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Freelancing


Corinne McKay

Wrapping up 2018

As the final week of 2018 dawns, it’s a good time to take stock of what went well and what could have gone better in your freelance life this year. I’ll suggest a few metrics that might help you assess how this year went, and then it’s time to set some goals for 2019.

Most importantly, thank you so much to all of the readers who keep the Thoughts on Translation community going strong. As this blog prepares to turn 11 (!) in February, I really appreciate everyone who reads, comments on, learns from and shares my posts, and I hope to keep this blog relevant for many years to come!

First, please do this. Give yourself credit for what went well. As freelancers, it’s so easy to get caught up in the negatives: the goals we set and never worked on; the clients we meant to look for and never did; the project that went disastrously off the rails. Those can be useful learning tools, but in order to move forward, I really think it’s important to build on what went right. So, first, do that: make a point of focusing on what went well. In my case, my primary fear at the start of 2018 was how I would balance my own translation work, my books and classes, and my ATA work. Happily, the juggling act went–for the most part–well. There were a few overcaffeinated, holding-on-by-a-thread days in there, but on the whole, I feel happy with my balance in 2018.

Did you reach your income goals? This is a basic but very important question. Income goals will vary widely, depending on your phase of freelancing. During my first year of freelancing (2002), I was ecstatic to earn US $9,000. To me, that meant that I could actually generate income as a freelancer. These days, I set two income goals: a gross revenue goal, and a goal for how much of that revenue should come from translation work versus books and classes–largely because I want to keep translating, not just telling other people how to translate. Happily, I met both of those–my gross income was in the 90-110K range that I aim for every year, and more than 50% of that came directly from translation.

Did you enjoy what you worked on? This is a factor that a lot of people overlook. But to keep freelancing over the long term, it really helps if you enjoy your work. And–as I’ve said before, but it bears repeating–way too many freelancers are translating whatever falls in the inbox rather than looking for work they enjoy and are good at. In this category, I’ll give myself about a seven out of 10. I have a good balance of “bread and butter” work and work I feel passionate about, which is good. I still work with lots of clients I’ve worked with for over 10 years–also good. But after resolving to build on having a book translation shortlisted for a fairly high-profile outdoor book award, my enthusiasm–for marketing, not translating–just kind of fizzled. The publisher I worked with on that book isn’t doing many translations, nor are several outdoor publishers I contacted. Still, there’s a lot more I could have done in that department–I’m always encouraging other translators to find little-known authors, negotiate for their translation rights and then self-publish the translation–and I just kind of stalled out.

Did you do enough professional development? This is a hard one, because it’s hard to define “enough” and there’s always more professional development to do. Still, you want to make sure you’re not stagnating–a risk that increases the longer you’ve been in the business. I feel mostly positive about this category: I of course attended the ATA conference, and I really pushed myself to work on my interpreting skills in a series of online courses (more on this in the “back burner dreams” category below). I also presented a bunch of webinars that required research and creativity even though I was the presenter instead of the student, and I branched out into offering online courses with instructors other than myself–a longtime goal on which I finally took action. My major regret is that I attended zero client-side events this year. To be fair, I simply didn’t have much time or energy once I took care of everything else, but this is something I’d like to do next year.

Did you give yourself the tools to do a good job at your job? Imagine if you were interviewing for an in-house job, and the boss explained that this position came with demanding and irregular hours, minimal vacation or comp time, minimal benefits, a paltry professional development budget, an aging and flaky computer loaded with outdated software, and so on. Would you jump at that opportunity? If not, then don’t treat yourself that way: make sure you have what you need to be a good translator. Because I pay a lot of attention to these factors, I tend to prioritize them. My main “benefit” is working at a co-working office. I simply hate working at home, and this was a year of serious upheavals in my co-working life.

The office where I’d worked for over two years needed more space for their own employees, so I worked from home for the summer, then moved to a large and well-established office…which announced that it was going out of business two months later. An office nearby was offering a special deal to all the “orphans” from the going-out-of-business office, so I signed up there, only to find out that I was the only person regularly working there (no “co” in the co-working…). I lasted one very lonely week, then relocated to office number four in four months. Happily, I love office number four. It’s cozy, and lively, and filled with interesting and ambitious people and a super-cute dog who sometimes even brings dog friends. All of these moves forced me to accept that the physical environment where I work is extremely important to me, and it’s something that I’m willing to spend a significant amount of money on, in the name of happiness and productivity.

Are you simmering a back burner dream? Perhaps I’m just a sucker for all things positive and dreamy, but I do think this is important, so let’s wrap up on this note. When you’re in the trenches of freelancing, it’s so easy to focus on what’s due tomorrow, or how next month’s mortgage or rent is going to get paid, and then you look up from your monitor in 10 years and realize you’re not where you hoped you’d be. To avoid that fate, keep slowly nurturing that perhaps-crazy dream of what your freelance business might become. Maybe you want to expand into an agency. Maybe you want to be the next winner of some major translation book award. Maybe–like me–you’ve always wondered about another facet of the language professions. This year I started taking interpreting classes, and I’m hoping to take an interpreter certification exam in 2019. This falls into the “we’ll see” category, but if you’re reading this, make a commitment to keep your own back burner dream simmering!

And with that, happy 2019 to everyone who reads this blog, and feel free to add your own year-end wrapup thoughts in the comments.


Corinne McKay

Health insurance for US-based freelancers

Note: this post originally appeared as a newsletter to my mailing list, but I received so much feedback on it that I decided to publish it here as well. Thanks to all the readers who responded with your own stories about health insurance!

Here in the US, it’s health insurance open enrollment time, which means that you can purchase a new plan, change plans, switch to a new flavor of plan, etc. For many freelancers (and from here on out, by “freelancers,” I mean those who work in the US), health insurance is a source of great stress and frustration, not to mention great expense, so let’s look at various options, and some out-of-the-box options as well.

-Under the Affordable Care Act, the good news is that ACA-compliant policy issuers cannot decline you because of your health history, cannot refuse to cover pre-existing conditions, and cannot drop you for using the insurance too much. Under the ACA, insurance companies can only ask your age, income, family size, address, and what type of coverage you want. For those of us who purchased (or tried to purchase) individual insurance on the private market in the pre-ACA days, these two things are a huge relief.

-But…even under the ACA, health insurance premiums can be extremely expensive. If you want to geek out on the statistics, here’s the report from the National Conference of State Legislatures on that topic. Many people do qualify for subsidies under the ACA, so it’s worth talking to an insurance broker about what the options are in your state and whether you would qualify for a subsidy.

–With premiums (and deductibles) rising–anecdotally, I’ve talked to freelancers who make just over the subsidy cutoff (about $52,000 if you’re single) and who pay close to $1,000 a month for an individual policy–people start looking at other options. Ed Gandia recently devoted an entire episode of his High-Income Business Writing podcast to the topic of medical cost-sharing plans and health indemnity plans. Long story short, these are health coverage plans that–because they are not technically insurance–are not subject to ACA requirements. This podcast episode is great, in that it gives actual case studies with costs, from people who had catastrophic health events and used this type of coverage. Definitely a recommended listen if you’re considering this type of coverage.

-If you’re under 30 years old (in which case, enjoy it while it lasts!!), or if you meet certain “hardship” criteria, you may be able to buy catastrophic insurance that is ACA-compliant. This coverage has lower premiums, but a very high (about $8,000) deductible.

My take: The US health insurance system is very problematic by any definition. Many people are in the unenviable position of paying a lot of money for an insurance policy that they are still reluctant to use, because they have high deductibles or co-pays. Still, there are two facts you can’t get around:

1. No healthy person anticipates having high medical expenses (i.e. “purchase this high-deductible plan if you don’t expect a lot of medical bills”). This kind of language–which a lot of insurers use, drives me crazy, because no one anticipates a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, or a life-threatening car accident, or the sudden onset of a chronic condition. Yet, these things happen to previously-healthy people every day.

2. No one, aside from people in the Warren Buffett and Bill Gates category, has enough money to pay out of pocket for US-priced care for a catastrophic event, or even–and this is important–to pay out of pocket for such an event and then be reimbursed. This reminds me of my accountant’s adage, that “Everyone has a retirement plan. Either you’re financially planning to retire, or you’re planning to work until you drop.” In the case of health insurance, either you have a health plan with decent coverage, or you’re planning that you’ll exhaust your savings and then declare bankruptcy if something truly catastrophic happens to you.

Here’s an example: in my family, we have the polar opposite examples of health insurance costs versus medical expenses. I’ve been an adult (off my parents’ insurance policy) for exactly 25 years. In those 25 years, I’d conservatively estimate that I’ve paid about $60,000 in health insurance premiums and perhaps closer to $100,000, while my medical expenses–including having a baby in a hospital–have probably totaled less than $25,000; perhaps even less than $15,000. The insurance companies are clearly on the winners’ side here, but that’s what insurance–whether it’s health, car, homeowners, or something else–is all about: paying for coverage that you hope to use as little as possible.

The other side of the coin is my husband, who is a case study in the two factors I mention above. Literally out of nowhere–“something didn’t feel right” after a hike in the mountains above our house–he landed in urgent care and then the emergency room with severe fatigue related to low blood pressure and low heart rate. And we’re talking about a guy who’s a lifelong endurance athlete and a vegetarian–if you made a list of 100 people who might develop a sudden and catastrophic health problem, he would be nowhere on that list. After two years and over $200,000 of medical expenses including a pacemaker, he was finally diagnosed with an obscure neurological problem that causes his central nervous system to mis-regulate his heart rate and blood pressure. On most days, he feels OK, and is able to continue working and doing his endurance athlete thing. This condition is not life-threatening or catastrophically debilitating, but it will require lifelong management and also means that he cannot go without insurance for even a day, ever again. This experience showed me a few things:

1. Catastrophic medical events come out of nowhere and have to be treated immediately. Saying that if you have high medical needs, you’ll shop around or perhaps be treated in another country is fine if you’re talking about something non-emergent. But in an emergency, you’ll be terrified, and you’ll just do what the doctor tells you to do, which will be expensive.

2. Medical procedures can cost more than you want to pay out of pocket, even if you get reimbursed later. A hallmark of many out-of-the-box health plans (like most health cost sharing plans and medical indemnity plans) is that you must pay your medical expenses up front and then be paid back by the plan. This is fine for things like routine checkups or even minor procedures. However, having been on the receiving end of a $50,000 bill for one procedure, I now see that requirement in a different light.

Like most middle-class people, the majority of our family’s wealth (term used lightly!) is tied up in our house, and in assets like retirement accounts and mutual funds that cannot be immediately accessed. We don’t keep $50,000 in our liquid bank accounts, and we don’t even have a credit card that would allow us to charge that amount. After I published this article in my newsletter, I heard from readers who’ve had sudden, emergency hospitalizations that totaled even higher amounts, well into the six figures. Were I to consider a cost-sharing or indemnity plan, I would ask the company that question: what happens if I get a bill that exceeds the amount of cash or even credit that I have on hand? If I get a bill for $150,000, am I still expected to pay it and wait to be reimbursed?

In light of these factors, I still think that the best option for most freelancers is–if you don’t get insurance through another route, such as a spouse’s job–to purchase an ACA-compliant plan, combine it with a health savings account, and make sure that you see the deductible as a likely cost rather than an unlikely one. If you’re using an out-of-the-box option, I’d love to hear about how it’s gone for you. General rants about the US health insurance system are also welcome in the comments!


Corinne McKay

“I feel like a cog in the machine!”–What to do?

Here’s an issue that several readers have asked about lately: What to do when a client treats you like a cog in the machine? A podcast listener recently referred to this as “dehumanization” in our profession. Examples may include:

  • Applying to work with a client without ever interacting with a human–the application process is a series of online forms, DocuSign documents, and auto-responses
  • Translation projects assigned by mass e-mail (“Dear translator”) or through an online job portal
  • Inability to talk to a human, even when you want or need to

For us as freelancers, the real question is what to do about this if it bothers you. Here are a few suggestions that may help:

  1. Adjust your mindset. These kinds of interactions are a) transactional, and b) impersonal. No question about that. However, they are not objectively wrong and horrible. For every freelancer who longs for a personal relationship with their clients, there’s a freelancer who sees those personal interactions as a waste of time in a relationship that is fundamentally about exchanging a service for money. Feeling critical every time a client treats you impersonally will only subtract years from your life and is unlikely to change the client’s behavior.
  2. Set boundaries. When you work with a client, you are telling them that their way of working is OK with you. If their way of working is not OK with you, it is not a good use of your time to try to change the client, or–worse–to expect that they will change on their own. The best option is simply to set boundaries about what kinds of client relationships are–and are not–OK with you.
    Examples of boundaries:

    • “If you typically assign translation projects via mass e-mail, please be aware that I will not respond. I respond only to project requests sent directly to me.”
    • “Before working with you, I’d like to have a five to ten-minute Skype call with one of your project managers, to get a sense of whether we’re a good fit for each other.”
    • “I prefer to have a conversation about rates, rather than putting one rate in your online form. Would that work for you?”
  3. Stop expecting clients to be something that they’re not. I truly believe that every type of client serves a purpose in our industry. Clients who need their HR training videos transcribed, translated, and re-recorded into 28 languages are probably not the best fit for a freelancer; they really need a company. Clients who want the same translator to work on every project, and whose businesses depend on consistency and confidentiality, are probably not the best fit for a company; they really need a freelancer. Problems arise when you expect a huge agency to crave a personal relationship with you, when they’re trying to push gazillions of words out the door. The huge agency business model is not intrinsically bad, but it’s a mass market business like any other. Just as you wouldn’t expect a personal shopping concierge to greet you at the door of a big-box retailer, don’t expect big-box translation clients to call and ask how your weekend was, before they ask if you’re available for 10,000 words.
  4. Trust that there are clients who want–or even crave–personal relationships. I can attest that my direct clients have taken me out to dinner, invited me to their birthday parties (no kidding), invited me to tour their campuses, and asked to see pictures of my daughter’s bike races. These types of client relationships do exist, and you can find them. But the first step is to acknowledge that many clients do not want and will not cultivate a personal relationship with you. Once you accept that, you can free yourself to move on to clients who do want that kind of thing.

If you have a story about a personal relationship with a client–or how you extricated yourself from an impersonal client relationship—let’s hear about it in the comments.


Corinne McKay

Freelancing parents: looking for feedback

I’m still recovering from spending all of last week in New Orleans at the 59th annual ATA conference, so here’s a topic for all of you while I catch up on work and sleep:

A colleague is weighing the options for working (or not) with small children, and specifically whether to take a sabbatical (stop working completely) for a couple of years, or to work 10-20 hours a week during the small child years. Obviously there’s not a clear answer here (if only!), so I’m interested in hearing from readers about the pros and cons. Freelancing moms and dads, over to you: what do you think??

I’ll kick things off:

My daughter is 16, and I started freelancing when she was a baby–just a few months old. I worked probably 5-10 hours per week during her first year of life, then 10-20 hours a week until she went to preschool at age 2 1/2, then a little more than that until she was in school for a full day when she was 5. However you slice it, freelancing with small kids involves some tradeoffs, but I feel that this option was probably the best for me. I felt–correctly, I think–that if I didn’t work at all, I would lose my mind from boredom and lack of intellectual stimulation, and that if I worked full-time, I would regret not having spent more time with my daughter during those early years.

However, the situation still had some minuses:

-I continually wished that I could be a full-time translator and a full-time mom. Intellectually, I knew that there would still be tons of exciting work opportunities there for me when my daughter was older and more independent. In retrospect, I feel that I have plenty of time to work as much as I want, now that my daughter is a teenager and will soon be in college. However, time sometimes moves very slowly when you have a small child; they don’t call it “the longest, shortest time” for nothing, and there were moments when I felt a lot of tension between the kind of fulfilling professional life I wanted for myself, and the kind of home life I wanted for my daughter.

-No matter how little you work, working when you have a small child is still stressful (or at least it was for me). Murphy’s Law dictates that even if you hire child care, which seems like the “easy button” solution, the babysitter calls in sick on the day you’re scrambling to meet a big deadline, or the kid wakes up with a fever on the day you have an important client meeting. Even with a supportive husband, I still did a lot of juggling. And for what it’s worth, this Murphy’s Law is still true when the kids are no longer little. My daughter almost never gets sick, but when she does, it is always when I have a big deadline or ATA-related task. Kids seem to have a radar for these things!

-However, I feel that I would not have been happy had I not worked at all. As an illustrative example, a friend of mine took several years off working when her kids were little. Then one day, she went to pick the family’s tax return forms up from their accountant, and in the space where the accountant lists your profession, her accountant had put “Housewife.” You can say that “housewife” is a dated term–and it is. You can say that unpaid labor, mostly performed by women, is a huge and hidden part of the American economy–and it is. You can say that a lack of affordable, high-quality child care is a major barrier to women’s economic activity in the US–and it is. You can say that child care should be seen as a family or household expense, not something that the woman in the household has to fund if she chooses to work–also true. Or you can criticize the accountant, who perhaps should have listed the friend’s previous profession, or asked the friend what she preferred to put. Still, that was part of my fear–getting stuck in the “housewife” category.

-Finally, I’m a maniacal believer in self-sufficiency. I felt that even if I earned only enough money to pay for my daughter’s child care and my own spending money, I still really wanted to work. Other people feel differently, and would rather be home full time than net a few hundred dollars a month by working. During my first year of freelancing I earned $9,000, but in some ways it felt more draining than the work I do now to make six figures…constantly getting up early, working late, arranging babysitters, praying that my daughter would sleep for a full two hours in the afternoon, and on and on.

Readers, over to you: what are your thoughts on this?? I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who took an extended period of time off when their kids were little, and how that worked out.


Corinne McKay

Sidelines: Smart business strategy, or distraction?

One of my all-time favorite quotes about freelancing comes from Walt Kania of The Freelancery: “Multiple prongs of income is a fine thing. (…) A few prongs is good. With twelve prongs you have a manure fork.”

The question for us as freelancers is: Where do we cross the line between multiple prongs and the manure fork? And in general, are “side hustles” a smart business strategy, or a distraction from what we’re really supposed to be doing?

How I developed a sideline

Back in the early aughts, there wasn’t much information out there on how to run a freelance translation business. Lots of information about how to translate, but not so much on the business side of things. To the extent that, when one of my first clients asked me to send them an invoice, I called my husband at work and asked what he thought I should put on the invoice. “Pay me $300?” I was about half a step ahead of Car Talk’s “write your answer on the back of a $20 bill and mail it to us.” Through trial and error-emphasis on the error-I muddled my way through marketing, invoicing, setting up a website, identifying marketable specializations, etc.

Having survived my first several years of freelancing more or less in one piece, I theorized that other translators might want information on how to do the startup phase more smoothly than I did. My daughter was a baby at the time, so I wasn’t sleeping much anyway…why not try to compile some information for other newbie translators? That thought morphed into the first edition of my book How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, and my online course Getting Started as a Freelance Translator, both of which are still alive and thriving 13+ years later.

How sidelines work for me now

Over the years, I’ve written two more editions of my book, published two other e-books, and kept adding to my range of online courses. In 2017, course registration fees and book royalties made up about 40% of my income. I hope that my books and classes fill a need and help people run better businesses, do their work better, and enjoy it more, and it turns out that translators have a pretty insatiable appetite for what the online world calls “information products”–books, classes, webinars, etc. about how to be a freelance translator. Currently, my challenge is that I want translation to make up more than 50% of my income. I’m not a huge fan of the career model in which one becomes a consultant about how to be a consultant; I want to keep doing the job I teach other people how to do, but in order to have time to translate, I have to put a lid on the zillions of ideas I have for new information products for translators.

The benefits of sidelines

Sidelines have a lot of pluses. Many sidelines–including mine–allow you to work on your own schedule, when you feel like it and have time. As I write this, my teenage daughter is doing homework. It’s late, but I don’t really feel like going to bed and I’m kind of sick of reading after working all day, so writing a blog post is actually a good and relaxing outlet.

Sidelines also give you some revenue diversification; also a good thing. I always schedule some online courses for periods when I know that my translation work will be slower than normal (January, August). And it does seem that when one revenue stream is down, the other is often up. I like the fact that I have control over my writing and teaching. When translation work slows down, I can either hustle my regular clients for more work (which can be effective but can also be awkward), or I can look for new clients (with the caveat that I don’t love selling). But when I want to create a new information product, I just dive in and do it, without depending on anyone else.

Other types of sidelines

Your sideline might be something totally different: language teaching, editing for non-native speakers, voiceovers, web design, copywriting, marketing consulting, terminology work…or something totally outside the word nerd sector all together. I’ve met translators who massage dogs, teach Pilates, run AirBnBs, work at bookstores, and various other sidelines that have nothing to do with translation.

How to differentiate between a smart business strategy and a distraction

Here’s the rub: when do sidelines hinder your freelance business rather than helping it? When are you on the slippery slope to Walt Kania’s manure fork? I’d recommend asking yourself these questions:

  • How does this sideline complement, rather than compete with, my translation work? An ideal sideline is something that fills a gap that your translation business creates. Maybe the gap is that you don’t get much physical activity (so your sideline is walking dogs). Maybe the gap is that your translation work is boring (so you write mystery novels). Maybe the gap is that you don’t love working in isolation (so you teach Spanish classes for adults). Just make sure that the sideline doesn’t exacerbate those gaps: if you love everything about translation except working alone at a computer, then choose a sideline that’s social.
  • Does this sideline diversify my business risk? For anyone who’s self-employed, risk diversification is worth thinking about. One way of diversifying risk is to have an entirely different client base for your translation business and your sideline business. For example, my book and course clients (other translators) are completely different from my translation clients (mainly international development entities and corporate communications clients). That’s a good thing, because if one client base takes a big hit–as is somewhat the case with USAID-funded projects lately–another client base is often insulated from that same hit.
  • Is my sideline better off as a non-paying passion project? It’s perfectly fine to have a sideline that generates little or no income. Let’s say that your passion is translating poetry. Rather than trying to squeeze blood from that stone, perhaps you’d be better off taking on more lucrative translation work, and using that to subsidize your poetry translation work so that you can afford to do it pro bono, just because you love it.
  • Could my sideline grow into its own business? One idea I’ve tossed around is spinning my online courses off into their own business, for two reasons. First, the administrative and logistical aspects are something I could hire someone else to do (and I can’t hire anyone else to do my translation work), and that type of standalone business is potentially saleable at some point (which my translation business probably is not). It’s worth considering whether your sideline is robust enough that you should create a separate identity for it.

In sum, I feel that my sideline business is a very positive addition to my translation business. It generates a significant amount of revenue, gives me the opportunity to interact with people, fills a need for other translators, and is scalable in a way that my freelance business is not. Readers, over to you: any positive or negative sideline stories to share here?