“I’m not making enough money!” Let’s dig a little deeper!

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Aiming for six figures: master class on October 23

Next up on our class calendar is a two-hour master class on Aiming for six figures as a freelancer, on October 23. A past participant in this class commented, “I enjoyed the fact that Corinne didn’t tiptoe around talking about money, and her transparency about her own experience and business. There’s nothing wrong with making money.” Registration ($75) includes the recording. 

This week’s topic: “I’m not making enough money!” Let’s dig a little deeper!

Many freelancers (of all stripes, not just translators and interpreters) feel that they’re not making enough money. Often, they’re correct, for a few reasons:

• Lots of freelancers radically underestimate how much more you need to earn as a freelancer, as compared to a job with salary and benefits. Various sources use various multipliers for this, but I typically see people recommending a salary to freelance multiplier of about 1.4. Like if you’re aiming for the freelance equivalent of a salaried job paying $100K, you need to earn $140K to factor in self-employment tax, retirement contributions, office space, health coverage, paid time off, computer hardware and software, accounting services, etc.
• As a side note, here, I need to point out two things. The average income for freelance translators and interpreters, as reported on the most recent ATA compensation survey and in the most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data is in the mid 50K range. If we use the 1.4 multiplier, this is the equivalent of a salaried job paying around US $40K. I just think that’s worth noting; if you’re at that income level, it’s worth asking yourself whether you’d accept a salaried job that paid 40K. Additionally, the $130K that I earned in 2023 is, if we use the 1.4 multiplier, the equivalent of a salaried job paying 93K. Meaning that although I set that goal as a way to move closer to the freelance equivalent of a six-figure salaried job, I’m still not there! You really do have to make a lot as a freelancer to replace all that stuff that employers pay for!
• Life is expensive. That sounds so basic as to not be worth saying, but it’s just true. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the “living wage” for a two-adult/one child household in Boulder, Colorado (that’s my household!) is slightly over 113K. Particularly as the freelance population ages, I think that many freelancers may be in for a big shock when they find out either a) how long they’re going to have to work in order to afford retirement, or b) what retirement is going to look like if you’re living mostly off Social Security. Those are all very personal decisions, but worth considering.

Three ways to not make enough money

First, let me say this. When I talk about “not making enough money,” or when I say that I made 130K last year, take it with the grain of salt that I made 9K (not a typo, nine thousand US dollars!) in my first year of freelancing. And I was really happy with that number, because my biggest fear was that I would make zero thousand dollars. It took me thirteen years of freelancing to hit six figures. What I’m saying here is not intended, in any way, to shame anyone who’s at a lower income level, and definitely not anyone who is totally happy at a lower income level. To be honest, that’s a place I aspire to be in 15-20 years; translating books, other stuff I find interesting, and donating the money to charity.

There are really only three ways to not make enough money as a freelancer:

1. You just don’t have enough work. This was me from about 2002-2005. I wanted to work more, but I didn’t have enough clients to fill my schedule, and I didn’t want to work at really low rates just to bring some work in the door.
2. You have enough work, but it’s low-paying. This is, honestly, a lot of translators right now: those who cruised along for years or even decades, doing decently paid per-word translation for agencies. Many of those agencies have now gone to machine translation plus a human editor, and many are offering dramatically lower hourly rates than the per-word rates they used to pay.
3. You have well-paying work, but not enough of it. This was the conference interpreting side of my business, when I first finished my MCI. The conference interpreting work that I found, paid well. However, it took almost a year (Spring/Summer of 2021 until Spring/Summer of 2022) until I had the amount of conference interpreting work that I wanted.

What now?

If you’re in one of these three situations, what’s the best course of action if you’d like to make more money? It depends a lot on your available time (single and living alone is really different than being the primary caregiver for a young family), and on what you do (Croatian literary translation is just never going to pay as much as Japanese financial translation). That being said, here are a few suggestions:

• The hardest situation is example two above. You’re working a lot, but you’re not making enough money. That leaves you with minimal time or energy to market to better-paying clients. This, in and of itself, is an argument for avoiding this situation in the first place, meaning not telling yourself, “Working is better than not working, I’ll just accept this lousy rate rather than not working.” Sometimes, marketing is better than working!
• Succinct advice for example one: I’ve seen this in a couple of freelancer Facebook groups I’m in, and it’s basic, but helpful. Every second that you don’t have work, you’re marketing. You’re applying to agencies, following up with agencies, and looking for direct clients. And (here’s the advice from the Facebook groups!) you’re doing that consistently, until you have slightly more work than you want. Don’t quit marketing when you find one new client, and don’t continue marketing until you’re sleeping three hours a night. Stop when you’re like, one click above where you want to be.
• In situation three, just keep marketing to clients like the well-paying clients you already have. This is perhaps the easiest situation, because no client is an island; there are always more clients like your current clients. Once I identified a few sources of well-paying conference interpreting clients, I just kept looking for ways to connect with other clients like them, and that worked out well.

If you’re hoping to boost your income in the fourth quarter of the year, 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. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!