Comments on: OT: Freelance frugality

By: Link: living on an irregular income « Thoughts On Translation

Link: living on an irregular income « Thoughts On Translation — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:02:25 +0000

[...] personal credit card bill with it (and as we talked about in last winter’s post on Freelance frugality, I think that the number one principle of personal finance is to never, ever carry a credit card [...]

By: Corinne McKay

Corinne McKay — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:41:19 +0000

Thanks to everyone for your great comments on this topic; maybe someone could start a whole separate blog on freelance frugality since it seems like so many of us are practicing it!

@Beth, that’s a really good question about outsourcing. I wrote a whole post about outsourcing a while ago, and people submitted some great suggestions about that too. I have to admit that I’m a rather feeble outsourcer (taxes, oil changes, can’t think of much else!) so probably not the best person to hold forth on this, but…

My issue with outsourcing (and disclaimer, this may sound awful!) is that I really don’t want to free up my time so that I can work more. In a neighborhood with an ample population of high school and college students, I’m sure that I could hire someone to do the laundry or go grocery shopping or mulch the gardens for a lot less than I make per hour, but those activities are things that I enjoy doing to take my mind and body off working.

In addition (and again, this is just me), I can’t get past the idea with certain tasks (such as housecleaning) that it’s just not the kind of relationship that I want to have with another person. I really think I would be uncomfortable watching someone else clean the bathroom while I ate lunch or talked on the phone or even worked; and I feel the same way about lawn care and other similar jobs. If I wanted to free up time in order to work more, I think I would probably look for a gal/guy Friday type of person who I could hire for 10ish hours a week to do whatever I really needed right then; admin work for the business, errands, package books to ship out, pick up kid at school, etc. but right now I actually enjoy doing that stuff myself.

By: Dawn Montague

Dawn Montague — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:59:00 +0000

What a wonderful post – a woman after my own heart:-)
We’re the same with food – I believe it saves a lot of medical expenses in the long run. We buy eggs, dairy, meat, produce and grains directly from farmers whenever we can and the price of gas doesn’t make it more expensive than walking down to the local natural foods grocery store. Some of our farmers come to town on a more or less regular basis and we try to arrange convenient pickups. I would bet we spend less time shopping for food than those who run to the grocery store every time they need something, and we develop great relationships as well as save a lot of money on the food we really want.

We have also chosen to live in the inner city where we can go almost everywhere by bus or walk. Where we are, the housing is a lot cheaper, too, because its not the “middle-class” thing to do – living downtown.

One thing that we do to save money is to use Vonage – no extra charge for long distance in the US, Canada and to some of Western Europe. If we have to call outside of the “free” countries, we compare the rates with those of a service like Skype or Yahoo. When staying at the film school in Pune, India, which had campus-wide wireless internet, we used Yahoo Messenger on a laptop with a headset to call back home to the US, and it cost us only 1 cent per minute. It’s more expensive from the US to India, but worth looking at.

If you are in a situation where you need to send SMS messages to someone’s cell phone abroad, using a service like Skype is much less expensive than sending directly from your cell phone. For some reason, it seems to be more expensive if you are sending within the US, however.

We don’t have a dryer, either – a constant source of consternation to certain relatives, but we don’t care. And we heat only part of the house in winter. The dining room, kitchen and a small sitting alcove are the only rooms we keep really warm. The rest is pretty cold, but warm clothes and heavy blankets are just a lot cheaper than natural gas right now.

Dawn

By: Beth Hayden

Beth Hayden — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:46:33 +0000

Hi Corinne -

Great post! And as your friend in Boulder, I have really admired your frugality and have picked up many, MANY great tips on living a more frugal lifestyle from you. The question I’ve still got is this…how do you balance spending time and energy with doing some of these things yourself or in a more frugal way with being able to work extra hours and earn more cash each month?

There’s a whole school of thought (4-Hour Workweek is a good example) that says you should outsource everything that you can to people to do whose hourly rate is cheaper than yours. For example, if you pay someone to do your bookkeeping or hang up your laundry, and they charge you $15/hour, can’t you then use the hours that you’re not doing those things to earn more income? I don’t know where the balance is.

I’m just wondering where you draw the line and say “I’m not willing to do that to save money because it would just take too much time”?

cheers,
Beth

By: Judy Jenner

Judy Jenner — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:45:34 +0000

Love this post — I am all about being thrifty, too! I am not quite as good at it as Corinne et.at., but I feel very comfortable where I am at.

For long-distance phone, I recommend Vonage or http://www.jajah.com — you can use your land line and aren’t tied to your computer like you would be with Skype.

I am a voracious reader, but get most of my books from the library.

I don’t shop at malls. My favorite store is Ross. Great deals.

We buy pretty much everything at Costco. The shopping trips are more expensive, but the per-item cost is incredibly low. We buy 2 gallons of milk for the price of 1 at the grocery store. Even stamps are sold UNDER face value. Cereal is half the price. Incredible.

I print using both sides of the paper. Good for the environment, too.

I drive a hybrid car.

After 3 years with no A/C in his car in Vegas (!), poor hubby finally bought a new car. Well, new to us. Used, of course.

I took my lunch to work when I was an in-house translator for years.

When I drive, I combine business miles with a non-business stop on the way and get the tax deduction (minus a few miles).

Amen on credit card debt. Don’t have it/like it either. I maxed out my 401 K and Roth IRA contributions for more than 5 years, but after my switch to freelance wonderland a few months ago, I’ve had to scale that back a bit.

Thrifty freelancers unite! It feels good to be thrifty. I have really enjoyed reading everyone else’s comments. Thanks @MT for the priceless image of you guys translating in the nude, hahaha. You are right, though — after I left corporate America, I spend less on clothes, even though I wasn’t spending that much anyway — a $200 dress at Ross for $7. I love the looks I get when I tell people my Jones New York outfit was cheaper than their lunch.

By: MT

MT — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:03:28 +0000

We in the MT household do many of the same things (prepaid cell phone, no credit card debt, rarely use the AC, buy in bulk, max. Roth contribution, the style of language exchange Benny suggested, fix things that break, make things from scratch, grow some of our own food, etc.). I’m not a cheapness zealot, but I do what I can to keep my expenses down. Some of the things I do to save money include the following:
- Our household seldom eats in restaurants. We find that by sometimes buying fancier, more expensive ingredients at home (crab, lobster, phyllo dough, fiddle-head fern, fancy mushrooms, nice cuts of meat, heirloom tomatoes, snooty cheeses, etc.) we can make the kinds of meals that we would want to go out to fancy restaurants to eat. For way less.
- We eat our share of legumes. People undervalue this whole category of food. They can be really cheap (especially dried beans!) and they’re not hard to make and to make well.
- In our wealthy youth we used to be $30-bottle-of-wine fans. We still occasionally get an expensive (and good—though the two are by no means the same) bottle. But mostly we’ve switched to a Frencher, more table-winey approach. And we’re happy.
- We never buy clothes. Since we work at home, we just translate in the nude. Well, we haven’t gone that far yet, but we rarely buy clothes.
- No air travel unless you can get someone else to pay for it to attend a conference or be a guest speaker or whatever.
- If you’re going to buy something, try to make it be a deductible business expense.
- Our household has had some very old hand-me-down cars (the kind that lost any bluebook value in 1982) and some new cars, but we trick other people into buying the new ones for us (as a present for completing an advanced degree or what have you). “Tricking” other people into buying you things is a great way to save money
- We don’t hire other people to do the things we can do and enjoy doing ourselves (walk the dog, raise the kids, prune the bushes, etc.) And we hire other people to do the things we hate that it makes financial sense to outsource (housecleaning, bookkeeping/tax prep, roof repair, etc.) MT earns a lot per hour, so if I can get someone to mop my floor for less than the $35 – $200/hour I earn (depending on the translation), it saves me money to pay someone else to mop and use my time translating.

By: Karen Tkaczyk

Karen Tkaczyk — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:58:34 +0000

I’m with you on several of your habits (Like the prepaid cell phone! You’re not the only one. I pay $20 per quarter for all I need).
Vonage’s VOIP works nicely for long distance and international telephone and might save you some money.
I too max my Roth each year but didn’t think of doing it automatically. I’ll look into that.
What is ruining our budgeting is plane tickets to Europe x 5 in the summer. We’ve found as of 2006 that prices rose a great deal and now we find that many familiar routes have been dropped, so choices are limited.
Karen

By: Tightening the belt « Musings from an overworked translator

Tightening the belt « Musings from an overworked translator — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:46:30 +0000

[...] Adam@Home’s lead and tighten our belts. If you haven’t read Corinne’s post on freelance frugality I suggest you head over there right now and check it [...]

By: Eve

Eve — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:22:36 +0000

Corinne – for long distance calls cheaper, maybe check out Comcast’s VOIP? They usually offer free domestic long distance. So many phone options these days, no reason to pay for long distance, I say. I have a deal on my cell where I pay .03 to Europe (to a landline, not cell to cell). As you know, I am from Alaska, and in college days, I spent a lot of money on long distance, so love all this competition now for my communication dollars (or lack thereof). Fun post! I am going to try to do the power strip idea!

By: sibylle

sibylle — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:31:54 +0000

I get the same questions whenever I go on a long climbing trip – “Where did I inherit … steal …. the money.” I’m taking my son to Australia in March for two months. The RT airline ticket was $870 – cheaper than Europe! We’ll stay in a tent the whole time ($2 per person per night) and cook our own food. I’d rather camp, eat cheaply, and climb for two months than stay in a fancy hotel and eat at restaurants for a few days.
We live in an Earthship (solar adobe home) that I built, without central heat. We heat using
1.) solar heat – our home at 9,500 feet never goes below 50º; and is often over 80º on a sunny day. The last few nights, it got so hot in the house (from the sun) that I slept with the door to the outside open because it was too hot for me.2) a wood-burning stove during blizzards
My monthly electric bill has been:
Jan 2009: $32.13
Nov. 2008: 24.90
Oct. 2008: 28.90
Last summer we traveled from June 20 until November 15, visiting Idaho, Yosemite, Oregon, and British Columbia. We Camped the entire time and I used my laptop at local libraries to submit writing assignments and work on my climbing book.
Oh – and My son I get paid to ski, because we teach skiing! So I get paid to play!