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If you’re more of an audio person, you can listen to me talk about this topic on episode 84 of the Smart Habits for Translators podcast. Madalena and Veronika are no longer releasing new episodes, but we discussed my 2023 workcation a few months back, and they asked great questions! I’ve also thought about workcations in more detail lately, as my husband and I are in the “thinking about thinking about” stage of doing a longer digital nomad experience (six months, maybe a year?) within the next three to five years.

What is a workcation, and why might you want to take one?

As the name suggestions, a workcation is a combination of work and a vacation. Case in point: in July of 2023, my husband and I loaded our mountain bikes, hiking gear, and work stuff into the car and drove approximately 20 hours north of our home (Boulder, Colorado) to the small town of Fernie, British Columbia, where we rented a house for a month, worked full time, and spent the evenings and weekends mountain biking and hiking. That’s a workcation.

Why? Why do this, when you could just go on vacation? As a huge proponent of vacation, that’s definitely a valid question! I think workcations are a good option to consider, if:

• Your spouse or partner isn’t a freelancer and doesn’t have unlimited vacation time or flexibility. This is our situation; my husband works remotely, but for a government research lab where he can work outside the US only 20 work days per calendar year, plus he wanted to save his actual vacation time for other things.
• You’d like to travel for a longer period than you can afford to go without income.
• You’d like to visit family or friends in another location, but work while you’re there (I wish remote work had been more of a thing when my daughter was little and my parents were in the Foreign Service).
• You’d like to immerse your kid(s) in another culture (maybe your home culture, maybe something else) while you’re working. Madalena and Veronika and I talked about this a lot on the podcast; both of them have young kids and also have family in other countries, which I think is a great basis for a workcation.

Choosing a location

We had our eye on Fernie since going there on a non-working vacation in 2022. One of us, now I can’t remember who, observed that it’s light outside until almost 10 PM in the summer, which prompted the realization that we could work a full day, then go mountain biking for two to four hours, and still get home before dark. An idea was born! We also liked the fact that we could drive to Fernie (opening up the possibility of bringing work stuff plus recreational stuff), and that it’s in the same time zone as our home, meaning that my husband (whose job involves a fair number of meetings) wouldn’t have to rearrange his work schedule.

Your criteria may be different. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn Italian at a language school in Rome. Maybe you’ve always wanted your kids to experience Argentinian winter during American summer vacation. Maybe your best friend moved to New Zealand and you’d like to spend a month there, but you can’t afford to take a month off. Think about what adventures you could take, while continuing to generate income, and see what ideas you come up with!

How to work effectively during a workcation

If part of your goal is to continue working more or less full time, you need to think about the physical setup that you need to be productive. This was particularly important now that my work is about 60% interpreting, which requires fast and stable internet and a silent environment. I really wanted a location where I could bring my own ethernet cable and plug in to the modem, and I needed a very quiet space.

In our case, this meant that we rented a two bedroom house so that I had a separate room to work in (my husband is totally happy working on the couch or the kitchen table, which I’m not). This actually worked out well because we had friends and family visiting us for about half the time we were in Fernie, so they slept in the second bedroom and I then kicked them out when I needed to work. It’s important to be self-aware about what kind of work space you need: if you’re workcationing alone, maybe you want to look at co-working offices where you’re going. If you’re workcationing with someone else, be honest about whether you need a separate workspace.

Technology setups in general have gotten much more portable in the last decade. We took a proto-workcation in 2012, when my husband did a summer consulting job in Switzerland (we’re all dual Swiss/US citizens), and we put my daughter, then nine years old, in summer camp. At that time, international cell phone service wasn’t much of a thing, so we had to buy a Swiss burner phone, to which no one had the number (kind of a plus/minus situation!). This time, our Verizon phones worked in Canada exactly like in the US, at no extra charge.

My secret mobile office weapon is my Dell 14 portable monitor, which is the size of a regular laptop screen, weighs less than half a pound, is less than a quarter-inch thick, and runs power and data through one cable, so you plug it only into the computer (no separate electrical plug). I love this thing! It fits in my laptop backpack alongside my computer, and it’s large enough to use as a true second monitor.

You also want to make sure that none of your clients have location restrictions. I have one client that requires me to be physically located in the US, and I just didn’t work for them for that month. With my Canadian clients, I made sure to let them know I was there. Even though I don’t typically work on site for them, I thought they would find it interesting that I was in Canada! Use your judgment on whether your clients need to know where you are.

Keeping the “cation” in workcation

To allow ourselves to enjoy the reasons we went to Fernie, we put some pretty strict parameters around work while we were there. Mainly, we tried to get up relatively early, start working by around 8, and wrap up by 4:00-4:30 so that we could have the late afternoon and evening free for outdoor activities. Personally, I liked this. It helped me avoid having work “bleed” over into the evening, and it honestly felt like I was kinda/sorta on vacation while still earning a full-time income.

Here again, time zone is a surprisingly major factor. At the outset of this workcation idea, I kind of assumed we would go to Switzerland. I got my dual Swiss citizenship in 2022 and I was excited to use it, we have friends and family there, and we just love the country. However, logistical factors dissuaded us. We’ve traveled to Europe with bikes before, but it’s a pain and can be expensive, and Central Europe is eight hours ahead of US Mountain Time, meaning that my husband would have been working approximately 4:00 PM – midnight, which didn’t seem that appealing.

Overall, I think that workcations can be a really good way to travel for an extended period of time without a huge loss of income. We’re in the early stages of planning this year’s workcation 2.0 (probably to the Vancouver area), and actually thinking about a 6-12 month workcation for after my daughter finishes college. If you try this, let me know how it goes!

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T4T is on Instagram!

Ever since I quit Twitter (and honestly, I don’t miss it at all), I’ve been meaning to put Training for Translators on Instagram. I finally had a day without translation or interpreting work and got it done…@trainingfortranslators is freshly stocked with posts, and ready for followers!

Newsletter recommendation

My new favorite newsletter about freelancing is writer Lisa Beach’s Expert-ish Freelancer. Not an affiliate deal; Lisa shares really practical, well-written tips for freelancers who want to feel more confident, make more money, and save time. Having written 1,000+ articles for Training for Translators, I’m a pretty discerning consumer of newsletters for freelancers, and I really like what Lisa writes!

Should you think about incorporating your freelance business?

Thanks to a couple of readers who suggested this as a newsletter topic! Most importantly, I’m not an accountant, tax planner, or attorney. Verify these tips with a pro!

As with many things related to freelancing, we tend to overcomplicate. If you’re just getting started as a freelancer, or if you haven’t thought much about freelance finances, you can put yourself ahead of at least 70% of other freelancers (trust me on this one…) if you:

• Completely separate your business and personal finances, even if that’s just a separate checking and savings account in your own name, that you use solely for business purposes; and
• Earmark a percentage of every client payment for taxes and other business expenses. “A percentage” is going to vary depending on your tax bracket, whether you pay for your own health insurance, etc., and “earmark” is going to depend on your needs. When I made less money, I would just chop 40% off every client payment and move it to my business savings account. Now, I keep a lump sum (in my case, $15,000, which is enough to keep my business afloat for three to six months) in my business savings account and don’t touch it; and
• Know how much you need to charge in order to reach your target income. Again, basic, but lots of freelancers are working for whatever clients seem willing to pay, and hoping that it adds up to enough money to pay the bills! Two helpful resources: my Deciding What to Charge worksheet, or JT Hine’s booklet I Am Worth It.

If you haven’t done those things yet, don’t even think about incorporating. Set up the framework first.

My experience with an S-Corp

As far as incorporating, I can only speak from my own experience; I’m not familiar with corporate structures outside the US, or with corporate structures I don’t use, but I think that these basic principles can be helpful as you look at whether incorporating could be helpful for you.

I’ve had an S-Corp for 15+ years and it has a lot of advantages. Most importantly, an S-Corp allows you to legally avoid paying self-employment tax on part of what you make, through a (somewhat artificial, but legal under the IRS rules) distinction between your “wages” (which are subject to self-employment tax) and the “corporation’s profit,” (not subject to self-employment tax). You sill pay regular income tax on the “corporate profit,” but you avoid the 15.3% self-employment tax on top of what you would pay if you worked for an employer.

Of course, what constitutes a reasonable wage (the IRS’s definition of the amount on which you must pay self-employment tax) is very subjective. My accountant tells me to take my gross income, subtract my business expenses, and divide the rest equally between wages and profit. I’ve heard other accountants tell people to use the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ median pay for translators and interpreters ($57K in 2023) as your base wage amount, and take the rest of what you earn as profit. There’s really no hard and fast rule.

Being incorporated saves money in taxes (back of the envelope, being incorporated saved me about $8,000 in taxes last year), but it also creates an administrative burden which is likely to require an accountant. In my case, business accounting adds up to more than $2,000 per year, because my accountant charges a monthly fee to prepare my payroll taxes (required for S-Corporations), and requires me to subscribe to Gusto, an automated payroll processor that pulls the money out of my business account, then directs it to the appropriate tax entities and pays my salary into my personal account, and an S-Corp has to file a separate corporate tax return, which my accountant prepares.

Thus, you want to consider the income level at which it would be advantageous to incorporate. Again, no hard and fast rule here: maybe $60,000 a year?? If I had to guess, something between 45 and 65K is the point at which, even if you hire an accountant, you’re probably better off incorporating.

In the US, corporations are formed at the State level. Check your State’s Secretary of State office for the fees and requirements. Here in Colorado, it’s quite easy and cheap to form a corporation, but you want to make sure that the corporation is going to confer the benefits that you’re looking for. Specifically, having a corporation protects you from some types of liability, but not others. For example, I rent an office outside my house. If I were to sign the lease in my corporation’s name, and then the corporation went bankrupt, my understanding is that the landlord could not sue me personally for the money. But a corporation does not protect you from things like errors in your work: only professional liability insurance can do that; clients can sue you personally for work-related errors.

Pro tip: If you’re going to use an accountant (for most freelancers, this is the first task I would consider outsourcing if you can afford it), use an IRS Enrolled Agent (EA). EAs will often put those initials after their name; using an EA means that the accountant can represent you in most dealings with the IRS, and you should never have to interact personally with the IRS, even if you get audited. This is a huge advantage: years ago, I received a demand letter from the IRS, saying that I owed $15,000 (!!!) in unpaid taxes on income in my PayPal account. I knew that this wasn’t true, but I had no idea what the issue was. I sent the demand letter to my accountant and signed a release form for her to talk to the IRS, and she ironed it out with one phone call (confusion between my personal Social Security number and my business EIN!).

I hope these tips are helpful!