Consider a Budgeting Program
The elephant in the room when it comes to working independently is, let’s face it, money. If Virginia Woolf postulated that all one needed was a room of one’s own, she left off the small but very significant detail about who the F was going to be paying the rent on that lovely space with its inspirational outlook. Woolf didn’t need to worry about that problem; after all, she came from a fairly affluent family. But that’s not the case for most people who find themselves working independently. At the outset, freelancing can be financially challenging. Most financial advice is based on the idea of a weekly salary. Things get a little more precarious when you’re lurching from flush to frugal in the space of a few weeks. Certainly that was my experience. With no steady paycheck to rely on, my new career came with a side hustle in financial management.
Fortunately, I stumbled across You Need A Budget. That plain and straightforward name turned out to be my key to surviving on small and uneven payments. While the payments have gotten larger — though no less uneven — I still rely on YNAB to get me through. Based on the principles of zero-based budgeting, developed by Peter Pyhrr in the 1970s, it’s an online version of the time-honored envelope system espoused by finance guru Dave Ramsey. The idea is simple enough: when money comes in, divvy it up amongst your spending categories — grocery, rent, car payment, credit card, phone bill — until you don’t have anything left. If you overspend in one category — you go overboard at Trader Joe’s one week — you can borrow from another category.
It can take a while to get a hang of it. But for the first time in my life, I was looking at my categories to determine how much money I had to spend rather than at how much I had in my checking account. The process of having to allocate the money each time a check came in made me think twice about where it was going: once when I rationed out the money and then again when I went to spend it. Often that was enough to put a halt to mindless purchase. Slowly but surely, I was able to avoid the seesaw common to independent workers.