The frugal freelance life

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I’ve written about frugality and money management a few times over the years, most notably in 2013, the year that my husband and I paid off our mortgage (after nine years instead of 30 years!) and became completely debt-free, a status we’ve maintained since then. I actually love thinking and talking about money, and life (as life tends to do) rolls on and changes, so I thought it was time for a 10-year(ish) update on the frugal freelance life.

Looking back over my 2013 post, I’m struck by some things that have doggedly stayed the same (our main frugality strategy is still “spend less than you make”), and some areas of frugality where we’ve softened over the years (we do now own a clothes dryer, and we recently bought our first-ever brand new car, a Kia EV6, and we looooove it!). My daughter is now in her second year of college/university; she goes to an expensive school that offered us a generous financial aid package, we pay for the rest from her 529 account (which we and her very generous grandparents funded over the years), so, fortunately, neither she nor we will have to take loans for that.

Frugality: What’s the point?

Admittedly, I’m a lifelong frugalitarian. It’s probably in the DNA. My maternal grandmother (who grew up as a first-generation immigrant on a cotton farm in Texas, with no electricity or running water) was a very active hospital auxiliary volunteer and used as many scavenged materials as she could when making crafts for the hospital gift shop. Her black-belt strategy was boosting me and/or my cousins into the dumpster at the local cemetery to scavenge discarded floral foam for flower arrangements. The deceased people sure didn’t need it anymore, right??? In we went!

I’m still not above a good trash pick or dumpster dive, because wastefulness drives me crazy. Any item that I don’t want anymore but that still has some life left in it, I really try to give away on our local Freecycle group (and it’s amazing what people are excited about getting!). But to me, the real point of frugality is to not have to worry about money. Oddly enough, this is the same reason I enjoy making a six-figure income as a freelancer: because I hate worrying about money.

The day we paid off our mortgage, I remember having the thought, “We’re never going to be homeless.” That might sound odd, but it meant a lot to me. And, we’ve had some curveball moments when that security was very comforting. My lifelong vegetarian, endurance athlete husband went through a major, year-long health crisis in 2016 that involved 11 medical specialists and a lot of time off work (he was ultimately diagnosed with dysautonomia, got a pacemaker, takes medication to raise his blood pressure, and is mostly OK, but the whole experience was truly awful). It was honestly really comforting to me to think, even if he has to stop working and we have a ton of medical expenses (the hero of the story is a diagnostic medicine specialist who doesn’t take insurance and we paid $$$$ out of pocket), we’re not going to be wondering where our next meal is coming from. To me, that’s a huge advantage of living frugally: to be able to throw money at a problem.

It’s all about priorities

In my 2013 post, I wrote about spending money on a co-working office, and I have actually never again worked from home, other than the first six months of COVID (after which I rented a tiny individual office). To me, this represents another core tenet of frugality: it’s really about prioritizing, not about cutting every expense to the bare minimum. I now pay $499 a month for a (different) small private office, but I’m so much happier and so much more productive that this would be the last business expense that I would ever eliminate.

Likewise, I’ve become much more likely to spend large amounts of money on experiences rather than things. For the past two years, we’ve taken “splurge” vacations over New Year’s (most recently to Belize) with my daughter and her girlfriend, which were 100% worth it. Hitting my 50s and, sadly, seeing friends pass away or have debilitating health crises has really impressed upon me the importance of making the most of life while we’re here, and that has definitely altered my spending priorities.

Actual financial advice

As I mentioned above, I honestly don’t feel like we have any secret weapons here, and now that we make more money, we also spend more money (no more prepaid cell phones; we actually switched to Verizon!), but here are a few concrete strategies that work for us:

• Always save something. I remember, when I was a senior in college, a friend’s mom who was an accountant told me, never let yourself get in the habit of spending everything that you make. Even if you’re in a situation where you can only save $25 out of every paycheck, it adds up, it makes a difference over time, and it gets you in the mindset of “always be saving.” For me, this has really been true: in my first job out of college, I worked at a boarding school and I made $7,500 (1993 dollars) per school year plus room and board, and I still saved enough money to buy a plane ticket to France for the summer.
• Especially if you own a house, try to avoid the “penny wise, pound foolish” phenomenon. We try to do one major home improvement/renovation project each year, usually at a cost of 6-10K. In recent years we’ve replaced our furnace and water heater, driveway, fence, and done some major landscaping. This is always painful at the time, but way better than doing 50K of work on the house all at once.
• If I had to identify one area where I think we spend less than most people, it would be food. We’re vegetarians (for environmental/animal rights reasons, but it’s also less expensive), we do most of our grocery shopping at Costco (if Costco doesn’t exist in your country, it’s a wholesale-priced grocery store), and we cook at home the vast majority of the time. I’d say on average, I go out for coffee maybe once a week, we eat out maybe once a month, and we essentially never order food delivery. This honestly doesn’t feel like a hardship; all of us in the family like to cook, we cook basic but healthy meals, and most of the time that we get together with friends, we cook and eat at each other’s houses. If you’re trying to pay off debt or establish an emergency savings fund, this is one area I would definitely suggest looking at.
• We don’t even see consumer debt as an option. I understand that sometimes in a crisis, putting stuff on a credit card is the only option, but to me, if you have ongoing credit card debt, you’re spending more than you make, which isn’t sustainable. Unless we got a screaming deal on something like a 0% car loan, we would never borrow money for a consumer purchase.
• We also acknowledge that taking on debt could be good for us financially, but emotionally that’s not what we want. An example of this is real estate. The building block of our current debt-free-ness was that I bought a house in the Boston area in 1998, and it doubled in value in the six years that I owned it. We then poured all of that money into our current house, which has since tripled in value. It doesn’t take a real estate analyst to see that a good financial strategy would be another trade-up: buy a more expensive house where we live now, pay it off, rinse, repeat. My accountant tells me this every year, and the reality is that we just don’t want to do it. The feeling of being debt-free is worth so much to us that we’re happy staying where we are.
• It amazes me, even as someone who’s pretty disciplined with money, how big a difference it makes when you put money directly into savings, before you have a chance to spend it. I have an S-Corporation so I have to pay monthly payroll taxes, which makes it easier to channel money to other things at the same time. I use Gusto (or rather, my accountant forces me to use Gusto) for payroll processing, and I auto-deposit money into my retirement account and my personal savings account at the same time. This sounds so dumb (like, it’s all my money, I know it’s there!), but it makes such a huge difference in how much I have the urge to spend.
• Monthly subscriptions really add up. It’s like we live in the subscription era…I spend a lot on personal and work subscriptions that I want to or have to pay for (yoga studio, Calm app, Netflix, Zoom, Mailchimp, and more), but I think the key is to know what you’re paying for. Those statistics about how much money businesses make (like, billions) from people who forget to cancel their subscriptions?? Don’t let that be you. When I sign up for a time-limited free trial or promo rate on something I know I don’t want to continue, I immediately set a reminder in Todoist to remind me to cancel it on the correct date.
• I think it really helps to know your spending weaknesses: the areas where you tend to overspend, or spend on things you never end up using. I have moderate issues with this when it comes to garden stuff, craft stuff, online courses, and clothes. I’ve learned to ask myself: Do I have time to dive into this right away (a major question with online courses)? Could I wait a while and see if I still want it? Do I have a place to put it in my house (it helps that we live in a really small house)? Does it duplicate something that I already own (a major question with clothes)?
• Retirement planning is a whole other issue that I’ll save for my next 10-year review, when I’ll be in my 60s. I alternate between thinking we’re probably fine (my husband and I are both pretty disciplined savers, and he has a salaried job with a retirement plan match), but then also looking at people our parents’ age going into $8,000-10,000-per-month senior care facilities and thinking that maybe we’re not fine. For now (at least until our daughter finishes college in another two years), I think we’ll keep putting roughly 10% of our yearly income into retirement, and then reassess.

I hope these tips are helpful!

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. She holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College, is an ATA-certified French to English translator, and is Colorado court-certified for French interpreting. If you enjoy her posts, consider joining the Training for Translators mailing list!