This is a personal finance blog so I plan on being extremely transparent with our finances, goals and how we’re going to achieve financial freedom. After all, if I don’t include “the numbers,” how are people supposed to know how we’re doing this??!
John and I both work for ourselves. It wasn’t always this way, though. After graduating college, I had a few finance-related jobs (mortgage industry, sales and a university) but didn’t really love any of them. They all involved cold-calling, sitting behind a desk for 8+ hours a day and didn’t provide much room for advancement.
After getting pregnant, John and I decided I would stay home to take care of our baby. Being a stay-at-home mom has always been a dream of mine, and I was super thankful I would be able to do it. Before having our daughter, I knew I wanted to try and get into freelance writing. Stay home with my baby and bring in an income? Yes, please!
So I did just that. I got lucky and a close friend of mine got me a small freelance job at her company. From there, my career has grown leaps and bounds and I hope to only grow even more.
John is a painting, drywall repair and handyman extraordinaire. He worked for himself for a while, but after we had our daughter he decided to work for a company. While he learned so much on the job, he knew eventually he was going to work for himself again. Let’s face it – there’s nothing better than setting your own hours and being in control of your income.
We had our second daughter and moved across the country from AZ to NC when they were 2 and 1 (that’s a whole other story, tho!). After being here a month, John decided to start his own company – Brookstone Painting and Residential Services – and I couldn’t be more proud! We’re now both working for ourselves and have our financial future in our own hands.
Breakdown of our income 9/2014
We sold our house in the summer of 2014 and profited a nice $46K. Between moving expenses, buying a new truck for John and getting ourselves afloat for the first month, we spent around $10K (I’ll do a specific moving cost breakdown in another post).
Sarah’s Income 9/2014
- Freelance writing $650
- Freelance editing $800
John’s Income 9/2014
- Job that didn’t work out $360
- First job self-employed $75
Total for 9/2014: $1,885
As you can see, we are not rich by any stretch of the imagination!! Though, John’s income will hopefully be producing 10x’s this amount within a month or so. We are also getting some of our investment accounts squared away, which I’ll go into detail later, as well.
Prior to our move, we were making roughly $4K a month after taxes. Our goal is to be back up to that number in October and go up from there.