Jeremiah Tolbert

Most have heard the apho­rism that “money can’t buy you hap­pi­ness.” Strictly true, I sup­pose, but then, money can buy things that will make you happy, at least for a while. Not all the things that would make you happy, pos­si­bly, but… it’s just not true in a looser sense.

That’s not what I want to talk to you about today.

What I want to talk about is the per­sonal les­son that I have learned from my first year of run­ning a web design busi­ness and being per­son­ally respon­si­ble for my own income. Money might not buy hap­pi­ness, but it can buy peace of mind.

Let’s start with the olden days.

The Way Things Were

Sarah and I grad­u­ated from col­lege with an unbe­liev­ably large amount of loans, and I brought to our mar­riage a not insub­stan­tial sum of credit card debt. We made decent money out of col­lege, and when I think about the rent we were pay­ing, I cry. $400 a month for a 2 bed­room! I can’t get than for less than 3 times that now.

But we never saved, and our expenses seemed to grow to match our income every time. Slight raise, oops, need a new car. Credit card debt grow­ing out of control–let’s con­sol­i­date all that into a home equity loan and do some house repairs while we’re at it. We spent a lot of money, we bor­rowed a lot, but we never saved, and if the Wall Street Journal is right, nobody else did either.

The prob­lem with this lifestyle was that we only ever had just enough. We were the def­i­n­i­tion of liv­ing from pay­check to pay­check, even though we were doing fine. We had no way of bud­get­ing to deal with emer­gency expenses, how­ever. A bro­ken down car would nearly result in me hav­ing a ner­vous break­down. Somehow, we’d scrape up the money every time, but I’d be pro­foundly happy about the entire thing, some­times for days or even weeks.

I was ter­ri­fied of los­ing what I had. Afraid that we would end up bank­rupt and by all rights, we prob­a­bly should have. I’d seen my father weather bank­ruptcy as a kid, and in my mind it was basi­cally flunk­ing adult­hood. It kept me up at nights some­times, and I devel­oped panic attacks now and then.

I’m skip­ping over a bunch of stuff, but even­tu­ally we moved to Fort Collins from Wyoming and went back to rent­ing after being home own­ers. Selling our house cleared out a lot of our debt, but not all of it. We still weren’t sav­ing much, but we had put a few thou­sand away from the sale of our home. If felt kind of good.

CUT TO The Econopocalypse

After a cou­ple of years of work­ing in Fort Collins, con­tin­u­ing to live pay­check to pay­check, slowly grow­ing to hate the world of cubi­cles and office meet­ings, I was laid off sud­denly and unex­pect­edly. It was a curi­ous thing, being laid off. Everyone around me was in tears about it. They had poured part of their life into the com­pany. I was still the new guy. I tried, but I couldn’t hide the grin on my face. I felt bad about being happy, but I was.

Getting laid off felt great, felt like sud­denly I had been handed pos­ses­sion of my own soul again. It felt like some­one open­ing the door of a cage and lur­ing me out with a bloody flank steak (in the form of a small sev­er­ance pack­age). I took it and ran, gnaw­ing along the way.

We tried to be respon­si­ble. We made dras­tic cost-​​cutting mea­sures. I began look­ing for a job, and to make the time pass more eas­ily, I took on some free­lance web/​design projects, mostly for peo­ple I knew. I felt… good. Because thanks to my sev­er­ance, I had a bit of a sav­ings. I had a fall­back, a safety net.

At the end of that sum­mer, I got offered a seem­ingly great job; work from home, great ben­e­fits, doing some inter­est­ing work, and so I took it, and side­lined free­lanc­ing. It seemed like free­lanc­ing with­out the risk. All the while, the econ­omy was totally tank­ing, but I wasn’t pay­ing attention.

That job turned out to be more stress­ful than every other one before it. I worked hard, worked fast, and I did what­ever I could to earn my pay and keep the job. Because now I had this fear of being let go, because I was depen­dent again upon the whims of the com­pany. I was para­noid. We started to put a lit­tle away. Just in case.

Six months later, I was out of work again, but this time, I wasn’t grin­ning. While I wasn’t the first to be let go, and as soon as oth­ers had been, we had dras­ti­cally cut our expenses again. We got rid of every­thing we could, and nego­ti­ated pay­ment plans for some stu­dent loans for a while. And we socked away all the excess in sav­ings. The sev­er­ance was a pit­tance, espe­cially com­pared to the last. And now the news was full of ter­ri­ble things about a pos­si­ble global eco­nomic collapse.

I was scared shit­less it was all going to come down on our heads now. But that sense of free­dom had come back, and the weight of a lot of stress evap­o­rated upon its arrival. I was scared, but I felt good at the same time. But I thought I needed that safety net of a “reli­able” job.

I applied for work fran­ti­cally. Early on, I landed an inter­view with a com­pany down near boul­der. The job struck me as the kind of utterly bor­ing, soul-​​crushing kind of thing that had slowly dri­ven me mad in Laramie. so I had fun and played the inter­view com­pletely hon­estly. Oh man. Don’t ever do that.

I wasn’t admit­ting it to myself then, but I didn’t want another job that could be ripped out from under­neath me. I was liv­ing on a com­bi­na­tion of free­lance and unem­ploy­ment at this point. Unemployment just barely got us by, and every free­lance dol­lar I took just reduced that, so I was mostly just tread­ing water. But I was divid­ing my time between free­lance and search­ing for work.

I spent almost six months get­ting by on free­lanc­ing before it finally sunk in that I was hap­pier than I had been in a long time. I gave up the job search, even turned down some job offers around the same time. I was seri­ously con­sid­er­ing this… this uncer­tain world, to not be just some place I was vis­it­ing between jobs, but a place where I would set­tle per­ma­nently, and make my own way.

Our sav­ings began to grow even faster because my atti­tude towards money had changed. Money is great to spend now, but it’s even bet­ter later should you not have a job lined up. Also, because I had to start pay­ing my own self-​​employment taxes and I had no idea what they would be, I started sock­ing every­thing into sav­ings that wasn’t what we needed to get through a month.

By the end of that year, we had more in sav­ings than we had ever had in our lives. I was still fright­ened, but the work was com­ing in, and if it stopped, our lives would not end. Everything would be alright.

CUT TO Today

My busi­ness is grow­ing well! I have amaz­ing clients, and new ones lin­ing up. We’re finally mov­ing into a slightly larger, slightly less slummy rental, even if it’s a bit more expen­sive. I recently had to trans­fer a bunch of money over from sav­ings to cover some of the costs of it, and I’m also fronting some money to fam­ily in hard times. It was a lot of money to move over from sav­ings to check­ing at one time.

The old fear came back. That deep, gnaw­ing fear that I almost hadn’t noticed. The voice whis­per­ing “you will be liv­ing in a card board box under a bridge inside of six months.” It doesn’t carry the same weight as it did before, but it def­i­nitely makes me uneasy and dis­turbs my peace.

This is when I real­ized, money unspent was buy­ing me peace of mind, and not only that, but I have a thresh­old level. If I have a cer­tain amount in the bank, and a cer­tain amount of work lined up, I’m not think­ing about money much at all. I have my peace.

I’ve basi­cally turned my sav­ings account into a video game, and I’m con­stantly try­ing to get it to a new high score. Running my own busi­ness, I can make as much or as lit­tle as I want. I’m not tied to some flat pay­ment sched­ule. If I want to book six projects in a month and work really hard, I can, and some­times, I do. Sometimes, the work isn’t there, and that’s okay, because I have a buffer against such things. Feast and famine is some­thing they teach new free­lancers, but hon­estly, they should have taught the con­cept to every­one who receives a so-​​called steady, “reli­able” pay­check too. Or maybe I just should have paid more atten­tion that that ant/​grasshopper para­ble from the olden times.

My busi­ness is the most reli­able source of work I’ve ever had, thus far. I don’t think I want to go back to that other world ever again. They claim it’s reli­able, but they can fire you at any time. At least as a busi­ness owner myself, I know when hard times are com­ing, and I have the power to try and fix it. There was noth­ing I could have done to stop myself from being laid off and I think that’s why it hits some peo­ple so hard. It’s that feel­ing of pow­er­less­ness, know­ing that there’s noth­ing you can do. But it was that fact that I could say, “it’s not my fault” that gave me the con­fi­dence to go for­ward with my life after­ward. I won’t lie–being laid off the sec­ond time hit my self-​​esteem pretty hard. But it’s bounced back sure enough.

I think about time and money so dif­fer­ently now. That’s a good and bad thing, but mostly good. And I owe that change to start­ing my own com­pany and tak­ing my des­tiny com­pletely into my own hands. If you’re a free­lancer or an inde­pen­dent worker or what­ever we’re call­ing our­selves today, or even if you’re not, my advice to you is, fig­ure out your thresh­old for basic peace of mind and make that your first goal financially.

Once you have that, you can take on so much more than before. At least in my case, I felt like I got a good chunk of my brain back that was always wor­ried about money before. Always antic­i­pat­ing that next emer­gency expense. Now, I grum­ble, but they don’t cause me to go apeshit when they happen.

If noth­ing else, my wife heartily approves.