This post started life as a Twitter thread:
I’ve been freelancing for 9 years.
I don’t earn £100k+ per year.
I keep seeing tweets from people saying they earn £100k/$100k+, & it’d started making me feel like a failure in comparison.
But then I realised something…
(Wanted to get this off my chest for a while…) (1/21)
— Steve Morgan (@steviephil) April 22, 2022
However, given that a) I’m a big fan of blogging, b) I’m not a big fan of Twitter threads, c) some people prefer reading blog posts to Twitter threads, and d) the fact that it’s given me a good excuse to repurpose the content, I thought I’d turn it into a blog post as well. (Gosh, that was an interesting sentence…) 😂
But! Rather than just being a copy/paste of the thread’s text, I’ve expanded on it a bit, and I’ve added to it at the end – based on some of the responses and reactions it got.
I’ve been freelancing for 9 years.
I don’t earn £100k+ per year.
I keep seeing tweets from people saying they earn £100k/$100k+, and it’d started making me feel like a bit of a failure in comparison.
But then I realised something…
(And boy, I’ve wanted to get this off my chest for a while…)
The US & London lift the average
Firstly, most people I see who say it are US-based. I saw someone tweet the other day saying that the US has a much higher GDP per capita than the UK. The US is wealthier as a whole, US companies have bigger budgets, and so they can pay higher fees to freelancers.
Also, USD is worth less than GBP – i.e. it’s easier to hit $100k than it is to hit £100k (it works out to about £77.5k going by the current exchange rate). It’s a lower target to hit.
Another person I see talking about £100k+ is UK-based – but they’re based in London. And us UK-based folk all know that London’s living costs are horrific – you need a good salary just to exist there. London clients pay more, and so London-based freelancers can charge and earn more.
I know what you’re thinking though: “But Steve, YOU could work with London clients!”
And that is true! And I do have a long-term London client. But my networking over the years has been heavily focused on South Wales, where I live. And I’d wager that the Londoner in question has a stronger London network. And that’s completely fair enough. (Heck, there’s a whole other discussion that can take place around this, about how I can improve/expand my London network, or even whether I’d even want to – as it’d result in more work/time/effort on my part – but maybe that can be a subject of another blog post sometime…)
Comparing like-for-like
In comparison, I live in South Wales – one of the poorest areas of the UK (West Wales & the South Wales Valleys are ranked 40th out of 41 UK areas). However, on the plus side, our living costs are lower (see #6 on this post about moving to Cardiff). On average, clients have lower budgets; they don’t pay as well as London (or other areas of the UK) or the US.
This is why comparing your earning with others like-for-like – in other parts of the world, with different circumstances – is foolish (and I’m saying this to myself more than anyone else – it’s taken me a really long time to see it this way).
If I swapped places with either the US folks or the Londoner (not just physically, but also the types of companies we all work with), would I earn more? Probably. Would they earn less? Maybe, maybe not.
Oh, I should mention as well: I only work part-time. I’ve done this for years, so that I could spend time with my kids (who – up until recently – were preschool age) and to support my wife’s career. So that’s another reason why I earn less.
Despite that, I earn more as a freelancer working part-time than I did working in full-time employment, for companies/managers who didn’t respect me or treat me right. I’m so, so, SO much happier now – honestly. And I made the leap because I wanted to be happier, not because I wanted to earn more.
Here’s the thing. In my eyes, earnings do not determine success alone. I’d much rather have more free time than more money. And even though my kids are in full-time school now, and so I can go back to working full-time, I don’t know if I will do…
The freelance freedom
A decade ago, Michael King (@iPullRank) wrote a post for Moz about agency-side vs in-house vs freelance SEO – as told by Mr. Men characters. It’s an awesome read, I recommend it (and I bet a lot of it still true, even today).
Regarding the freelancing side of things, one of the things Michael talked about was how freelancing could complement his music career and touring schedule. This sounded awesome. As a past musician myself (don’t look me up LOL it’s terrible), I liked the idea that you could do freelancing and other stuff on the side.
But for years, it never happened – at least not in the way I envisaged it; the way Michael had managed it with his thing-on-the-side. I worked hard growing the freelance business, we had our first kid, I went part-time, we had our second kid, and so I never had time to do that extra ‘thing’ (although there has been Anti-Sell, Cardiff SEO Meet, and other projects over the years).
I’m finally in the position now that I can do the extra ‘thing’. I’ve waited 10 years for this. I don’t have to freelance full-time. I don’t have to strive for $100k/£100k. I can work on my novel, or start another business, or something else. Or I can have more ‘me’ time.
In fact, regarding ‘start another business’, freelancing complements that perfectly. A friend of mine was a freelance UX (user experience) consultant who wanted to launch his own startup. In the early days, his UX consulting salary covered the startup costs. Then he ramped it down as the startup took off.
“Comparison is the thief of joy”
My mindset has now shifted from one of jealousy and bitterness to one of excitement over what the future holds. Working on the novel or a new business idea excites me. It’s not all about the money. It might be for some (and power to you if so) – but it’s not for me.
Confession: There was a much more bitter version of the Twitter thread in my drafts, where I call the £100k/$100k+ crowd “braggarts” and say that most of them are just trying to sell you something (e.g. a course). You know what though? I prefer this version of the thread a lot more.
A note on privilege
One final point: I consider myself privileged. I’m a middle-class white cishet man, born and raised in a first-world country. Change one or all of those points and everything in life gets a lot harder. That’s another point to consider as well.
(Side-note on the privilege thing: the £100k+ Londoner I mentioned earlier is an LGBTQ+ woman – and it’s absolutely freakin’ rad to see her doing so well.)
And that’s it I think? TL;DR – Don’t compare your freelance earnings to others like-for-like. It’s not all about the money. Freelancing offers you the luxury of more freedom and more time, which you might prefer to more money anyway. The end.
Insert mic drop emoji: 🎤⬇️💥
But wait! There’s more!
Ok, so the above is the end of the Twitter thread – but it’s not the end of the discussion.
I’ve been humbled by how many people responded and reacted to the thread and its tweets, saying how much it resonated with them. Some points really stood out to me:
1. The US is higher because their healthcare is so expensive
I live in the UK, which has the NHS (National Health Service). When one of my kids got seriously ill at 6 months old (sepsis brought on by a kidney infection), the local children’s hospital were incredible, nursing him back to health. We paid £0. (And I’m happy to report that he’s now 5 years old and that his kidney issue’s sorted.)
I dread to think how much that would’ve cost in the US… 😬
I don’t need to share examples of photos of US hospital bill receipts with ludicrously big numbers on them – we’ve all seen them. And I know there’s health insurance, but a) that’s also expensive, and b) it might not cover some things, or it might only cover a portion of the cost (not all of it).
So it makes a lot of sense that the US freelancers charge more and earn more – they have to, to compensate for that.
Which leads me on to…
2. Some people earn $100k+ because they have to
Two of the replies I got were very eye-opening. I’ll embed them below:
Well said! It’s not apples to apples.
I need to make at least $101k USD per year – but I live next to NYC, have a chronic illness in a country with expensive healthcare, and need to pay for premium tools to service my clients.
— Tom Basgil (@TomBasgil) April 22, 2022
Consider in US we pay a lot for health care ($5k-$10k+/yr), my university was $50k/yr for 4yrs. I work 12+hrs/day. My home is $350k which is low price where I live but that is in a high crime area with multiple shootings/day. I’d rather have your deal than my salary.
— KJ (@MsKackiV) April 22, 2022
I already knew Tom through #FreelanceChat (which I’ve blogged about before) – so I know him well (well, by Twitter standards anyway). 😆 He has to earn $101k per year just to get by, thanks to expensive living costs and – yep – expensive healthcare. It’s not done out of any sort of bragging – he literally has to.
KJ’s tweet, however, was like a punch to the gut – especially reading: “I’d rather have your deal than my salary.” Shit. 😔 It’s so easy for me to say: “Earn less! Have more free time!” but there’s people out there working their arse off to get by because where they live is so expensive. I apologised to KJ for the Twitter thread’s insensitivity in that regard, which thankfully she was ok with. Privilege strikes again.
There’s probably a million other things that came out of the discussions that came from the Twitter thread, but those two points stood out the most for me.
But what do you think? Got a view on this either way? Feel free to respond to the Twitter thread directly, or drop a comment below in the Disqus box. Cheers!
