Money

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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!

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers!
–March Marketing Madness kicks off in two weeks; have you signed up??

Lately, a few readers and online course alumni have sent me questions about increasing your income as a freelancer, particularly if you’ve been through a period of stagnation, where your income (even if you’re satisfied with it) has stayed the same for a period of years.Their questions included:

• Is stagnation negative, as long as you’re happy with your income?
• Is it better/easier to make a significant income leap, or to gradually “creep” your rates up?
• What’s the best strategy if you want to make a significant income leap?

This is exactly where I was from 2019-2022. As I described in my 2023 year in review post, my income was stagnant at about US $100K for those three years. While better than an income decrease, I wasn’t happy with it, for all of the reasons that the people who contacted me mentioned:

• With inflation, a stagnant income means that your actual purchasing power is declining
• A stagnant income may also mean that other things in your business are stagnant: maybe you aren’t working on your own skills as much as you should be, or maybe you aren’t marketing as much as you should be

Increasing your income is a really individual thing, but I did do it, raising my income (which I define as gross income, minus what I immediately pay out to subcontractors) from 110 to 145K in one year. A few observations, based on my experience:

• Ideally, we’d all “creep” our income up, a bit at a time, by raising our rates maybe 5-7% each year, similar to the raise we might request in a salaried job. But in reality, this is relatively uncommon in the translation and interpreting professions. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea; I actually think it is a good idea. I just mean that it’s not the norm. Lots of other professions do this: when I get the first invoices of the year from various professional service providers in my life (accountant, web designer, etc.), they’ve often raised their rates by around 5%, often with no notice. I simply see that the invoice is a little higher than the year before. This “creep” model has lot to recommend it, because the increase is small enough that it’s hopefully not a deal breaker, and because it avoids the phenomenon of, “haven’t raised my rates in five years, now here’s a huge increase.” Yet, very few of us do this. I think there are a few reasons: a) our perception (whether right or wrong) that clients, especially agencies, are very price sensitive and may send us less work if we raise our rates, b) our desire to just avoid thinking about rates in general because we’d rather translate or interpret, and c) the fact that, particularly if we bill by the word, an increase of something like 5% is a tiny amount. If an agency is paying us 15 cents per word, are we really going to raise our rate by half a cent, or does that seem ridiculous?
• The most common, and in my opinion, the worst way to increase your income is by working more at the same rates. Honestly (trust me, I see under the hoods of a lot of freelancers’ businesses!), this is what most translators and interpreters do. They want or need to make more money, so they just take on more work from their existing clients, or clients who pay around the same rates.

Following are a few factors that went into my significant income increase in 2023:

• I acknowledged the pattern of stagnation and set a new goal. At 110K, I wasn’t worried about where my next meal was coming from. I also wanted to aim for more like the equivalent of a six-figure salaried job, which is a lot more than 100K as a freelancer. So I set a goal of 120K, figuring that was at least a start at this goal.
• I focused on my very highest-paying work and didn’t feel guilty about it. This is a simple but pretty huge thing. I just think that as freelancers, we have such a hard time turning down work that doesn’t meet our financial goals, for a few reasons: fear of being labeled greedy, fear that we won’t have enough work, fear that the client will think or say negative things about us, fear that we’re acting arrogant and entitled, or “the client is so nice, I feel bad saying no!” I decided to let go of all of these fears, and just focus on making money while doing interesting and fulfilling work.
• I (mostly) let go of the fear of having dominant clients. My translation work is pretty diversified. I have regular clients but I don’t really have dominant clients. Interpreting is a different story: basically all of my work comes from a handful of conference interpreting agencies and two state court systems (Colorado and Utah). I have a few sporadic direct clients for interpreting, but mostly it’s my regulars. I’ve written before about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and I’ve decided that for now, for me, it’s OK, because I really like these clients, they have interesting work, they pay well, and they’re easy to work with. As I recommended in the blog post I wrote about dominant clients (yes, for once, I followed my own advice!), I put some protections in place, in case I suddenly lose a lot of work from one of these clients. Most importantly, I increased my business savings account to $15,000 (about three months’ salary and taxes at my current income level), and this money just sits there as a rainy day fund.
• I also told myself that I don’t need to earn this much every year. That’s just a fact. I had no trouble spending the extra income: first, by increasing my business savings account, then by doing some deferred maintenance on our house, then by buying a new electric car, then by taking some really incredible vacations (Iceland, British Columbia, and Belize). And yet, I don’t want to put pressure on myself to earn 145K every single year, because I don’t need to. I think it’s important, for your own sanity, to differentiate between an income jump that you *need* to make and an income jump that you *want* to make.

I hope these tips are helpful if you’ve set an ambitious income goal for this year!!

Greetings, readers! Our final master class of the year is next Monday (December 11)! For all of you beginning and aspiring subtitlers and audiovisual translators, guest instructor Molly Yurick will teach Breaking into the subtitling market, a two-hour class packed with practical advice on the key concepts of the subtitling market, free and paid subtitling tools, pricing models, and how to pursue training and find clients. Registration ($75) includes the recording and we hope to see you there!

This week, let’s talk about how to raise your rates, because the end of the year is a good time to strategize about this topic!

Most importantly, it’s rare to make a big rate jump with an existing client, and how/when to raise your rates depends mostly on how much you need or want to hold on to that client’s business. Here’s what I mean:

• In many professional service businesses, it’s common to raise rates without specifically notifying your clients. My accountant, my dentist, my graphics person, all seem to raise their rates every year, but without drawing too much attention to it; I just notice that the bills from them are suddenly somewhat higher. I would say that this is uncommon in the language professions; it’s usually on us to specifically get the client’s approval before we start billing them more, unless we bill them on a per-project basis, in which case they may not notice the increase.
• In a sense, this is an argument for per-project billing. I’m not sure that I’ve ever encountered an agency that accepts per-project billing, but lots of direct clients do. I think that some direct clients even prefer per-project billing, because it gives them one number to focus on: “How much is this going to cost us?”
• This also means that big rate jumps normally come from new clients. If your current clients are paying 15 cents per word and you’d really like to be making 25 cents per word, you’re simply going to need to find new clients.

Assuming that you’re billing clients per word/hour/page/day (anything other than per-project), you’ll probably need to inform your client ahead of your rate increase and get their approval. How difficult that is and how carefully you need to handle it depends on how price-sensitive the client is, and how much you need or want their work. Let’s go in order of difficulty, from easy to difficult.

• The easiest way to raise your rates is to simply inform the client of your price increase. “Just checking in, to let you know that as of January 1, my per-word/per-page/hourly/daily rate will increase from X to Y.” The hard part is that if you’re going to use this strategy, you have to be willing to lose the client, because you’re essentially saying, “take it or leave it.” In my experience, this technique works well with a) clients you’re not particularly concerned with retaining, b) clients who merit an “annoyance fee,” because they are difficult to work with (you’re not interested in working with them unless they’re willing to pay the annoyance fee), and c) clients who you perceive are willing to pay more than you’re currently charging.
• A little more on the annoyance fee. I’m a pretty tolerant person, but every once in a while, I work with a client who is…just…difficult. An example for me is clients who call on the phone with a frequency that I would consider excessive. Years ago, I worked with a client who would call me (no kidding) three to five times a day whenever I was working on a project for them. This was a direct client with a large budget, and finally I told them, you can call once a day and talk to me for up to five minutes. After that, every phone call will be billed at $75 per 15 minutes (note that I was getting paid well to translate for them, but not $300 an hour). And, guess what, they kept calling. The eventual bill just for the phone calls was in the thousands of dollars. That’s an example of how an annoyance fee can be beneficial.
• A middle of the road option is to discuss the rate increase with your client, and see what they say. “In looking over my accounting records, I see that I haven’t raised my rates with you in over three years. I really enjoy our work together, and I appreciate the large volume of work that you send me. All new clients that I’m onboarding this year will be paying X; would it be in your budget to pay that amount, or would you be able to let me know how that type of increase might affect my work volume from you?” This strategy is tricky, because the client now knows that you perceive that they’re underpaying you, which isn’t something you want to convey without thinking it over. I’ve had successes and failures with this strategy, partially because it feels vague and waffle-y on the part of the freelancer, and because a lot of agencies simply won’t tell you (and they’re not obligated to tell you) what they’re paying their other translators. I’ve had clients who wouldn’t give any sort of substantive response (“It’s up to you” type of thing, which, in a way, is true); clients who said “You’re already at the top of our rate range,” and a very few clients who said, “That would work for us.”
• The hardest situation is when you have a client who is paying you less than you’d like to be making, but you’re very dependent on their work. Honestly, a lot of freelancers are in this situation: they have a dominant client that also pays poorly. In this situation, make sure you’re not trying to get blood from a stone. Many low-paying clients’ business models are based on paying low rates: they simply cannot pay more if they want to retain their own end clients. As frustrating as this is (you feel taken advantage of, you’re getting burnt out), you are ultimately responsible for accepting or declining any given client’s work. If you’re in this situation (big client, low rates), it’s time to vow that you will not be in the same situation a year from now. You will start doing at least a small amount of marketing every day. You will Always Be Marketing.

I’m also guessing that in the current climate, some agencies may tell you that they’re under a lot of downward price pressure from their end clients due to various factors, including MT and AI. Remember that their business is their business, and your business is your business. A client telling you this is like you telling a client that you need to raise your rates because you bought a new car: not their problem. If your agencies are pushing their own rates down, that’s up to them, but you have a choice to accept or decline those rates.

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! As it’s now mid-July, I did a review of the first six months of 2023 and how things are going in my business; I’d encourage you to do the same, because you still have half the year left to make some changes if you’re not where you want to be.

I recognize that I’m a bit of an outlier among translators and interpreters for sharing my income statistics. If you find this weird or off-putting, feel free to just skip it. Such topics seem to be more common among freelance writers (examples here,  here, and here, and here, and some of those include much more detail about the writer’s sources of income than I typically provide, which I found interesting!). My goal here is not to brag about how much I’m earning, but to say that I started from zero (twice: once as a translator and once as an interpreter), and if can do it, you can do it!

Income and where it came from

At the beginning of 2023, I set an income goal of US $125,000, an increase of $15,000 over my 2022 income. When I say “income,” I mean gross income minus subcontracting: I don’t include money that I took in and immediately paid out to someone else (typically online course instructors), but I include everything else. My 2022 income was almost equally divided between translation, interpreting, and teaching (31-35K from each of those).

At $110K, I definitely was not worried about how to keep the lights on, but I was frustrated with the stagnation. My income had stayed stable at around that level for four years, and I wanted to bump it up a bit. Specifically, I wanted to move more toward the equivalent of a six-figure salaried job, which I feel that I (and anyone else with two Master’s degrees and 20 years’ experience) would merit.

So far, I’m ahead of this goal; minus subcontracting, I earned about $86K in the first six months of 2023, for an average monthly income of slightly over $14K. Where did the 86K come from, and what are the trends?

• My translation income was slightly behind last year, at 14K for six months (my total translation income in 2022 was 31K)
• Interestingly (since I haven’t published a new book in a number of years, but hopefully that’s changing soon!), book royalty income, while not a huge portion of my overall income, was way up, at $3,500 for six months as compared to around 4K for all of 2022
• The remaining 69K was divided between two line items that are up: interpreting, and teaching. Teaching is up about 25% (I offered some new Training for Translators courses that did well, and I did some training for other entities that also did well), and interpreting is way, way up: my total interpreting income for 2022 was 35K, and I earned 34K from interpreting in the first six months of this year

What went well:

• I honestly really enjoyed all of the work I did, even when I was working a little too much. I got my conference interpreting degree exactly two years ago, and I’m seeing that conference interpreting clients are starting to trust me with larger, more important, and multi-session assignments, rather than occasional or one-off things
• I did a lot of remote court interpreting work for entities outside Colorado, which brought in some additional income and proved to be interesting (and who knew there were so many francophone defendants in court cases in the US; there really are!)
• Court and conference interpreting are starting to balance out. In 2022, I did a bit over 110 court assignments and around 50 conference assignments, and so far this year, I did 47 court days and 52 conference days, which is more like what I’m aiming for
• Even when I was working a little too much, I made my own health and happiness a priority, and mostly kept going to yoga at least 10 times a month (sometimes 15-20 times), meditating pretty much every day, and doing the daily stretch/strengthen routine that I really enjoy, and that keeps my body feeling good when I’m sitting a lot. I was able to go on a week-long trip to the Navajo Nation with our animal rescue group, I took a really great trip to Iceland, we took a very fun family trip to Bryce Canyon National Park, and we fostered some really great cats who have now moved on to their forever homes. It felt really good to do all of this during a time when I also made a good amount of money.

What went less well (or failed completely!):

• For various reasons, I decided to scrap an upgrade to the Training for Translators website that I had already paid for a lot of web programming on; it was the right decision, but I should have thought this through before I went ahead with it.
• As expected (but it never seems real until it actually happens!) one of my largest direct clients completely discontinued working with me because their six-year contract with USAID ended. I knew this was going to happen, but it really sunk in after the usual start of their translation cycle went by and I didn’t work for them.
• My conference interpreting work from clients in the US is still sporadic, with the bulk of my conference interpreting work coming from Canada and Europe. This doesn’t necessarily bother me (I love Canada and am spending the whole month of July in Canada, and I went to a Canadian interpreting school), it’s more that I feel like haven’t really “cracked” the US conference interpreting market. I have clients who say they’re sending me all the French conference interpreting work they have (maybe one to two assignments a month), and there are many clients that won’t pay the rates that Canadian and European clients offer.
• I switched accountants, which took a lot of time and was a major hassle. I hate accounting, and I just want to pay someone to deal with it for me. My longtime accounting firm made some errors (that I caught…not good), took too long to fix mistakes that they made, and had a bunch of billing hassles, so I decided to switch to a new firm. However the first person I tried turned out to be even more disorganized and unresponsive, and on attempt #3 I think I’ve found a winner, but this still involved switching all of my payroll accounts and previous tax documentation over to their online portal, which was time-consuming. Hopefully this is now resolved (stay tuned!).

Other observations

• I’m still getting used to the seasonal nature of interpreting, and along with that, what it feels like to earn a big chunk of money at once, and very little money at other times. For example, QuickBooks tells me that I earned $1,100 in January (!), followed by three months in a row where I earned more than 15K per month. Experienced conference interpreters tell me that they expect and even look forward to this, and that they expect little to no work from mid-July to early September. I’m filling these gaps in by doing more translation and court interpreting, but it’s a big change to get used to, even when I’m happy with my overall income.
• Don’t give up on translation agencies. I haven’t worked with any new agencies in a long time, but earlier this year, an agency found me in the ATA directory, and sent a 30,000 word project paying 14 cents per word. They were easy to work with, the project was interesting, and they paid on time. Never say never!
• It takes time to build up a new line of business. Not an earth-shaking observation, but worth noting. When I finished my conference interpreting degree in July 2021, my only interpreting client was the Colorado state court system, essentially a “captive audience” client because Colorado has a lot of court work for French, and only a handful of certified French interpreters. I started from complete ground zero with conference interpreting work, and it’s only in about the last six months that my client base feels solid. Interestingly enough, this aligns with the 18 months it took me to replace my previous full-time income when I started my freelance business in 2002.

What’s ahead
At this point, things for the second half of the year look good. I’m currently working on a large translation project for an agency (there we go, another good agency!), I have inquiries or confirmations for at least 30 days of conference and court interpreting in September-November, and I’ve finally made some decent progress on the interpreting version of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator that I’m determined to finish before the end of the year. As always, freelancing involves a lot of uncertainty, but I’m feeling good about how things are going right now.

I hope these observations are helpful to you, as you assess your own first half of the year!

Freelance tip: Two financial tasks to think about before the end of the year, so that they’re in place for January 1.

1️⃣ Are your business and personal finances completely separate? If they’re commingled, I’m begging you (literally, begging you), at least create a separate checking and savings account that you use only for business. Don’t be that person who gets audited and has to comb through every transaction, wondering if it was business, or personal. Separate accounts make it much easier to determine how much you made and how much you spent, and you can immediately redirect a certain percentage (I do 40%) of every payment into savings, to pay your taxes, pay yourself when you take vacation, buy a new computer, attend a conference, etc.

2️ Think about whether you should incorporate. In the U.S., if you’re a sole proprietor (the default business structure if you’re not incorporated), you pay self-employment tax on every cent that you make. That’s a big hit: 15.3%, to be exact, *on top of* what you would pay in taxes if you worked for an employer. This is because you pay the employER and the employEE portions of the Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Incorporating isn’t a trivial decision. In most states, it’s easy and cheap to form a corporation (check your state’s Secretary of State website), but the hitch comes when you may be required to file quarterly payroll taxes and a separate corporate tax return, and the penalties for not doing so can be steep.

However, incorporating allows you to *legally* avoid paying self-employment tax on some of what you earn. Even if you are the corporation’s only employee, you can legally allocate some of your income to yourself as wages (subject to self-employment tax), and some of your income to the corporation as profit (not subject to self-employment tax). In my case, having an S-Corp saves me about $6,000 in taxes per year, which in turn covers the rent on my office. Since I hate working from home, it’s a good tradeoff. Definitely speak with an accountant who has small business expertise if you are thinking about incorporating!

Thinking about these issues *now* will get you prepared for January 1, rather than having your accounting or business structure patched together throughout the year!