How to Make Money: A Freelancer's Survival Guide Short Book
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About this ebook
Celebrities like Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson prove that you can always spend more money than you earn. Want to know how to make money while self employed? Learn how to manage the money you do earn.
In this short book, international bestselling writer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, shows you how.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake. She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.
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How to Make Money - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
You shouldn’t make money without understanding how to manage it once you have it. This short guide teaches you how to find money, manage what you have, and earn even more.
How to Make Money
A Freelancer’s Survival Guide Short Book
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Copyright Information
Copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in 2009 in a slightly different version on kristinekathrynrusch.com.
Published by WMG Publishing
Layout and design © copyright 2012 WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art © copyright James Steidl/Dreamstime
Smashwords Edition
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
List of all the
Freelancer’s Survival Guide
Short Books
When to Quit Your Day Job
Getting Started
Turning Setbacks into Opportunity
Goals and Dreams
How to Negotiate Anything
The Secrets of Success
How to Make Money
Networking in Person and Online
Time Management
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Freelance Equation
Definitions
Net Income
Income Streams
Billing And Toughness
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright Information
Introduction
Money is a difficult topic to discuss. Most people don’t want to think about it. Most of us don’t know how to discuss it. Most of us consider financial information private—even more private than our sex lives (and you know how you are, you TMI people, you).
And yet money is probably the most important topic of all for freelancers.
Because money—the lack of it or, oddly enough, an abundance of it—is the primary reason most freelance businesses fail.
Consider this: In the United States, we insist on remedial skills for our children. At a minimum, we want them to read at a high school level, to do basic algebra, and to write well enough to communicate their thoughts. They often don’t achieve these minimums, which is why every president in my lifetime has had some proposal for fixing
education.
No matter how education is fixed—and each generation has things it must put up with from its elders—it always fails in one big important area.
American public schools do not teach money management. Some private schools do. Colleges occasionally do in their business schools. But oddly, I think, most colleges expect the business majors to have basic money management skills—and most of them do not.
Whenever my husband Dean Wesley Smith and I teach the Master Class, a class designed for professional writers who have plateaued in their careers, we begin with a financial quiz. We want to make certain that we use terms everyone understands.
The classes, composed of already established professionals, have an average age of 40. The quiz has ten questions—basic questions such as define net worth
and explain cash flow.
Most of the students fail. They get one or two questions right, and that’s it.
One or two.
These are fully functional adults, many with day jobs. Most have children. Most have lived away from their parents and have managed their own finances since they were eighteen years old.
The public school’s original rationale for failing to teach money management was that kids should learn how to handle money at home. Some kids do. Some get allowances to buy what they want, and when the money’s gone, it’s gone. Some learn how to save, either with an account or with a piggy bank. Some (if Kiplinger’s is to be believed) even manage their own stock portfolios—or did, before the recent economic collapse.
Most of us, however, got haphazard money management training at home. My ex-husband, for example, got an allowance. But when it ran out, his mother would just hand him a $20 to cover whatever he needed. By the time I met him, he didn’t realize deep down that money was a finite commodity.
Even with that problem, however, he was better off than I was. My parents never discussed money. They encouraged fiscal responsibility, since they were both products of the Depression, and I do remember the day my mother took me to the bank to open my own savings account.
But when the school sent home a form for family information, my father refused to fill out the money sections. He wouldn’t tell anyone what he earned. One of my grade school teachers made me bring the form back to my father and ask him again to fill it out.
My father scrawled None of your damned business
across the form, and handed it back to me. I didn’t find out what the man earned until he died, and my siblings and I made certain my mother had enough money to live on. She had more than enough—she was happy to tell us how much—and I was a bit stunned at the amount.
I learned that by the time I was thirty, I was out-earning my father. I had always thought my parents rich. My friends thought them rich. My parents just pretended very, very well.
(The reason we didn’t have a second home at the lake like my wealthier friends [my mother told me when I asked] was because we didn’t want one, not because we couldn’t afford one. In fact, I never once heard my parents say that we couldn’t afford something. My parents left me with the impression that we could afford everything. We just didn’t want very much.)
Our perceptions about money—what we learned from our parents, our grandparents, our friends, and the world around us—have an impact on how we handle money. Most of us just do what we were taught. We work 9 to 5, have a secure
job, and pay our bills on time. If we have investments, we hire someone to take care of them for us because (we were taught) it takes specialized knowledge to handle money.
Money management has become an arcane science in American society. We all get by, but only a few hold the keys to the kingdom.
We’ve seen, in the last few years, what giving the keys to that very important kingdom to people with specialized knowledge brings. It brings economic ruin and chaos.
I’m smart about money. I still make mistakes (jeez, do I), but I’m a very, very good money manager. I’d like to tell you I was always this way.
But I wasn’t.
I learned about money from the school of hard, hard, hard