Being self-employed and working from home

Note: this is a long narrative that I’ve probably written before, but it helps me to get stuff off my mind by writing.

Periodically people ask me about being self employed and working from home. I’ve been self-employed for almost 5 years (5 years next month) and have been working from home for 8.5 years. So, I have a bit of experience with both parts; while they are related for me, they are quite distinct in how they affect my life.

This is my second stint of working at home; the first time I worked at home was when the small company I worked for closed its offices and I worked at home, in Portland, OR, for a few months. I was miserable; I had only lived in Portland about 5 months, had just bought a house, and didn’t know anyone. I was pretty much just looking for a job and moping around until I landed my next job and actually went into an office everyone. Portland finally got to me and I decided to pack up and move back to San Diego (I only lasted 14 months in Portland; I couldn’t take the rain). After I made my decision, I gave my bosses the customary 2 weeks notice that I was leaving (I had nothing lined up, but I didn’t care). They were pleased with my work (I worked there for 6 months prior to this) and asked if I’d still work for them. I said, “why not?” and continued to work for them for another 3.5 years working out of my apartment and then my house. As I made the decision to work from home and enjoyed where I was living, working from home treated me well. However, I did have some issues. Most importantly, I worked too much. In an 8 hours day, I put in 8 hours of work which meant I typically put in 25% more than people in an office due to chit chat and water cooler talk. For me, this wasn’t a bad thing, but my boss told me I worked too fast.

I parted with that company on good terms as they had no work for me and I was bored out of my mind as I didn’t have work for the last few months of working for them; I literally played video games all day and got paid for it. So, that stint of working from home worked out well; I kept normal hours and had no reason to overwork (I was salaried). I have the kind of personality that can handle being isolated at work; I like to get my work done and don’t mess around. Other people would go stir crazy as they need the interaction of an office; I’m most efficient when I have few distractions which works well for working at home.

Continuing on, at that point, I had already being contracting part time for another company, so starting to be completely self-employed was not a huge leap, but a little scary at first. Where would clients come from? How much time would I have to spend finding them? Would I earn enough money? Well, clients just seemed to come to me; word of mouth is quite powerful. I haven’t had to look for clients and have had enough work (at times more than I can handle) to do well for myself and my family. However, being self-employed means that the more I work, the more I earn. The incentive is always there to work more. That is the biggest problem with being self-employed for me; I have the desire to always work. I am still trying to balance things so that I work less, but it’s hard. It’s even harder that I’m pouring time into ReceiptWallet where the financial reward isn’t immediate and is largely speculative. However, the potential is huge.

Also, if I’m sick, I can’t really work which means I can’t earn money. This, unfortunately, causes me a lot of stress and can cause my ulcerative colitis to flare up like it did several years ago. I just got over being sick (I was sick for about 2.5 weeks), but this time I did my best to work as much as I could and my sickness didn’t cause me stress (my desire to get all my projects done, however, did).

Working at home and being self-employed has a lot of upsides; I’m not sure I could work in an office 5 days a week. Maybe 1 or 2 would be a nice change, but never again could I do it all the time. Self-employment has a lot of scary things and lots of garbage to deal with, i.e. company taxes, company accounting, getting clients to pay, etc. However, there is no job security in any job (OK, maybe some government jobs), so being self-employed is the only way to control your own destiny. Would I work for a company again? If I said no, I’d be lying. If the numbers were right, I would say yes.

Feel free to ask me questions or comment on my thoughts.