I've been freelancing for 3.5 years, part of which included a 6 month office contract that ended a little over a year ago. Just wanted to give a few hard numbers since nobody ever gave me any:

* When I left the working world, I had no savings. Long story, but I was so far in debt due to paying business expenses with personal credit cards, saving wasn’t on my radar. Won’t get into details, but ya, don’t do that (don’t mortgage your future). Having no savings is common, but it’s only okay if you have some sort of income lined up.

* The first year I earned income however I could with repair experience I had gained at my last job. Most of that entailed flipping broken Macs through eBay, which is getting marginal but if you need quick cash you can buy one online, replace the HDD or whatever, and sell it on Craigslist. Don’t expect to average more than about $50-100 per day though, and probably less than that unless you can pipeline multiple repairs at once. I also did a little troubleshooting and picked up $100 here and there, which I no longer do, due to the liability of being on call.

* The second year I went to the school of hard knocks, picking up a degree in online contracting. I started with freelancer.com, taking $100 gigs a couple times a week. Then I moved to elance.com and got a few fixed-rate contracts in the $500-1200 range. Unfortunately I underestimated and several 2 week contracts turned into 6 weeks. Two overseas clients never paid (one at no fault to elance - I did too much without asking for payment, and one I scouted on my own) which set me back at least $2000 and a couple months of my life.

* Just when I was about to hit my breaking point, an old friend called me up and asked if I would come interview with his employer. That turned into the 6 month contract at a company that provides mainframe services, but was dabbling with more of a startup business model. They offered me my hourly consulting rate on a full time schedule and I was able to save again.

* In the year since, I’ve been focussing on contracts in the $1500+ range, which is probably the minimum for rural America. It makes ends meet but I will be owing taxes soon on money that I made at the 6 month contract, because the contract was split across a year boundary. I managed the first year just fine but ate into my savings the second year. So be sure to set aside a third of your income for taxes.

On the face of it, this is all irrational behavior and I’m told daily that I should just go get a job. That’s all fine and good, and to be honest, showing up somewhere and doing time each day in exchange for currency can be less stressful than worrying about where next month’s mortgage payment will come from. But, I find that I can’t generate more than about 6 hours of concentration each day sustainably. So the additional 2 hours that jobs extract are to ensure that nothing is left for pet projects. They have more to do with turnover than productivity.

I kind of look at it now in a meta way, like, if you take a step back from your life and picture where you are and where you’d like to be, does that depend on money? I mean for me, that’s a very serious question. I don’t care about money. I know I should, but it always seemed like a pretty inaccurate way of measuring one’s life, since the people who have a lot of it never seem to do anything good with it. I’ve decided to instead focus on having enough. If the forces align each day to give me enough food/water/shelter to continue, then I consider that a good day.

So I don’t know what else to call it than survival. And I’m doing it for just exactly the same reasons that survivalists do it, as refuge from “this”, whatever intangible kind of ominous matrix-like manifestation you want to call our culture. I don’t think I have to explain it to anyone here because you already get it. I’ve really been thinking a lot lately that if enough of us can get unplugged and survive long enough, that we might be able to make the real contributions to society that we know we are capable of.

My biggest problem now is that since I work for the client instead of a boss, I’m finding it hard to carve out enough time for my own projects. The world still wants dollars, and part of the reason that office life is so brutal is because that’s what it takes to stay afloat today. Contracting pays 2-4 times as much as a day job, but I find focussed concentration takes a toll on downtime as well. I have the inspiration to tinker but not the motivation. This is really starting to haunt me, more perhaps than scratching out a living. I keep wishing that there was some kind of reprieve, like if I could just get ahead of the curve long enough, that maybe naturally I would find time to invent stuff. The answer seems to be residual income, but the few times I’ve had it, it’s been snatched up by others and I developed a pavlovian aversion to investing in it. That’s probably my biggest regret, and so I would offer a word of warning that if you go the survival route, be sure to have something brewing in the background or else you will find yourself back where you started.

Sorry this got so long, I’ve never been a very good editor.