Employee to Freelance: How I Became Location Independent
If you want to have a better life of travel, our tip for you is to turn your full-time salary employee position into a freelance or consulting gig. I know it’s shocking that there are other ways to travel and work without just being an Instagram influencer. Becoming a freelancer in a field you are familiar with is a great and relatively easy way to work full-time while traveling.
Location Independence
The best way to explain how to turn your day to day job into a freelance is to describe the way turned my career into one more unconventional. I was working at a job that is rarely a position that can be done remotely. People who already have jobs that involve a lot of computer work have a leg up because the internet is available just about everywhere. Unfortunately for me, I was working in human resources… a job that involves quite a bit of face to face contact.
Leaving the Office Behind
I started at my office job working a typical 9-hour workday complete with plenty of water cooler chatting with coworkers. That wasn’t doing it for me, so I switched over to become a remote employee for a different company. I was working for a company doing HR software training. I was doing this while we were saving up to go on our first trip while we were living in Chicago. This looked like an attractive job for me at the time because while we were looking at all of the countries we were going to, I knew I would be able to easily find internet access and continue to work and earn an income while we were traveling.
Not Everything Goes as Planned
Unfortunately, the company that I was working for didn’t like the idea of me working internationally even though I was a remote position. So that job was over and we spent the next 10 months traveling. Neither of us was working, but we had been planning and saving for four years to be able to make this trip so we were prepared. After 10 months, we ran out of money traveling and returned to the States.
We needed to make money, but neither of us was interested in returning to a desk job. Tim took up some plumbing jobs and I reached back out into the business world.
Finding a Client
The first thing I did when stepping back into work was to find a client that was willing to pay me for my services. There are plenty of resources online about how to become a #GirlBoss and becoming an entrepreneur. Not to mention so many inspirational entrepreneurial podcasts to help you get started. While these resources can get you excited about your new business, when it comes down to it, there is no business without a client.
How to Find a Client
Networking can be incredible. Today there are so many ways to network even without having ever have met these people in person. LinkedIn is an incredible resource for networking and getting your name out there. Luckily, I had an extensive work history and quite a few contacts to reach out to. This doesn’t mean that it was easy, though. I had to do some things that were out of my comfort zone to get to where I needed to be. I had to reach out to past customers and use some sales techniques to find a need that needed to be filled.
Find Who is Searching for You
Once I found an employer, I then worked with that employer to create a work environment and title that worked for both my niche and my lifestyle. This ended up being consultative or freelance work. Basically, someone was looking for someone to get work done and I was looking for someone to pay me.
Easier Than You Think
Now this all may sound sort of cumbersome especially the aspect of becoming an independent contractor, but truth be told, any corporate job out there will be happy to hire an independent contractor. As long as you can take care of yourself, your insurance, and your finances, many companies will be more than thrilled to hire you as a contractor rather than a regular employee. It puts more risk on you than on them as the employer which is favorable in their eyes.
Contractor is Better
The opportunity as a contractor or consultant is the ability to make more money. Coming into a company as a contractor, the employer won’t be having to deal with settling for your benefits which means you probably can ask for a higher salary. The employer is much more worried about the product you are putting out than the raise in salary you are asking for.
This, of course, is all contingent upon your contract. What we suggest as a business model is that you don’t want to end up trading time for money. A popular way to promote this is by being project-based. There is a project that needs to be done, a beginning and an end, and metrics that needed to be covered in between. I went into my clients and said, “You don’t care how much time I put into this project, you just need it to get done.” I didn’t want to spend the time tracking my hours and I knew I would get paid way more for the value of the project completed rather than the time it took.
RED FLAG
If your employer is more worried about the time you put into something or the hours you work rather than the quality of the work being done, it may be time to evaluate your client.
How Much We Talkin’?
The way I constructed my wages as a contractor is by something called a weekly retainer. This is an overview stating that you will get paid for the time that you make yourself available as well as a statement overview of all the things that you have agreed to be done. We would have weekly meetings as well as several phone calls to check to be sure the work was being completed. If all the scope of work was covered correctly then I would send an invoice to the client who then compensated me for the work I did.
The Transaction
There would be a basic weekly baseline of work that needed to be covered and the compensation would follow suit. If I happened to have completed more work or extra projects were given to me, I would add it to the invoice and be paid accordingly.
This way, I was making the same amount of money whether I worked 5 hours or 45 hours a week all depending on the amount and quality of work I completed.
The Digital Nomad Lifestyle (you’re a freelancer)
Not only can you be making more, but more than likely you’ll be working less. You’ll no longer have a commute and you also no longer have to sit through company meetings and other aspects of an office environment. Because you’re focusing your time directly on the project at hand rather than various office tasks, you’ll spend less time working which means more time traveling or working on entrepreneurial projects.
There are perks!
In an office setting, your boss may come in and ask for you to complete additional tasks with no compensation. As a contractor, you are now being paid for these extra tasks because it is an additional project not because it is taking up your time.
With contracting you have more time, more flexibility, and in many cases, more money!
Become a Digital Nomad
This is a travel blog so of course, we cater it to those looking to add more travel into their lifestyle. This topic isn’t solely for travel purposes, though! Maybe you’re looking to spend more time with your family or just simply spend less time at the office and more time doing what you want and love. Working as an independent contractor or freelancer will give you the time to do just that.
Live the Way You Want to Live
The hardest thing is finding your new client. If you want a change in your lifestyle badly enough, you have to use that as your motivator. It only takes one client to make this change! Oddly enough. The best place to look for this client is at your current employer. Changing from an employee with benefits to a remote contractor saves the employer quite a bit of money.
Switching to being an independent contractor allowed us to be location independent and made all the difference in the world. We were able to fund a complete trip and gave us the extra time to build our Amazon business. It was the right choice for us and allowed us the freedom we needed to live the life we wanted!
What changes are you going to make to live out your dream?
More ‘Make Money Traveling”
Read Instead:
Tim: 00:00 This video is coming out and we're somewhere in Vietnam right now. It's good to think ahead of time.
Fin: 00:05 Oh. That's exciting.
Tim: 00:07 Anyways, back to the video.
Fin: 00:10 Hey. Welcome. If you're new to our channel, we're Tim and Fin and we put out travel videos about every Sunday on our series Tripped where we travel around the world and then when we're not doing Tripped we have kind of informative videos like this one. If you missed last week how to make money in travel, talking about being a travel influencer.
Tim: 00:35 Oh God. No.
Fin: 00:35 Be a travel influencer.
Tim: 00:35 Stop. Don't. Don't do that.
Fin: 00:35 It's just like being an influencer.
Tim: 00:35 We talked about how much we made in 2018, which ...
Fin: 00:38 but we like actually share numbers. It's not just generalize or anything.
Tim: 00:42 Yeah.
Fin: 00:42 So segue into here, since we talk about how that isn't a great business option, doing like the travel influencer. If you want to have a life of travel, a better option, a better business option, is turning your full time salaried employee position into a freelance or consulting gig.
Tim: 01:03 All right. Alison, how do I become a consultant?
Fin: 01:06 And I'm going to try to teach you how to do that by sharing my story of how I did it and I think in an unconventional field where it's tough to do that.
Tim: 01:17 I'd say it's one of the last parts of the corporate structure that I would think of somebody just working completely remote and ...
Fin: 01:26 That's what was so frustrating is you're like, "Oh, those graphic designers" or like those people who can code and you know, do website design and you're like, "Well, yeah. Of course they can travel wherever because they're just on the computer and that's just like the nature of that business."
Fin: 01:38 Well, my career was in human resources and I went in and I swiped my ID card, you know, at 7:00 AM and then we punched out at 4:00 PM.
Tim: 01:50 Even though you were salaried, you had to punch in and out?
Fin: 01:52 Literally.
Tim: 01:53 Did you work in the gravel pit with Fred Flintstone?
Tim: 01:56 She transitioned to a company where she did training on HR software. That was what we did before, like while we were saving up to go on our first trip. You were doing your software training.
Fin: 02:09 And so if you're new to the channel, our first series Tripped Around the World, this was the preparation before that. When thinking like, Oh, we're going to go to all these countries, it was like, Oh, I could keep my job and work from those offices. My company said no so we spend 10 months traveling abroad. Neither of us are working. We had been planning on that. We've been saving money for four years to do that. We now are ... we run out of money and we have to come back to the States and ...
Tim: 02:41 That's the worst part of the trip.
Fin: 02:41 And then we're looking at each other and we're going like, "This sucks. Now what?"
Fin: 02:46 Tim worked some plumbing jobs, but how I took my job experience from the past and then applied that to like something coming back is I found a client.
Tim: 02:59 Tell us.
Fin: 03:01 I found a client who would pay me for my services and why I'm saying this like so weird is because I did still go to job interviews, like we didn't necessarily think we were going to have this life of travel after that. We thought we kind of had our one trip.
Fin: 03:17 When you look online, especially as a female, or a male, whatever, like everyone's got their niche. In the female niche and whatever Google ads like serves me because I'm a woman, great content like Girl Boss, like Marie Forleo, like you know, be your own boss, all this entrepreneurial stuff and so many of those women or those resources or like there's, you know, great guys like Tim Ferriss or like, you know, podcasts, like all this inspirational entrepreneurial stuff.
Fin: 03:43 Since there's enough information like that out there, I'm just going to go ahead and say if this is like a path that you're trying to go down, find a client.
Tim: 03:52 This is coming from the girl that when I met her, like she literally had notebooks with like business names and like cute little business plans and drawings and everything.
Tim: 04:00 But I think that adds extra weight to, at the end of the day, you can be nervous about executing everything but you're not a business so you find a client. That's the hardest part and everything else falls in line after that.
Fin: 04:13 You know why that probably happened, now that we're discussing it, is I bet that happened because we came back, we didn't have money. Tim was plumbing. I needed money and so like it just made sense. I was interviewing for jobs, I need a job, or I need a client.
Fin: 04:31 I wasn't spending so much time listening to a motivational podcast to like build this website to hopefully like somebody who was going to find me because my branding was professional or quirky and I found a client by reaching out to my network of people I had worked with. It just worked out how you would expect something like that to work out. You know, use LinkedIn, reach out to people you have worked with, see who needs help.
Tim: 04:56 You had to do something uncomfortable. You had to do a little bit of sales stuff and I know how like uncomfortable that made you.
Fin: 05:00 Sure.
Tim: 05:01 But it wasn't relying on the goodwill of people or something. It was talking to past customers and seeing who needed help and one of them did.
Fin: 05:07 I wasn't looking on Glassdoor for consulting gigs. I was just reaching out to a network and found a need that needed to be filled and while the employer was looking for an employee, we just created this position as more of a consultative or like freelance or you know however you want to word it.
Fin: 05:29 So that's how I found my thing, is just reaching out to a network.
Tim: 05:32 Right.
Fin: 05:33 And in this, I guess part of the video, I just want to make the importance of like a business is based on your sales. It's not necessarily based on your brand. Those things can come later once you want to develop and grow that perhaps, but at this point I just needed somebody to pay us.
Tim: 05:48 Yeah, that sounds really cumbersome too, as far as like becoming a contractor for an employer. Any corporate structure out there is going to be happy to hire an independent contractor and as long as you can worry about your own health insurance and we can talk about all that stuff in a different video. As long as you can take care of yourself and you're making enough money, many companies will be very happy to hire you as a contractor instead of as an actual employee and like flexibility.
Fin: 06:17 Because they don't have to pay for your benefits.
Tim: 06:17 Right. It's so much cheaper for them.
Fin: 06:18 And if it doesn't work out, it's, you know, your contract is much more contingent upon more varied things so it's just easier to let you go. So it's less ...
Tim: 06:26 Yeah.
Fin: 06:27 So, yeah.
Tim: 06:30 The risk is for you, not them.
Fin: 06:30 Right. The risk is on you, not for them, which means that it's easier for them. And it really is hard for an employer to fire someone that's like a huge, you know, coming from an HR perspective, that's just a huge deal. So it's to their advantage to get the same work done with somebody who is hired contractually like that.
Tim: 06:51 Another one of the opportunities with working as a contractor or consultant is just the opportunity to make more money. First off, you're going to be cheaper as an outside contractor just coming in without all of your like benefits to them. So you can probably ask for a little bit more there. They're worried about your production output. They're only worried about like what you've gotten done on the project, what you're making happen.
Fin: 07:14 Plus, so that's contingent upon your contract. So what I did and what we suggest as a business model if you're going into this is that you don't want to trade time for money. So a popular way to promote yourself would be at an hourly rate or something but I think that that's a little bit outdated. That goes back to like the 40 hour work week and punching in type thing.
Fin: 07:39 I always negotiated all of my contracts based on the project. So there was, you know, a piece of software and a project and you know, this is too detailed, but there was a project that needed to be done. There was a beginning and an end and there were certain metrics to look at.
Fin: 07:54 I went in and told the client, "You don't care how much I work on this or you know, how much or how little I work on this, like you just need this to get done." And I didn't want to spend a time tracking my time and I also knew that I would get paid way more for the value that this project was going to provide to them versus just like I worked for you for 12 hours this week.
Tim: 08:17 If somebody who is hiring you is more worried about you proving the time that you're working for them rather than the results, that's a great ...
Fin: 08:25 It's a red flag.
Tim: 08:25 That is a great indicator that that's not a great client for you.
Fin: 08:28 Right.
Tim: 08:29 It should be all statement of work and just like results.
Fin: 08:34 So in our last video we go really into detail on the specifics of how much we make on YouTube, how much we make on Amazon affiliates, like all those different revenue channels. In this video, I just am not going to go into what I was earning as a consultant because I am still friends with several employees who work there and know that I do this so just for confidentiality reasons, but I will say the structure, because this is really helpful. I spend a lot of time researching like how do you even charge people when you are freelancing and consulting and a contractor. We talked about not charging for time. What I did is I put together a weekly retainer is what it's called in the contracting world and so you're essentially being paid to be available and then also there's a statement of work of all of the things that you've agreed on.
Fin: 09:24 So based on all of the kind of almost how you think of a job description, all the line item things I was going to work on, that kind of goes in this statement of work, we signed it as a contract, and then we had one standing meeting a week and then we also had just back and back phone calls as they came up throughout the week. But then I earned the same weekly rate and sent an invoice to the company and then they paid me from their accounting department, almost like they're paying a bill.
Fin: 09:51 And then when there were additional projects from the same company, then I just added additional things to the invoice. So there's kind of like a weekly baseline and then, you know, anything above or below that. Never below that. Always above that. It requires more work. Yeah.
Fin: 10:08 And then if I worked, you know, five hours in a week, I made the same weekly rate and if I worked 45 hours in a week, I made the same weekly rate. So it was usually less than 40. It was always less than 40, unless I was traveling.
Fin: 10:27 So not only could you be making more, but you'll also likely be working less because you know, you're not commuting, and maybe you are, you know, visiting the Louvre in the morning in France, you know, wherever you are in the world while you're doing this. But then you're also not just like sitting through your employee meetings or just all the things that come along with being an employee or just really getting the job done.
Fin: 10:51 So likely, based on the project that you're working on, you are probably working less hours throughout the week, which also means you either have more time for travel. That's kind of the point of this video. Or if this is like truly an entrepreneurial video, you have more time to take on another project.
Fin: 11:09 So what's another difference between being a contractor or being an employee is your boss coming in and being like, "Yeah, we're going to also need you to like work on this project and like, you know, you get like merit points for doing it or like good job."
Tim: 11:21 Good job. You get that big promotion.
Fin: 11:24 There's no "Good jobs." If your client needs you to work on a different project, then you get to charge them for that. So let's say you're making $50,000 with benefits as an employee somewhere. There is no reason under the sun why you couldn't go in and ask for $60,000 cash as a contractor, no benefits, because that's still cheaper to the employer than the 50 with benefits, and now you have like $60K, let's say, in 20 hours a week. You can work on another project and make another $30K. Now, all of a sudden you have more time, more flexibility, and you're making 40 grand more.
Tim: 12:04 Yeah.
Fin: 12:04 So I mean, yeah, I mean that's not outlandish.
Tim: 12:07 Yeah. No, it's not.
Fin: 12:07 That's like literally the point of this video is either, you know, be an entrepreneur and like granted we're the travel channel. We're bringing this up in a travel context. But perhaps like you just want more free time to spend with your kids.
Tim: 12:18 Exactly.
Fin: 12:18 Or you just want to like not think about on Friday, in the summer, if you're going to go to the lake or not.
Tim: 12:23 [crosstalk 00:12:21].
Fin: 12:23 Or you know, whatever it is.
Tim: 12:26 To get to this point though and like hearing this all again in your story and like I lived it with you. I saw it. The hardest thing is finding that first client. We're not trying to like make that sound less trivial. That's hard. You don't do sales. It's hard to go out there and sell yourself at first, but if you want to make that happen, you've got to use that as your motivator and like Allison said, it only takes one client.
Fin: 12:49 And a great place to start is your current employer. Maybe, you know, times are tough for them and changing from an employee with benefits to a contractor where you are remote, where maybe you're working less hours, maybe you are making less money, but if you're living in Bali, you're also going to be spending less money.
Tim: 13:10 That let us be location independent though. It made all the difference in the world and funded us for that entire trip.
Fin: 13:16 So that Tim could build Amazon, which is our next video.
Tim: 13:21 Oh. This is a real ending.
Fin: 13:21 This is a real ending.
Tim: 13:22 It just goes into the next one.
Fin: 13:25 Look at this segue. It's like we've been dating or something.
Tim: 13:28 We'll see you in the next video, if you want to hear about Amazon. I'm not going to ram Amazon sales stuff.
Fin: 13:32 Which you should because we kind of set this series up to be like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Being a travel influencer ...
Tim: 13:40 Don't do this voice again.
Fin: 13:41 A hard time, in the last video. This was kind of like our stepping stone, and then we feel like we've found it with Amazon. We'd like love when YouTube videos or travelers, they're like, "We found it." And it's just like a girl's ass on the page.
Tim: 13:55 If I had a nickel for every video call we found it. I'd have a lot of nickels.
Fin: 13:58 So in the next video, we found it.