For Creative People Who Have to Keep the Bills Paid
There’s a lot of things I hate (rude people, traffic jams, being called “buddy” in conversation), but not getting paid for the work I’ve done takes the top slot. This isn’t because I’ve been stiffed on a paycheck, but because I’ve had jobs where I had to face off against my arch nemesis unpaid overtime.
Check out this graph from the Economic Policy Institute showing Continue reading
Let’s get one thing straight: if you spend less money on dumb shit, you’ll have more freedom to do the stuff you want to do. This means fewer hours spent doing Day Job work and more time for your creative work because you’re not working harder to pay for that coffee table or those three steak dinners you ate last week. Continue reading
This is Part 2 of my interview with poet, artist, and part-time cookiemaker Paul Hanson Clark, so you can check out Part 1 here.
But I Also Have a Day Job: So to make your life work and still do your art, you have to go to your web editing job during the day and make the doughs in the afternoon. Continue reading
I used to commute. A lot.
Back when I started my first office job, I was driving 23 miles to work and back, which took 35 minutes AND since I used a busy commuter route I had to get to work 20 minutes early or waste even more time sitting in traffic. I listened to a lot of music during that time, though, to the point where I still to this day associate certain parts of M83’s Hurry Up We’re Dreaming album with that drive. Continue reading
Budgeting is awesome and literally everyone should do it. As a creative guy with a Day Job, budgeting’s especially important for me since I need to track my Day Job hours and keep the accounts balanced while I finish my novel-in-progress. Not only that, it also shows me how I’m doing in my quest to pay off my student loans and helps me track how much of my income goes toward essentials (like rent!) and how much goes toward fun stuff (like books!). Continue reading
…well, most of them anyway. Last week I cashed out a good chunk of savings to pay off one of my final two student loans, a financial move that cut my monthly payment by two-thirds (!!). That basically equates to a ton more financial flexibility each month (i.e., more cash for whatever I want).
The biggest reason for the payoff, though, was to ease the transition into working fewer Day Job Hours. Think about this: It took me 20 hours of Day Job work each month Continue reading
So like I talked about in Part 3, there are all different kinds of Day Jobs, and they all place different demands on your time, energy, and sanity levels. You might still be on the hunt for a bill-paying Day Job, you might have what you thought was a Real Job until you decided to make that mental switch to the dishwashing philosophy Continue reading