Photo by seier+seier+seier.

Buying your first home can seem intimidating and scary, especially when the news is full of talk of mortgage crisis, and especially when you’re a freelancer without a steady paycheck to rely on. In fact, it can seem downright impossible.

The first time I was looking into buying a home, it was with my boyfriend: a nice, steady, engineer-type with a full-time job. I was freelancing lots of small gigs that added up to a nice income but didn’t look very reliable on paper. But we figured that with his undeniably reliable paycheck, a bank could be persuaded to give the two of us a mortgage.

Well, instead of buying our first place together, we broke up, and to me it looked like my hope of owning a home was gone, too. Sure, I was making money, and more every year, but like many freelancers, my income was erratic. I never had any idea what I would be earning more than eight weeks out. To make things worse, I had credit card debt and had been late a few times on bill payments. Plus, I’d never heard of a freelancer buying her own place without also hearing that her spouse had a steady job, or that the freelancer’s career was bringing in six figures.

Neither of those descriptions fit me, and wouldn’t anytime soon.

So, while I was digging into pints of ice cream mourning a broken relationship, I was also mourning the broken dream of homeownership. As far as I could tell, I was either going to have to wait for a (corporate) knight in shining armor, or save my pennies for about 20 years. Yeah, good luck to me. Continue Reading

There are numerous discussions and debates in the world of freelancing–what’s the best website for this, what’s the best software for that, etc. In Switchoff, John and Jack will explore one of these debates in a calm, measured way–that hopefully won’t involve them killing each other in the process.

John Brougher: Welcome, Freelance Switch readers! Today, Jack Knight and I will be facing off against each other, flexing our rhetorical muscles regarding one of the most heated topics in the world: choice of computer platform. Mac or Windows PC? Continue Reading