completed the 5 blog posts (which fortunately did NOT take that much time) I heard from the client that she loved them. I was thrilled that she was happy because I was hoping for a regular gig. So I went along and sent my handy dandy PayPal invoice.

Weeks went by and I received no payment. After sending some friendly inquiring emails, I got the standard response, “Oh, I missed seeing the invoice.” Then I heard, “The company doesn’t have a credit card; can we send you a check?” Figuring this would be the only way to get my money, I agreed and sent her my mailing address.

Needless to say (and I’m sure you’ve probably guessed by now) I’m STILL waiting for that check.

Lesson learned.

Here are some tips so you can avoid this exact situation. You work too hard to be stiffed!

1. Develop a payment policy and stick with it! Paypal is the easiest way for freelancers to accept online payments but you can’t force someone to pay that invoice. Many freelancers require half payment upfront before any work is started and then bill for the remaining 50% upon completion of the job. If a client is willing to give some payment upfront, they are most likely serious business people.

2. Discuss this payment policy with each client. Just as important as having a policy is making sure ALL your clients KNOW about the policy and agree to it. Don’t just put it somewhere on your website and “assume” that your clients will see it. Tell the clients about the policy either in your contact email or phone call, direct them to the page on your website to read, and have them sign a payment agreement before you start the job.

3. Consider charging a late payment fee. While it’s unlikely to receive payment within 24 hours of sending an invoice, freelancers shouldn’t have to wait longer than 10 days to receive payment. Sometimes a late fee will be a percentage of the total bill or it could be a flat dollar amount. Again, let your clients know about this ahead of time and send followup emails prior to charging the late fee. This might be the incentive they need to get the invoice paid.

4. Develop a collections plan if no payment is received. So, what’s your plan to get paid if your client disappears? You can register a PayPal grievance but that only works if your client has a PayPal account (mine did not). You can also pursue payment through small claims court or, if the amount is substantial, you can hire a contingency fee-based collections attorney.

No one likes to think of doing work with unscrupulous clients but sometimes things like this do happen. Thinking of these problems and solutions when you BEGIN your business can only help you in the future.

photo image by bertop

The good news is that there are clients out there with interesting projects and substantial budgets, and they are looking for freelancers. The bad news, of course, is that there are a lot of freelancers who want these jobs. To get high-paying work, you’re going to have to learn how to compete more effectively.

Here are the top 5 things you can do to attract more high-paying clients to your business:

1. Improve your skills. It turns out that there are no shortcuts to excellence. If you want to get high-paying work, you have to be worthy of it. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck if you’re not currently the best writer on the block. Take a class. Participate in a workshop. Practice. Get feedback from a mentor if you can. Read about writing. Practice some more. Most importantly, you have to keep pushing yourself to get better. Don’t feel like it? Maybe this high-paying clients thing isn’t for you (I tried to warn you there are no shortcuts).

2. Specialize. As in any profession, writers with a specialty tend to make more than generalists. Clients (especially those with larger budgets) aren’t looking for well-rounded writers; they’re looking for particular people to handle particular projects. For any given project, they’re looking for the best person for the job. The best person is almost always going to be someone who specializes in that type of work. If a client with plenty of money is looking for someone to write a sales letter, is s/he going to hire a “good writer,” or the well-known expert on sales letters? That’s an easy decision. So it’s important to pick a specialty and become an expert in that type of work – just make sure it’s something you enjoy doing, and something that your target market really needs.

3. Target the right market. No matter how good you are, if your target market is broke, you have a problem. That’s not to say you should only target the super-rich, but make sure your market has enough money to pay the rates you’re seeking. Your market also has to care (a lot) about quality. The only reason a client will pay more than the average rate for a freelancer is because the client wants better than average quality. The more your market cares about quality, the more you stand to make (assuming you’re really good at what you do).

4. Set rates appropriately. It’s hard to go after high-paying clients when you’re still accepting low-paying work. First, you end up so busy with the low-paying stuff that you don’t have time to go after better jobs. Second (and more importantly), when your going rates are low, prospective clients make certain assumptions about you and your work. They assume your rates are low because you aren’t good enough to charge more. They assume that you can only handle certain types of work. You have to be willing to ask for the rates you deserve (if you don’t deserve more than you’re currently charging, go back to #1). If you’re not willing to ask for higher rates, I can guarantee you that no one will be willing to pay those rates.

5. Market yourself effectively. It bears repeating that clients with a lot of money have a lot of choices. Why should they choose you? To compete for high-paying work, you’re going to need an impressive website and portfolio, testimonials from past clients, and a professional demeanor. You will probably want to start your own blog to establish your expertise, and use social media such as Twitter to raise your visibility. Learn as much as you can about marketing and learn how to close a sale once you have someone interested.

To learn more about how to get more high-paying clients, sign up for my free e-course. It’s a 10-lesson course delivered every few days to your e-mail inbox, it’s totally free, and it will help you make more money with your freelance business. What could be better than that?

How, oh how, do freelancers get any work done in the summer?

May’s Totals:

Monthly Income: $6,013.50
Percentage of Income Paid Out to Our Writers: 25.3%

SEO Articles – $2,147.30

Web Content – $274.90

Blogs – $1,240.00

Ebooks/Reports – $1,290.00

Newsletters – $211.30

Press Releases – $100.00

General Informational Articles – $120.00

Miscellaneous Business Writing – $630.00

You’ll notice that we paid out a substantially larger percentage to our writers than we have in previous months. We’re hoping this will be a trend we continue in months to come; not only is it great to provide an income to others, but it also decreases the amount of time we spend in front of the computer!

Welcome to Spark an Idea Thursday.  Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers.  We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog!  If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

While money is certainly not the only motivating factor for freelancing, it is a big one. If I could realistically live the life of a SAHM instead of a WAHM, I think I’d be OK with that. Unfortunately, the need for cold, hard cash is a reality here in Freelance Parent Land. I recently used that to my advantage, and the payoff (pardon the pun) was really worthwhile.

I guess that in order to tell this story properly, I will have to admit that my life involves a fair amount of debt. Both my husband and I attended a very pricey university, and I was crazy enough to go back for that Master’s Degree. We should probably pay off our student loans right around the time we start putting our own kids through college. Yeah, that’s a fairly depressing thought.

A couple of months ago, I decided to use those student loans to motivate myself to see what I could do with my freelance writing business. I set a rather ridiculous goal to try and pay off one of my husband’s student loans. The goal was $13,000 in five months. I started last November and had hoped to pay the entire thing off by the first day of spring.

Having that goal made me much more productive. Whenever a job came in, Tamara and I would determine if it was something she wanted or not. When neither one of us has the time or inclination for a particular project, we turn to our writers to see who would be a good fit. For those five months, however, anything that didn’t go to Tamara “defaulted” to me. As a result, I put in far more hours than I ever had before, and I got myself on track to pay off that debt.

Having that student loan bill as motivation was really inspiring. I could watch each month as the next statement came in the mail, reflecting all the extra payments I had made. Rather than having the money just disappear (as is common when there’s no true set purpose for it), I was able to funnel it right into the perfect place. In fact, I would find myself doing “mental math” from time to time. “So, if I take this project for $800 and those other two for $400, that’s an extra three months’ payments on the student loan…”

I have to confess, however, that one thing did get in the way of my plan…one client left me on the hook for about $3,500. We’re still working to recoup that money, and it has been quite a lesson. Not only did that mean that I had $3,500 less for my overall goal, but it knocked a lot of the wind out of my sails and derailed my progress. Remember, I was trying to earn $13,000 above my normal pay.

In the end, I paid about half of it off, which is still quite an accomplishment. It was a lot of extra work, but it’s the kind of thing I can see doing every once in a while…maybe when we get close to paying off the next student loan, for example, I’ll kick it back into high gear for a couple of months. The point here is that by finding one place to focus my financial efforts, I was really able to motivate myself to stay quite focused and to get more done than I ever had before.

That said, I would absolutely love to know what types of things you all do to get that extra motivation! What ideas can you spark?

We alternated between blaming the economy, the omnipresent freelancer famine, and the quirks of fate. But, as it turns out, it was really just two women falling into full-blown panic mode for no real good reason. We ended up having a pretty good month, and have plenty of work lined up for May.

I will say, however, that it was nice to have a business partner to accompany me into panic mode. Like misery, it’s much more pleasant when you bring a friend along.

Without further ado, here’s the breakdown for April:

Monthly Income: $4,142.65
Percentage of Income Paid Out to Our Writers: 7.2%

SEO Articles – $125.00

Web Content – $352.60

Blogs – $1,360.00

Ebooks/Reports – $1,600.00

Newsletters – $75.00

Editing – $70.00

Product Descriptions – $185.05

Press Releases – $175.00

Nonprofit – $200.00

We’re still pretty curious about the way other freelancers are faring in this economy. While I’m fully onboard Lorna’s It’s Not the Economy concept, I can’t help but think that there are some issues at play. And I’m not the only one; the first question almost everyone asks me when we meet is how my company’s doing in the face of so many layoffs and cutbacks nationwide. (So far, so good, people. So far, so good.)

Couple this with a client we fear will go bankrupt before meeting all their outstanding invoices, the loss one of our biggest regular clients, and general paranoia about the economy, and you’ll get an idea about how we’re feeling.

Here’s the breakdown:

Monthly Income: $5,381.44
Percentage of Income Paid Out to Our Writers: 4.9%

SEO Articles – $1,999.00

Web Content – $1,529.54

Blogs – $80.00

Ebooks/Reports – $1,200.00

Newsletters – $222.80

Print – $0

Product Descriptions – $100.10

Press Releases – $250.00

So what’s going on out in the freelancing world? Is this part of the regular famine that we all experience, or are other freelancers facing a downturn and starting to feel the belt closing in?

Also, go enter our contest.

There is absolutely TONS of talk on the blogs about how to set your freelance rates. You will probably notice, however, that while everyone talks about how to set your rates, no one tells you what they actually charge. There are a couple of reasons for that, in my opinion:

• If you tell others what you charge, they might undercut your rates and get all your great jobs.
• Other freelancers might make fun of you for not charging enough. (There are a couple of freelancers in the blogosphere who make it their personal mission to go around berating freelancers who don’t charge enough.)
• People might think you’re too big for your britches if they learn that you’re charging three times more than they are.
• Our culture has certain taboos regarding talking about money in more than hypothetical terms.

Tamara and I have attempted to break through some of these obstacles by posting our own freelance income report each month. Of course, we didn’t do that early on when we were happy to make a couple hundred dollars a month, but that’s mostly because we hadn’t thought of it yet. We really want to try to take some of the mystique out of freelancing, so that’s why we made the decision to post those reports. When you read them, however, keep in mind that we’ve been doing this for about a year and a half, and between the two of us, we probably work a little more than 40 hours a week.

One Approach to Setting Freelance Rates

So, how do you set your freelance rates? There are tons of opinions out there on the subject. Some say that you should determine how much money you need to make and then divide that by the number of hours you intend to work to get a reasonable hourly rate. If that makes sense to you, then go for it! Other suggestions include charging a per-word or per-project fee. We use this approach quite a bit in our business. We base the rate not only on the size of the project, but also on the type of project. For that reason, we have different prices for “web content,” “ebooks,” “SEO articles,” and other types of writing.

I may get yelled at by other freelancers for disclosing this, but here’s how we got to this point:

I’d like to start February’s income report by saying that, as with most businesses and individuals these days, the Berry-Brewer Freelance Agency has been negatively affected by the economy. In addition to general annoyance, we’ve lost three fairly regular clients who simply had to cut back on their own expenses. We also had a very late international payment almost cut in half because what the exchange rate was in October (when we did the work) and February (when we got paid) were two very different things. These things do not make us altogether happy.

That being said, I’d like to also state that the Berry-Brewer Freelance Agency has been positively affected by the economy. We’re not quite sure if more businesses are turning to independent contractors to provide low-cost copy (as opposed to doing it in-house), or if we’re experiencing something of a fluke, but this has been the most incredible month we’ve had as a business so far. It was so incredible, in fact, that Lorna squealed like a little girl and hugged me when I told her what number we’d hit. And I’m not a hugger.

Here’s the breakdown:

Monthly Income: $7,300
Percentage of Income Paid Out to Our Writers: 14.8%

SEO Articles – $2,605

Web Content – $2,219

Blogs – $261

Ebooks/Reports – $1,840

Newsletters – $150

Print – $0

Press Releases – $225

We’d really like to follow this month up with another one breaking $7,000. After all, nothing beats kicking the economy in the butt like showing regular growth regardless of stimulus packages and housing market collapses!

http://www.sparkplugging.com/freelance-parent/freelance-income-report/ – January, 2009

http://www.sparkplugging.com/freelance-parent/freelance-income-report-playing-catch-upand-losing/ – November and December, 2008

http://www.sparkplugging.com/freelance-parent/freelance-income-report-aka-show-me-the-money-3/ – October, 2008

http://www.sparkplugging.com/freelance-parent/freelance-income-report-aka-show-me-the-money-2/ – September, 2008

http://www.sparkplugging.com/freelance-parent/freelance-income-report-aka-show-me-the-money/ - August, 2008

http://www.sparkplugging.com/freelance-parent/our-first-freelance-income-report-aka-show-me-the-money/ – July, 2008

Overall, Lorna and I feel like we have never been more busy than we have been these past two weeks. Part of it may have to do with opening a new office space, but a lot of it also has to do with several new clients we’ve acquired. I expected the acquisition of these new clients to make a profound difference in our numbers, but they haven’t. Not yet, anyway.

Here’s the breakdown:

Monthly Income: $3650.73

SEO Articles – $1964

Web Content – $248.90

Blogs – $91.28

Ebooks/Newsletters/Reports – $920

Print – $309.05

Product Description – $42.50

Press Release – $75

I promise that’s not what happened. It’s much more noble than that: a severe case of the lazies.

In my defense, November was sucked up by NaNoWriMo, and I can blame December on the holidays. But believe me, I’m feeling the backlash now. Not only have I been remiss in updating our report here on Freelance Parent, but I’m also behind in my own bookkeeping (and I’m completely changing the way I do the finances this year, which doesn’t help). This is not good, seeing as how I got a phone call from our accountant today reminding me of certain…unfinished reports he’s in need of. Oops.

Anyway, let this be a lesson to all of us in keeping things current. A freelancer who falls behind in bookkeeping is a freelancer who has to spend hours upon hours catching up.

So, without any further ado, here is a *very* brief overview of November and December for us. Hopefully, the new year will bring more organization and actual current reports!

November: $3,911.70

December: $3,896.64

First of all, I have to point out that—as is so often the case with debates—I think we all ended up practically “arguing” the same point, just in different words. I agree with the way James phrased it:

“We’ve determined (all four of us) that it’s possible (but not preferable) to start a freelancing business on less than $500.”

Yep. We agree on that. You can totally do it with less than $500, but you’d better have a backup plan.

So, here’s where I get a little rant-y. I hope you’ll bear with me, as I think I actually have two mini-rants brewing at the moment.

Point #1:

Tamara and I absolutely know that we are privileged. The mere fact that we live in North America means that we are privileged. Also, the reason that I mentioned our working spouses was to be clear to everyone that we knew we were in a fortunate situation. Of course, that’s not to say that we are (as Tamara so eloquently put it) “a couple of rich bitches who decided to take up freelancing because we got bored of sitting around and having our nails done.”

We started freelancing because we needed money and wanted to earn it on our own terms. When we decided to start our business, Tamara’s husband had taken on a second job, and I was trying to figure out which maternity outfit was going to work best for my upcoming job interviews. She even took a part-time job at the beginning to help her family meet expenses. So, while we are absolutely a couple of fortunate people, we want to be clear that this wasn’t just a lark or a hobby.

This leads nicely into my second rant…

We set a large financial goal of $5,000 for the month for the pair of us, and I’m happy to say that we got there. This is pretty amazing, considering about a year ago we were struggling to find a way to reach even half that. As almost all successful freelancers will tell you, there seems to be a breaking point where all of a sudden the works just multiplies itself. It takes time and hard work to get there, but it is worth it!

We’ve decided to take a page from another brave freelancer’s first financial report and actually share dollar amounts this month. Hopefully, it will help everyone to see where and how we’re doing our business.

Total Income for October: $5337

SEO writing = $1832
E-books = $1405
Print media = $462
Nonprofit = $414
Blogs = $99
Web content = $1125

Next month should be an interesting one. Lorna has set some pretty high financial goals personally, so she expects to be increasing her workload as November wears on. On the flip side, I am actually taking a step back from freelancing (not stopping altogether, but definitely slowing the stream) to follow some goals of my own. That’s right – it’s NaNoWriMo time, and I fully intend to become a part of the mania that is 50,000 words in 30 days. Wish both of us luck!

Yet despite what sometimes felt like a whirlwind of activity, we still managed to meet our goal for this month’s income. I’ll be honest – we were near nervous breakdowns on more than one occasion – but at the end of the day, we feel really good about where we’re headed.

You will notice a new “passive income” category in this month’s freelance income report.  It’s pretty small right now, but we’re excited to watch it grow over the next several months as we put more and more of our ideas to work.

We’ve increased our goal substantially for this month in addition to starting some new marketing campaigns, so we’ll see if our pattern can hold!

Total Income for September: $4,047.60

Percentage of This to PayPal/Guru Fees: 6.73 %

Total Number of Clients Served this Month: 13

Number of These Clients Who are New: 3

Original Client Contact Point

Guru.com: 9

Subcontracted work: 1

Referrals: 3

Total Number of Projects Completed: 20

Project Types

SEO and web-based article writing: 7

Website content: 4

Blogs and blog-related work: 2

Nonprofit: 2

E-books/E-courses: 1

Copywriting: 4

Passive Income: $23.00

Finding a fine balance

Lorna and I are really great at meeting deadlines for our clients. We really are. However, we – and most work-from-home-professionals that we know – constantly put our own work on the back burner and fly past self-set deadlines like we haven’t a care in the world. We have a separate blog for our business that is utterly neglected, we have really good marketing plans that we’ve yet to put to good use, and we have a number of small personal projects that we never seem to have time to even work on, let alone finish.

Oh, and we’ve tried to work around it. We have a “business account” that automatically receives 15 percent of everything we make, so we tried paying ourselves from that account as a way to get motivated. Basically, we hired ourselves to write blog posts for $10 each. I wrote zero. Lorna wrote two. That was a month ago.

We also sat each other down and put on our stern faces. “We need to get more posts up.” “You write two articles for the marketing idea, and I’ll do three. No backing out.” Of course, we backed out.

Finally, after much painful deliberation, we decided to outsource them to other writers.

Now, I’m a pretty logical gal. I know that paying someone else to write a $15 blog post for us is a big fat waste of money for two reasons:

A) I could write it myself at any point of almost any given day. It’s 30 minutes of work, tops.
B) We are paying out money that we earned (i.e., the $15 I made writing an article of virtually the same length has to be taxed, and is therefore actually only about $12 – so I am essentially losing $3 in addition to spending the same amount of time working anyway).

Still, it feels like the greatest idea ever.

The question of outsourcing has been plaguing us in more ways than just this. Lorna and I have both – completely independently of one another – been toying with the idea of hiring someone to come clean our houses. My house is a mess. There are dust bunnies under the couch larger than my daughter, my sink is full of dishes, and I believe we each have one clean pair of underwear left (which means I’ll probably buy some more when I’m out and about tomorrow rather than actually do the laundry).

Basically, we are willing to have complete strangers enter our homes while we sit at our computers, clean around us while trying not to let us see their faces of disgust, and charge us more than we will actually make in that same amount of time to make our environments livable.

Again, the logical Tamara comes out to play:

A) I will pay the equivalent of two hours of my working time to have someone else clean my house in one hour.
B) I will probably also take the time to make her some cookies and kiss her feet.

Again, I’m really starting to feel this idea.

I once came across an article by a freelance writer discussing the ever-present question of how much to charge (I can’t find it anywhere now, and believe me – I looked). Overall, he was really pompous and irritating. He talked about how his time is worth $100 per hour (or something like that), and that he never spent time on activities he deemed “less worthy” than that $100. So he didn’t mow the lawn because he could hire a lawn company to do it for $35. If he went outside and did it himself, he’d be wasting $65. He went on like this for awhile.

I had a few problems with this theory:

1. Once you start quantifying your time like that, how do you stop? If he’s having dinner with his wife and she starts discussing inane topics, is he going to cut her off and go take his plate to the computer instead? “Sorry, honey. You just wasted $50 with that stupid story about your yoga class.”
2. There is more value to an activity than just the time investment. For example, I wondered if this man belonged to a gym (insert: gym fees, gym clothes, gas to get there). Going outside and mowing the lawn would be excellent exercise, especially if he got one of those old push mowers. He could essentially save himself money in gym costs if he mowed his own lawn twice a week. Plus, there’s the simple benefit of going outside and enjoying the air. He could listen to some catchy tunes, meet some neighbors, or simply enjoy being alive rather than attached to his computer screen.

He would probably have a problem with my outsourcing idea – not because it is asking other people to do things that I can do perfectly well myself, but because I’m not making the wisest financial decision.

So where does the balance lie? Do my distaste of cleaning and my inability to self-motivate secondary projects qualify as enough of a cause to make outsourcing a good idea? Or am I just being lazy and financially irresponsible?

As far as home-based businesses go, freelance writing has been a dream come true for us. We’ve had our ups and downs, and the ups have been more than enough to keep us motivated and excited. We definitely think of you all as one of those “ups.” We want to thank you for being a part of our success. We truly believe that we’ve gotten as far as we have because of this blog…because of you!

James, Allena, Melissa, and Genesis weighed in, and they were all really supportive. We wanted to say “thanks” to all of you for that.

But, it turns out that we’re not done with this topic yet. In fact, it seems that we don’t plan to ever be done with this topic. One of the basic tenants of Freelance Parent is that we want to encourage those who are willing to work hard enough to take the leap into freelancing. In order to do this, we feel it’s important to share the truth and give people a factual example of what others are doing.

In honor of our recent revelation, we’ve decided to offer a monthly look into the finances and workload of the Berry-Brewer Freelance Agency. We are opening ourselves up to scrutiny in hopes that our struggles and successes can inspire others to learn what it means to be a freelance writer in the current market.

Whether you want to compare your own successes to ours (for good or evil purposes); you are a new freelancer wondering about the hows, wheres, and whys of making money on the Internet; or you are simply a lookie-lou of the freelancing community, there is information here for everyone. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions as to how we came up with our numbers or why we do things the way we do.

Total Income for July: $2248.88

Total Number of Clients Served this Month: 13

Number of These Clients Who are New: 3

Original Client Contact Point
Guru.com: 6
Elance.com: 0
Subcontracted work: 1
Referrals: 6

Total Number of Projects Completed: 18

Project Types
SEO and web-based article writing: 3
Website content: 4
Blogs and blog-related work: 5
Nonprofit: 2
Product descriptions: 1
Press releases: 2
Newsletters: 1

Look for additional tallies in the upcoming months. This is no fair weather project; we mean to expose ours numbers every thirty days or so regardless of feast or famine.

Starting your own freelance business is a huge decision. There are so many choices to make and things to consider. Throughout the next few weeks, we’ll most likely look at a lot of these concerns. I know that Tamara and I have had them, and you’re probably dealing with them, too. This is one of those posts I’ve been nervous about writing. It’s one of the kind where we’re really transparent, and you get to see how we’ve done everything backwards. On the other hand, it should make you feel pretty good about yourself.

One of the biggest concerns for me has been the fact that I’m just not bringing in as much money as I would working a nine-to-five job. As much as I’m painfully aware of this, I know that my husband is doubly so. Even though I’ve never brought in a lot of money (my degrees are in the infamously low-paying non-profit sector), what I was earning helped make ends meet in our household.

Building your own freelance business is not necessarily a lucrative endeavor at the beginning! Of course, there is the benefit of having low overhead costs, which really helps in comparison to starting some other type of home-based business. Tamara and I literally started the Berry-Brewer Agency for approximately $220.

So, yea for low start-up costs, but boo for low start-up earnings.

What can you do to mitigate this? Well, the first option is probably “don’t quit your day job.” I’ve read a whole lot of how-to-freelance books, and pretty much all of them recommend that you don’t turn your back on a weekly paycheck while you’re getting set up. These books all say to start the freelancing part-time, before or after work. Once you’ve built up a clientele, then you can quit your other job.

Oops. We didn’t do that. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly by choice. On the other hand, if things hadn’t happened exactly the way they did, we very likely never would have ended up on this adventure.

If you have left your previous job, there are a few other ways to help make up the difference. For example, you could get a different, part-time job. I’m still considering this option, although, I have to admit that the pregnancy makes it a less-desirable option. Tamara tried temping for a while, but . . . well, let’s just say she didn’t like it. Another option for some is to get their significant others working harder. Tamara’s husband has taken on a second job, and we were lucky because mine just happened to be due for a raise when this whole thing started.

If bringing in more money isn’t going to work for you, consider how you might spend less while you’re getting your business off the ground. If you’re going to be spending hours working in front of the computer, for example, maybe you could cut back to basic cable. Instead of paying a babysitter, maybe you could trade with another parent so that you each had one full day without any kids to really focus on your business. Start making your own coffee rather than send your dollars to Seattle. The one place we don’t recommend you cut back is on your internet connection. In today’s freelancing world, the internet is one of the most important tools at your disposal.

I certainly don’t mean to be doom-and-glooming here. Freelancing really does take so little money to start. Unfortunately, the money tends to sort of trickle in at the beginning. As our business grows, so will that trickle. In fact, after about a month of officially being in business, Tamara and I just had our first payday. We each got back our initial investment and there was enough left over for each to receive a small paycheck. It wasn’t anything terribly impressive, but I can’t tell you how proud I was to hand that piece of paper to my husband and know that our new business had contributed to my family’s income.

The sense of satisfaction was far more valuable than the amount written on the check.