commutergirl raises a great point that i feel it’s extremely important to address (and is also a big part of what i talk about in my books, talks, interviews), so i’m going to get a bit more personal than i probably should here about my financial sitch:

1) i have never been married; i do not want kids. i live alone with a large dog. i have a boyfriend who i have not seen in over a week b/c i am hunkered down on a deadline; he lives 15 minutes away in his own home. we have been together 4 years and i’m not sure we’ll ever live together because i’m not sure that’s the life i want to live, even though he’s someone i feel committed to and do see myself with for many years to come. i have been paying my own way since college. i have owned my own home in seattle for 3 years. it’s not quite 700 sq ft, the biggest possible home i could afford, which ain’t much. i worked a full-time contract gig at microsoft for a year leading up the home purchase to save for the 20% down payment. my salary at that gig was close to six figs, so saving the money was easy. before i took that gig, i had about $5K to my name, which is pretty much how i’d lived for all of my 30s.

2) as i talk about in my books, i did not save money/get educated on business before striking out on my own as a freelance writer, which was dumb dumb dumb. but i was 24 and stubborn. live and learn. as a result, i spent much of my 20s struggling to make ends meet, which i write about in both books. i did live with a guy during part of my 20s, but that wasn’t much help, as he was a wannabe screenwriter who worked at a small independently owned video store (as a clerk) and made far less $ than i did; plus we kept our own checking accounts. we both went into credit card debt, as our bills exceeded the money we were bringing in. (as an aside, he’s now a crazy-successful screenwriter in LA; hard work pays off.)

3) at 30, i moved from san francisco to seattle to cut my cost of living (this was in 1998), pay down my five-figure credit card debt, and try to stop living month to month once and for all. I STILL MISS SAN FRANCISCO DEARLY, where i lived for about 8 years, but it was important to me to own a home and start saving for my future, which i did not feel i could do there as a self-employed person (not at the time anyway), so i left — right before the dotcom crash. for those outside the US, houses cost two to three times as much in SF as they do in Seattle, a big factor in my decision to move. when i moved to seattle at 30, i took the only other one-year contract i’ve done in my life, also at microsoft (i moved FOR the job; i was that broke). by the end of the year, i managed to not only pay down $30K+ of credit card debt (i negotiated a great salary; guess i did learn something as a freelancer!), but to come away with a handful of contacts i used to seed my commercial freelance side of my biz in seattle, as well as a little extra money in my savings account.

4) in the past decade, i’ve done a mix of corporate work (i have other clients besides msft, all them smaller obviously) and publishing work (newspapers, magazines, books). as you can imagine, the corporate/commercial work i do in the high-tech sector pays several times what the magazine/newspaper/book writing work does. that’s how i stay afloat, by alternating between bread-and-butter work and the work i really want to do. my advance for my first book was very small, which you can read about on mediabistro. (sub required; if you don’t have a subscription, the short story is “well under $10K for more than half a year’s worth of writing work + what’s probably amounted to four or five solid months of promo work.) after the initial promo push of my book was over, i spent five solid months doing corporate writing/editing/project management for my high-tech clients, to make up for the financial hole doing my first book got me into and to re-line my bank account. i’m not comfortable unless i have 4-6 months living expenses in my savings account, on top of any retirement or long-term investments.

5) “success” means different things to different people. to me, it’s doing the work you want to do on your own terms, living comfortably and saving enough money in the process. i don’t live extravagantly, as i talk about in ANTI 9-5. i rarely buy clothes (why should i? i’m always home during the week); my biggest expense is groceries, as i like to shop at stores like whole foods and i hate to cook (meaning, lots of meals to-go). i have never cracked six figures (though during my two fat msft contracts i came close), because i always have a mix of the more fun, creative publishing work i love on my schedule. were i to just stick with the corporate work, i could make well over $100K a year. but i would shrivel up and die on the inside, so i do a mix of both, as i have a mortgage to think about, and the fact that i need to retire on something. i haven’t done the math to figure out what percentage of my work has been corporate since 1998, but i’m sure it’s been at least 50%. that said, my calendar for the rest of the year is starting to fill up with gigs writing articles and columns for mainstream media outlets and the income prospects are daunting. so i have to ensure i leave time for my bread-and-butter work. either that, or climb higher up the journalism/author food chain, which brings me to my next (long-winded) point.

6) i know a number of freelance authors/journalists who make $60-100K and up without relying on the corporate work, some of them in new york. how? they’ve been at it many years and they’re at the top of their field (columns in major publications, several books on the shelves, etc), but they weren’t always flush with cash. they were writing for smaller pubs and pay once upon a time too. to make the most possible money, they go where the money is: bigger new york publishing houses, business journalism beats for the day-to-day article writing, magazine articles for the big newsstand glossies, which pay better than newspapers and indie mags. if interested, you can learn all about the biz on mediabistro.

7) since i think it’s extremely important for people to know that you don’t need a boyfriend/girlfriend/rich relative to bankroll you so that you can survive as a freelancer, i do my best to only interview self-employed women who are single, are the sole bread winner in their family, or whose income contribution is as necessary to their two-person household as their partnes’. (you’ll see this if you take a peek at ANTI 9-5.) there are tons of them out there, even in NY, and i’ve met and know many. that said, i realize NY is insanely expensive. i have lived there too, having grown up in New Jersey. i lived there when i was 22-24. my dad lives there now and i visit often. working your rear off to save money before you leap into full-time solo work is essential, as is living lean. i applaud anyone who can make this life work in NY — it’s tougher than tough financially — but people do it all the time. to hear the other side of the story, i’ve also interviewed many people who left NY for the south or the midwest because they didn’t want to worry about money so much and wanted to accelerate the process of working for themselves; this isn’t an option for everyone, but it’s something i thought was worth mentioning. author meghan daum is probably the best-known example of this.

thanks for allowing me to write this long post. hopefully it’s been helpful.