Blessed by the Potato

Warning: this post is about sad stuff while I’m grieving, and writing it may just be more for me than you. Feel free to skip this one. Comments have been disabled.

My cat is downright ancient by feline standards, pushing eighteen and a half. Like many older cats, she has kidney failure, and we’ve known for a while now that her days are numbered. The past few weeks she’s had a rather poor trajectory, and it’s clear the end is going to come very soon.

So I’m left with a very hard decision on timing. She barely ate anything yesterday, and refused food this morning, along with other troubling signs like urinating on her cat bed and only having two tiny bowel movements this week.

With my dogs, there was absolutely no question about euthanasia — either as the right move or on the timing. They were in distress, and their health declined hour by hour, rather than day by day. Their deaths came quickly and suddenly, rather than at the end of a chronic illness, and euthanasia was an unquestionable mercy.

With my kitty it’s a much harder decision. She is on a path to basically starve to death, and that is not how I want her to go — I’m comfortable with a decision on euthanasia as an endpoint. But the timing is so hard.

She’s not in distress, she’s not yowling in pain… she’s just lying here in the sunshine, snoozing. But she hasn’t eaten more than a few mL of food in the past few days, and her energy is so low her awake time is measured in minutes, and if she does try to get up and walk she stumbles and falls. Her tummy groans, and she looks nauseous when she does eat, or falls asleep mid-chew. However, she could go on like that for another few days.

It’s hard to say for sure that an injection today is a more compassionate thing to do than one tomorrow, or waiting for some other end at home over the next few days.

I think it’s time. I’ve made our final appointment with the vet. But it’s hard to say goodbye to a dear friend and companion, and I wish I was more sure about this than “I think it’s the right move and the right time.” But waffling on the fine timing is not going to change the fact that I do have to say goodbye to my sweet fluffy baby sometime very soon.

Goodbye, old friend.

Last week I did some thinking out loud about freelancing, which included some discussion around some recent posts by Robb Engen at Boomer and Echo. Robb left this really long and thoughtful comment which I think should be a post in its own right so you can all see it. Here’s Robb.

Hey [Potato], I’m not sure if you’re just taking issue with the $1000/month comment or what, but this comes across as a pretty whiny rant. The point is, if you were in financially dire straits, you could easily find a way to double your best freelance earnings. You’re not in that position, so you don’t NEED to hustle that hard.

Think of it this way: the average couple with no kids could rent out a spare room or basement to reach that extra income target. But they won’t, because having a stranger in your house is weird and uncomfortable. One or both of them could take a part-time job or use a marketable skill to earn extra money on the side. But they don’t want to because they’d rather watch TV and look at Facebook.

My advice to millennials [snip] is to hustle. “Do what you love” is a great mantra, but do it on the side. Anecdotally, I know a few people who do it, and plenty who could, but choose not to.

You make a lot of assumptions about me and my situation. I’m actually offended (well, offended enough to make this comment). I’m not in the upper-stratosphere of writers — not even close! I write a lot and do a decent job promoting. I’d say my biggest strength when it comes to my side business is finding what the next thing is going to be.

When the typical online ad revenue streams dried up, I looked for other ways to increase my side income. I noticed plenty of brands trying to start a blog or newsletter, and most of the time they had no content strategy whatsoever. So I’d reach out to a few of them and offer to write articles at $250/post. I took a targeted sales approach and it paid off. Incidentally, many of those relationships turned into advertisers on B&E or RCC.

After the Toronto Star column ended, I was out $8k to $10k per year. Enter the fee-only planning business, which filled that void and to be honest takes less time than writing, finding sources, and going back and forth with an editor (as you described above).

Yes, I benefit from a short commute and a steady 9-5 job. But did you know that I work every Friday/Saturday night from September to December, and from January to March?

Yes, I’m blessed to have a stay-at-home spouse. But that does not limit the time I spend with my family and looking after my share of the household duties. Did you know that my wife has MS? I can’t imagine how tired she gets chasing after two young kids every day while keeping the house in order, groceries stocked, and family on schedule. I drove my daughter to and from Kindergarten most days. I do whatever I can to help ease that burden at home.

Finally, I’m also working on plenty of non-income generating activity on the side, such as completing the coursework required to earn my CFP designation, and doing pro-bono financial planning.

Hey, we also love binge-watching shows on Netflix and do so on a regular basis. But when The Bachelor comes on, or (shudder) Grey’s Anatomy, I pull out my laptop and get to work.

I freelance to replace my wife’s working salary so that she can stay home for her health and to look after our kids. It’s a lot of work, but I’m in no danger of burning out.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to earn $1,000 per month on the side. Deep down, if your financial livelihood depended on it, you could hit that target. My turn for assumptions: You have the luxury of working on “dream projects” like writing a book or creating a course because you don’t necessarily need the immediate income (these projects may pay off down the road, but likely would not return the time and effort that were put into them). If you had to focus on immediate income, you could easily earn $1,000 per month or more. You know you could.

Potato again. In last week’s post I did some thinking out loud including deciding not to try to quit my job to do freelance full-time, and also trying to think of what the average person might be able to expect in terms of side income if they started freelancing. I started by referring to and criticising a recent post by Robb Engen at Boomer & Echo, which left off anchoring readers at $1000/mo, and then whining that I was nowhere near that and then thinking out loud to try to figure out if the expectation was reasonable or if I just stink [TL;DR: I leave off inconclusive, but suggesting it’s doable for some, and that my odour is not entirely that of freshly baked cookies and rainbows]. I also made some assumptions about Robb’s situation that he found offensive. Robb, for what it’s worth I’m sorry. It’s not going to stop me from continuing to run my big stupid mouth (err keyboard) over the next few lines, but I’m not intentionally trying to provoke you.

I think one thing that comes out clearer in Robb’s post here than in the original is the issue of need. Having the ability to start tapping some kind of side income if you lose your job is a great backstop (whether that’s freelancing or something else), and of course for that to be there when you need it, you have to have at least a little bit of freelancing going on while things are fine. Whether that’s going to bring in $500/mo, $1000/mo or more is hard to say, and not all that relevant except for my own neepery and nit-pickiness on numbers and setting expectations — the point is that doing it will open possibilities and create backstops for you.

His closing point here is valid. I do diddle around a lot on projects with no economic return. If I was in a needful situation I would hustle a lot more for paid work and shelve things like the book and course, and that might make me more positive on the prospects of freelancing.

And a final sticking to my guns moment: I’ll still suggest that Robb is in the upper stratosphere of freelance writers. Freelance writing is not so lucrative that said stratosphere is necessarily paved with gold, and I didn’t want to suggest that that makes it easy to do — writing a lot [hard work] and doing a decent job of promoting is how you get to be a top-level writer. And Robb is a machine.

This has been a pretty good year for me for freelancing: I’ve had a fair number of clients on the investor education business side, as well as some editing jobs, including editing a novel-length fiction for another author — my first work of fiction (I normally work in non-fiction/science/health care/personal finance). I’ve had on my to-do list for a while to revamp my various websites because I’m doing just an absolutely atrocious job of advertising myself¹, when I realized that I’m busy enough and there is no need for that — I have almost as much work as I can handle just coming in from my terrible advertising and excellent word-of-mouth. This is my second-best year ever for freelancing, and though the year is only half over I’m on track to quadruple the average of the last three years. The only better year involved a single intensive project versus a bunch of smaller jobs.

But despite doing fairly well on a few different freelance projects, I am nowhere near the point where I would feel comfortable quitting my job and going full-time freelance. And I don’t think I will ever get to that point: I like having a steady job with benefits (and I like working in the not-for-profit sector even if I could make more freelancing or in for-profit). And with that realization in mind, I think it’s maybe time to slow down — another big reason I keep trying to not get myself worked up to creating a course for beginners to investing/planning/etc.

I’ve also had freelancing on my mind because I’ve been stuck trying to complete an interview for a really great person who does not deserve to have me sitting on her deadline for the past few months. The question that’s been holding up the works is fairly simple: “What advice would you give PhD students today [about preparing for non-academic jobs]?” And I wrote a pretty decent few paragraphs on expanding and honing your transferable skills by freelancing on stuff. And then I second-guessed that: how realistic is that advice, how good is it? Will risking burnout in grad school (or complications if they go over the typical 10-hour-per-week cap on external work) actually help grad students as advice? How repeatable would my freelancing experiences be? I mean, I think I’m pretty good at what I do, and I’m well-rounded so there are lots of things under that umbrella, which leads to a number of things I can do on a part-time basis. But would most grad students be able to devote so little time to rounding up business that it made part-time freelancing worthwhile?

This was kind of driven home for me by a few recent posts by Robb over at B&E, including this one on multiple income streams where he ends with this bit: “You’d be surprised how quickly you can accomplish your goals when you can earn an extra $1,000 or more per month.” Well yes, a ~20% raise for the average person would accomplish goals faster. But how realistic is $1k/mo in freelance income? IMHO, not at all. Look, my best year ever didn’t even hit half of that on average. Yes, I made a fair bit more than that in my busiest two months — but I could not have kept up that pace for a full year, I would have burned out — let alone being able to keep scaring up that kind of work.

He’s partly helped by not having the soul-destroying commute that I do: saving 10 hours a week could free up a lot of consulting time. He’s partly helped by his wife: add a working spouse (as is the case for many) and he’d have to do more housework and have less free time to work side projects. He also has a really steady 9-5 job, whereas I have trouble scheduling work far in advance because I don’t know when the shit will hit the fan (but then I get lieu days to freelance after it does). But he’s so far up in the stratosphere of freelance writing (where people come to him for jobs, and where he pulls in an average family’s full salary in blog income) that I’m afraid he may be losing perspective — most people are not in the position to make that level of side income², and that’s assuming that they have marketable skills that are amenable to part-time side income in the first place.

A thousand dollars a month doesn’t sound too hard, on the surface: if you bill at $60/hr (but actually earn closer to $30/hr after under-bidding on projects and doing development work and fiddling with your website and Linkedin profile), then you only need to work about 17 billable hours each month. That’s like four hours a week; even after it ends up doubling with all the unpaid work that surrounds freelancing, you’re still only out one of your weekend days each week. Of course, $60/hr is for pretty specialized work, which is kind of hard to find and may require like graduate degrees or something. Freelance writing pays more like $0.50/word if you’re lucky, maybe $0.10/word if you’re not. No problem, you’re thinking, you might be able to hammer out 1,000 words in about two hours if you’re a fast writer. Two of those a month and you’d hit that $1k target with two weeks off to yourself. Of course, only people who are already famous can hammer out a 2-hour blog post and get paid $500 for it — most³ freelance writers and most assignments will require that you do research, and interview experts, and go back and forth with your editor to polish it, which can bring your hourly rate way down. Plus you’ll have to draft and send like 20 proposals to editors for each assignment you actually land, which is hours out of your life you don’t get paid for at all. A few sites peg basic copyediting at about $30/hr — but go to the self-publishing sites and you’ll see authors claim they don’t pay over $20/hr (along with ads from hungry part-time editors willing to low-ball).

So with business development, you’re probably talking 8-10 hours per week to hit that expectation if you have some marketable skills but aren’t a super-specialized professional. If you don’t have a portfolio or a lot of skills and are just grinding away at things like fiverr jobs or brainmass, you’re talking more like 20 hours per week, which I don’t think is something to advise most people to expect.

What, then, is a reasonable expectation of what working freelance can do for you? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m way under my potential^4,5. I believe that I’m well above the median in terms of freelancers who work full-time day jobs, at least in specialized skills if not in billable hours, which means most should not expect to break even the $500/mo point. But maybe my self-image is all wrong and the only reason I took issue with the B&E estimate is because I’m actually just unsuccessful. How much is a reasonable amount of work for the average person before burnout threatens? Again, I’ve personally prided myself on my stamina, but I lose a lot of time to other parts of my life — a young, single person with no commute could rock side income (but then is that typical/average?). Is ~10 hours/week sustainable if your commute is more reasonable? I don’t know what to suggest, which leads me back to part of why I’m stuck on that interview.

However, the main point may still apply: freelancing may be a good way to build transferable skills and improve your finances. Most Canadians struggle to save even a few thousand dollars per year, so making even $250/mo in a more realistic freelancing expectation could really beef up those retirement savings.

As for me? I think I’ll move updating my websites and profiles back down to the bottom of the to-do list.

1. I mean, I earned my American Medical Writers’ Association certificate two years ago and still haven’t gotten around to putting that fact up anywhere — in fact no where do I actually advertise that I do editing work, it’s all been thanks to word-of-mouth. And my CV/bio is just a disgrace.
2. And of course, Michael James was ahead of me again to that idea, as you can see in the comments section at B&E.
3. Look at me, talking like I’ve had any kind of success in this field at all (I haven’t), or talked to more than two people who have (I haven’t).
4. Well, I know that I am: I charge almost half of what many money coaches charge, which I justify by focusing on education and making my clients work for themselves — I do less for them, at the end of the day, so it ends up being what I consider exceptionally fair, which makes me feel good as a service provider.
5. Also, I know that I am: I spent a lot of time writing the book last year, and this year on pro bono work for the library as well as promoting the book and doing interviews — all time that I could have instead dedicated to making money by freelancing.

Last week Sandi and I presented Money 201: Planning and Investing at the Toronto Public Library and it was a blast. I think it was one of the best lectures I’ve ever given¹. Sandi opened it up with a discussion about goals and direction, making money fit your life, and she did it all with only a few graphical slides. Then I picked up from there to go into investing in a bit more academic way. The room was nearly full, the audience was involved, the energy was good, the questions were great. I hope at some point we’ll be able to do it again.

In brief, my part started with the old fable of the grasshopper and the ant: we know we need to save for the future. Then I took it a step further: with inflation and long lives we need to not just save but to invest. Then a breezy breakdown of what investing is and how it’s kind of scary (discussing risk) and not scary at all (showing how easy passive investing is).

At this point I’m not quite sure what to do with the material — I can leave it alone for now, and if/when we do another seminar then the lucky people who come can see it anew, or I can put up the slides… but that loses a lot without the accompanying talk and discussion. I can also make a video/podcast out of it, but at an hour² just for my part is a lot to listen to, and a lot of work for me if no one is going to watch it. Let me know in the comments if that’s something you’re interested in (also if you’d prefer to see a video of me standing and gesticulating with my hands as though it were a lecture, or a voice-over on the slides which is cleaner).

Speaking of lots of work, let me now give a behind-the-scenes glimpse at preparing something like this. It basically took about 15 hr of prep time for a 1.5 hr presentation — and I’m still buzzing from the energy of that day so let me go ahead and say that 10:1 ratio of prep time for a great presentation is about right in my experience from preparing other classes and lectures³. Of course, everyone is different: some people can write some bullet points on cue cards in the drive to the talk and be amazing, and my PhD supervisor famously gave other people’s talks cold (zero preparation time), just talking based on what he saw on the slides as they came up and rolling with it. Or check out this guide from TED, which suggests that if anything my 10:1 prep ratio is not practicing enough. IMHO you should always plan at least one real-time practice run, especially if you have a time window to hit — good talks don’t just materialize from being charming and winging it.

First, there was the idea stage: Sandi and I were psyched to do something for financial literacy month 2013; when that plan fell through we took our early discussions and wrote a proposal for the Toronto Public Library and submitted it. Yes, Money 201 actually pre-dates the Value of Simple — we submitted the proposal for it like two years ago now, thinking TPL would go a lot faster. Instead it was over a year before we heard back that there was a branch interested in hosting the seminar, and once they did get back to us they were booking 7 months in advance⁴.

Anyway, with this actually a go I now had the book in hand, so I set out to try to basically recapitulate it, with some more detail on planning to come from Sandi’s part. Well, as you can imagine, there’s way too much material to cover in that kind of time: I had to create something new that would fit. So I spent about 2 hr putting together a first draft slide deck which outlined a more focused talk, expanding on some parts of the book and ignoring many others. Then I spent about an hour doing a dry run on my own to identify problems with the flow and scope, which led to another 2 hours of slide revisions and rewrites (some of this was digging up a reference for a quote and double-checking some math).

Then because this was a joint presentation I had another 2 hours to discuss it with Sandi so that our parts would mesh together well, and to get her feedback on my early slides. That was followed by another 2 hours or so of revisions and rewrites.

After that I took about 2 hours to practice in front of Wayfare (though the talk was only an hour, there was lots of time to stop and ask questions, discuss what works and doesn’t, to accept criticism, see what’s too detailed, and where things come out of nowhere). I only had about an hour of revisions after that — mostly reordering and cutting slides rather than revising them or writing new ones.

Finally, another hour to practice the “final version” on my own, check the timing and flow — which includes creating a few mental checks, like where the ~1/3 and ~2/3 points are so I’ll know when I might have to hurry up or slow down if I get off my timing at the real thing. That inevitably leads to a last few tweaks of the slides, which with the other prep tasks like copying backups to my cloud drive, a USB stick, making sure I have a laser pointer and bottled water packed, etc., is another hour of prep time.

In all that slide prep I try to think of likely questions and a trick that has carried over from my academia days is to have question slides ready — if I have say 50 slides to present then slide 51 might be my ending “thank you, questions? contact me here:” etc. slide, but then past that I keep slides ready to help answer questions. Many of the extra slides I had to cut back on for time are kept there because I don’t like deleting things, as are a few slides I made just to be ready for questions. Even if I don’t have to bring them up to answer a question, that kind of advanced thinking of likely questions (and their answers) really helps the Q&A part go more smoothly.

A financial literacy event like this can feel really good to do — lots of happy people in that audience who walked away knowing more and feeling better about their money and how it intertwined with that future, which is affirming for us as presenters. But make no mistake that it’s a much bigger time commitment than just the hour or two spent up on stage.

1. and if I may toot my own horn, that is indeed saying something.
2. and to toot horns again, our timing was great — few people appreciate coming in on-time for a 1.5 hr lecture, but it is important and requires work and practice to nail it.
3. for my PhD defence it was naturally more, closer to 200:1 (and that’s not including data analysis tasks like making graphs — just presentation prep). I had a very indulgent and supportive lab group who critiqued me through three full-length practice runs.
4. so using that as a guide, if you’re interested in seeing another Money 201/new title TBD with Sandi and/or me, it likely won’t be for another year or more, at least at TPL.

It’s buried in the blogroll on the sidebar, but for a few years now I’ve offered consultation services for personal finance/investing matters over at Robertson Investment Services. I mention this now because of this recent article pointing that out, yet people landing here might not see that little wee link and be confused as to how I made it into that list. So hello and welcome — that is a thing that I do.

Deciding what to call my particular services was a bit of a challenge — I’m not a licensed salesperson or CFP, and I don’t really do a whole lot of detailed planning. “Coaching” kind of fits, but I have not aimed to get recurring coaching clients — I’ve specialized in a niche of helping people become do-it-yourself investors. Most of my clients just need one or two sessions to bounce some ideas off someone who’s well-read on the subject, trouble-shoot some nitty-gritty issues, and get over the hurdles of brokerage systems and spreadsheets to fly on their own. Given that I started as I was finishing my doctorate and had a long series of conversations on the meaning of that (to teach), I settled on “educator” and named the business accordingly¹.

After working with a few clients over the years I thought I had figured out some of the most common issues and barriers, and set out to address those in the Value of Simple.

I was conversing with Ellen Roseman about it back in November, and said that I had hopefully made myself obsolete with the book — with only a few exceptions, most of my clients’ concerns have focused on the material in there. Ellen had a great response: “In my view, you never get obsolete if you offer a valuable service people don’t get elsewhere.” I figured I could help more people with a book hitting a wide audience than sitting down with people one at a time — I actually expected client flow to stop after the book came out as it could answer so many of these common issues; instead I’ve had more queries (the rest of you probably saw that coming).

I don’t push the service much — as you may be able to tell by the link being buried below the fold on the sidebar. Somehow enough clients find me to keep me reasonably busy. Of course, I actually have a day job and a family, so an investor education side business that keeps me reasonably busy is not nearly as bustling as for someone who does it full time.

Update: A few years after this post, I launched an online course teaching people how to invest, and have gotten a lot closer to making myself obsolete as an investment educator/coach.

1. “Portfolio Doctor” was an awfully tempting runner-up.