Category: Work + Life Balance

achieving the perfect work and life balance

emergency fund

Why An Emergency Fund Is A Must For Freelancers

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emergency fundIf you are thinking of switching to a freelancing career, you need to seriously build your emergency fund first.

A few days ago, my husband’s laptop stopped working. Both of us work as freelance writers so you can guess how important his laptop is. According to the service center, it could take a few weeks to a month before the laptop can be fixed. Obviously, waiting for it to be fixed is not an option. We need to find a replacement so he can keep working while his laptop is being repaired.

As a freelancer, our income is not stable. We only depend on what project is given to us. If we do not work, we cannot rely on a sick leave or vacation leave to help pay the bills. It is a situation that can easily make us feel anxious.

But believe it or not, we did not panic.

I do not say that to sound cocky. But I just want to stress the importance of having an emergency fund.

An emergency or reserve fund is the money that you will use for unexpected situations. Life can be very unpredictable. It does not matter if you are very careful with your actions or not. You will face these emergency situations and you need to be prepared for them. There are too many outside forces that could land you in an unexpected situation. You could get into a car accident. You can get sick. Your home could be in need of a repair. All of these situations can happen and you need to have the finances to help you pull through each one.

In a freelancer’s world, a busted laptop can be considered an emergency because it is just like being temporarily unemployed. You can just imagine the stress and pressure that we should have felt.

Fortunately, we had enough good sense to save up for an emergency. Instead of feeling stressed, we had our emergency fund to rely on. That allowed us to immediately look for a replacement that can fit our budget. Instead of worrying about where we will get the money, our emergency fund allowed us to go straight to the problem and solve it.

Hopefully, you will not wait for the unexpected to happen before you set aside an emergency fund for your family. If you have young ones, like we do, this becomes a necessity.

Some people I know would always say that they are not earning enough money to have something extra to put aside. Do not have that mentality. Even if you can only save P500 each month, that is enough. It would soon become P6,000 after 1 year. It can mean a lot when you are really strapped for cash.

Think about it. The financial security that an emergency fund can bring a huge relief when the going gets tough.

It is actually what makes me feel calm, even if I know that I have to bring my youngest son to the doctor tomorrow.

:)

Image courtesy of jk1991 for FreeDigitalPhotos.net

pregnant woman with laptop

How I Juggle 2 Kids And A Thriving Freelancing Career

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pregnant woman with laptopMy freelancing career is still thriving – and I intend to do the same for this blog.

Yes I know, it had been 2 years since my last post and to give an update (and to explain why I had been absent for so long), my husband and I just had baby number 2. The second pregnancy was tough and I had to put a lot of things on the side. Unfortunately for this blog, it was one of the things I had to give up.

Well giving up was not really what I had in mind. I intended to continue with the blog because it is my way of sharing my experiences as a freelance writer. Now that I am back, I intend to keep on contributing my thoughts and experiences through this blog.

So how have I been juggling 2 kids and a freelancing career: with a lot of discipline and self-control.

I have a pre-schooler and a 1-year old and these two can be a handful. Any mother can attest to that. How some can take care of 4 kids is beyond me.

If taking care of the kids is not hard enough, earning an income through a full-time freelancing career makes it even more challenging. Although my mind and body would like to devote my every waking moment to motherhood, my wallet tells me that I cannot afford it. So I need to pull out that SuperWoman cape and do multiple tasks all at the same time.

I have found that discipline and self-control help me juggle full-time motherhood and a freelancing career.

Discipline is my way of describing how my week starts with a well thought out meal-plan, writing schedules, planned chores, etc. Everything about my family should be planned because if not, we will miss out on a lot of things. I will probably find myself writing in the wee hours of the morning and catching only a few hours of sleep to finish everything on my to-do list. Of course, my family deviates from the plan most of the time – something that I have no control over. But it still gives me a sense of control about everything that this growing family needs.

Self-control, on the other hand, is my way of keeping myself from burning out. I tend to overexert myself – which I know is not really healthy. So I need to exhibit self-control to force myself to enjoy my kids and give myself a break every now and then. A massage, spa treatment, facial, and a trip to the hair salon usually does the trick for me.

These two, discipline and self-control help me juggle this new life that I am leading right now. It took a while for the dust to settle after baby number 2 came into the picture but I am proud to say that I have been able to survive all of it.

The struggle is real. That is my favorite line for now. If you are a mother of more than one kid and you hold a full-time job – I salute you. We all have to encourage each other and I hope this tidbit of information that I shared with you can help you survive this crazy combination of motherhood and freelancing career.

Image courtesy of patrisyu for FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How To Manage Your Time As A Freelancer

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woman holding a clock

Time management is an important aspect of a freelancer’s life – especially for stay at home mothers. You need to learn how to balance your time because when you are not working, you are not earning. At the same time, you need to take care of home-related responsibilities that were the very reason why you opted to work from home. If you try to obsess about it, you will realize that you will never have enough time to finish everything. In most cases, you might even overwork yourself.

That had been one of my struggles for the past few months.

Now I am not going to make excuses for my long hiatus but let me just give you a brief scenario of the reason why it took me 7 months to update this blog site..

My 3 year old son started going to school and the mother in me just couldn’t help but feel very excited for this new milestone in his life. We also enrolled him in summer school to see if he can skip one year and proceed to Junior Kinder. Well he passed (Yipee!) and all the hard work paid off. I am brimming with pride and joy and I just want to share what I have learned for the past couple of months.

Obviously, time management was a big issue for me while my son was in school. He is at an age wherein he cannot be left alone in school. That meant I had to stay with him and the waiting eats up my precious time. But since I’m committed to guide him and be a supportive mom, I am not complaining. But it does bring up some issues about how I can manage my time better as a mother and a freelance writer.

The thing is, when my son started to go to school, a lot of job offers suddenly poured in. If you work on oDesk, you should know that there is this new feature wherein you get invites for interviews. Well I got a couple and it became a struggle between the mom and freelancer in me as to whether I should accept them or not. I was tempted to decline and focus on my son’s schooling but I knew that my husband and I needed the extra income to save up for my son’s tuition.

This is where time management became a real savior in my freelancing life. I knew that I could not sacrifice the attention that my son needed but I also had to boost the freelancing jobs that I had to take on. So here are the things that I did to cope with what could have been a chaotic time in our household.

  1. I put everything on schedule. Before the start of every week, I wrote down all the projects and chores that I had to accomplish and plotted everything in my schedule sheet. That way, I knew what had to be done the moment I woke up, while my son was sleeping, etc. I was very detailed at first and I found myself consulting this sheet every now and then. I set at time limit for each project and task to make sure that I finished them on time.
  2. I built my schedule on my priorities. I had to weigh the important tasks and this time, it was my son’s schooling. I built my freelancing career and household chores around that time to make sure that the priorities will not be compromised.
  3. I took note of those that were not my priorities. I ranked my tasks to identify which of them can be given up. That way, when certain tasks took longer than planned, I knew what to give up or move to another day.
  4. I did not obsess about the changes. Now this did not happen immediately. I initially, became upset when things did not go according to my schedule. But I soon learned how to let go of the things that I could not control. I just made sure that my schedule have some free time that can be used for the tasks that I needed to move because some projects took longer to finish.

If you find yourself faced with a lot of things to do, planning really goes a long way. This is how time management helped me be there for my son and at the same time, allowed me to put in more time on my freelancing career to save up for his tuition fee.

How about you? Do you have time management issues in your work?

Image courtesy of stockimages for FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

How to keep from overworking yourself

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How to keep from overworking yourself

Photo Courtesy of David Castillo Dominici for FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When you are working as a freelancer, the chances of you overworking yourself can be quite high. Recently, I have worked myself up to a point where I am already feeling sick with fatigue for working long hours.

I used to have this thing about working overtime at home but I seem to have lost grasp of that. My husband and I set our minds to achieve a financial goal in a couple of years and I am obsessively driven to reach that target.

Admittedly, this is probably not a healthy arrangement for me. This compulsion to achieve our goal has the right intentions but I have to control it to keep from abusing myself. I have to keep my strength to take care of my son – which was and still is the reason why I started writing from home.

This is proving to be quite a difficult dilemma for me. But, like everything else, I need to know my limits. So here are a couple of things that I remind myself so I can keep me from being too overworked.

  1. I think about my priorities. Again, I need to touch base with my reason for staying at home – which as I mentioned, is my son. Oftentimes I find myself rushing my son so that I can go back to work – which is me being a bad mom. I usually have to reprimand myself when I am putting my work ahead of my son.
  2. I remind myself that I have an emergency fund. This is the benefit of having an emergency fund – you have the secure feeling that you are financially capable of providing for your family even if you are not earning. This is something that I have to keep on reminding myself from time to time.
  3. I lose more when I get sick. When I get sick, I can’t work and I need medication. If I take it slow, I get to lose a couple of hours of work. All in all, I lose more when I let myself get too sick to be able to work.

So far, these are the reminders that I use to make myself stop working. People who own their business can probably relate to this – you never really stop thinking about earning more because you are in control of your source of income. But then again, it defeats the purpose of me quitting the corporate rat race so I can slow down.

This is still an on-going process. I can’t say that I have mastered the art of not overworking myself. I’m sure I need to be thankful that I have a happy problem of having too many work coming my way. But then again, I have to think about what it is robbing from me – which is my personal well-being and time away from my son.

I need to re-assess my priorities. Wish me luck!

Why I Call My Career A Test Of Faith

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The thing about a freelancing job is that there is no consistency to it. You are not guaranteed that the same amount of workload and compensation that you enjoy today will be the same tomorrow or the day after.

Why I Call My Career A Test Of Faith

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This is why I call my freelancing career a test of faith. I have never been vocal in my blog about my faith and I have no intention of preaching. But I do have to tell my readers how I have come to appreciate the importance of faith even in my career.

Being a freelance writer has its ups and downs. Your ability to earn through freelancing is dependent on the number of clients and projects that you can get at one time. There may be times when you have more than what you can work on. Then there are times when you suddenly have nothing to do. That is where the challenge is: pushing forward even when you know that your current workload is not enough to financially support you.

In most cases, I understand why people are scared of getting out of the corporate rat race and pursuing a career doing what they love. This is the type of career that bears all the risk of an inconsistent compensation.

In the beginning, that was also my greatest fear. However, I realized that pursuing any dream, especially one that is too far from what you have grown accustomed to requires a great deal of faith. In my case, that faith involved my belief in a higher power that controls my life. For some, it can be faith in their skills. In others, it can be faith in the industry that they want to enter into.

Regardless of what you believe in, you have to hold on your faith because that is what will get you through the lean times of freelancing. Trust me when I say that there will be times when you barely earn enough for your needs. These are the times when you should remain steadfast to your beliefs.

There are people who begin doing their dream jobs but quit along the way because they lack faith. My faith allowed me to continue on even when things seem to be hopeless. I pity those people because they lose the chance of being really happy with their job. There is nothing like working on your own terms and doing what you love to do. The personal fulfillment that comes with excelling cannot be matched. You need to be able to hold on to the motivation that gave you the strength to pursue this dream in the first place. It may be a flimsy concept to grasp but I sincerely believe in this because it was what kept me from giving up and succeeding in my writing career.

So I guess that is my challenge to you. Find something that you can hold on to – a source of faith that will help you through the lean times. We all have to believe in something. It doesn’t even have to be logically correct – but as long as it gives you the drive to pursue what you love to do best, then you know you will be alright.

It’s a cliché I know. But you really just have to believe and keep to your faith that it gets better.

I sincerely hope this makes sense to you. :)