Freelancers & Commission Employees: How to Budget When You Don’t Have a Salary

Also known as: My worst nightmare!

Just kidding. The ironic thing about this post is that a lot of my fellow salaried peeps are probably feeling slight, secret pity for the freelance hustlers out there who don’t have a consistent income, but my friends – your freelance friends are probably making more than all of us.

I’ve seen women quit their full-time jobs where they were guaranteed $4,000/mo. “safely” only to find out they would actually have months where they could pull in $11,000 at a time working for themselves. In other words, we put salaries on a pedestal because they’re predictable and easy to work with, but often times the way you actually become wealthy is through creatively building your work and income in a way that works for you.

That said, it’s harder to commit to automatic transfers and a strategic financial plan when your September income was $11,000 and your October income was $500.

Harder, but not impossible.

Setting up your Primary List

Before you do anything else, set up your Primary List – this is your guide to your own life and how much it costs.

I literally want you to pull up an Excel document, copy and paste this, and then put numbers beside it. Seriously. It’s okay (great, even) if the answer for some of these things is “$0” or a rough estimate, but the idea is that we’re assigning values to the things you need to live.

• Cost of your home (usually this is rent, but it might be a mortgage)

  • Water bill

  • Average cost of electric/power

  • Trash/fees

  • Wifi/cable

• Cost of your vehicle/transportation

  • Car payment

  • Car insurance

  • Public transportation costs

  • Parking/tolls

• Average monthly grocery spend (try to think about what you’d spend in a week x4)

• Debt minimum payments

• Streaming services & cell phone

• Gym/health/wellness clubs

• Travel (if you can’t think about it on a monthly basis, try to annualize it – two big trips per year might total about $3,000, so you can divide by 12 and assume your monthly allotment should be $250)

• Variable expenses

  • Dining out (restaurants and bars – this category is probably a trouble spot for you if you’re 25 and live in a city)

  • Personal care (haircuts, nail appointments, eyelashes… the list for this one goes on, and again, I would bet it’s somewhere you could probably afford to cut back if need be, based on what I’ve seen in the past in my own life and clients’)

  • Pet care (doggy daycare is criminally expensive!)

  • Shopping (yes, I see that Free People tab open, and I’m going to encourage you to close it)

• Miscellaneous – gifts, donations, etc.

This list is not exhaustive, but it should cover a lot of the major areas that you’re probably spending.

Now that you’ve got your list, put these things in bold:

• Cost of your home (usually this is rent, but it might be a mortgage)

  • Water bill

  • Average cost of electric/power

  • Trash/fees

  • Wifi/cable

• Cost of your vehicle/transportation

  • Car payment

  • Car insurance

  • Public transportation costs

  • Parking/tolls

• Average monthly grocery spend (try to think about what you’d spend in a week x4)

• Debt minimum payments

These are your real living expenses – the things that you can structurally lower (by finding a cheaper apartment, buying a used car, etc.), but can’t necessarily “cut back on.” It’d be a little challenging to tell your landlord you only need a few hundred square feet this month and to keep the patio. Everything else that’s left unbolded is far more flexible month over month.

Total up your bolded living expenses

Again, this is an exercise that’s intended to provide rough guidance. Obviously, if we were doing this together, we’d be going over things with a fine-tooth comb – but I want you to get a general sense right away.

The number that you see on the document is your bare minimum, or what you need to live. That’s the number we’ll be using moving forward to determine what’s “left over” every month.

The remaining money on a monthly basis will be divided between your fun, discretionary stuff (an article that dives a little deeper on budgeting for fun stuff lives here) and saving and investing.

Your Emergency Fund needs to be beefier than a salaried person’s Emergency Fund because things are slightly more unpredictable

I want you to think about the Emergency Fund a little bit differently. Let’s call it a “Lean Month” account.

This means, to extend the example above, that if you do happen to have a $500 month and your living expenses “bold number” is $2,500, you can use $2,000 of your Lean Month account to cover it. Then, the next time you have a Fat Month (like an $11,000 September!), you’ll put the $2,000 right back in to make up for it. Easy.

While I usually recommend people have four full months of all expenses (living, fun money, investment account contributions, etc.) saved in their Emergency Fund, I’d recommend you go for six. That way, you could have six Lean Months in a row and still be covered.

So do me a favor. Add all of your variable expenses to that big, bolded total, and see what comes out. It’s probably going to be higher than you think, and that’s OK. Multiply by 6. That’s your Lean Month savings account goal.

Your sole purpose in life from this point forward is to hit that balance in your Lean Month account

I’m not messin’ around! Let’s get serious about it. As soon as you hit it, you can taper back. Maybe you’ve already got it!

From there, it’ll become a more automatic situation, and you can think about your investment contributions moving forward like a waterfall. Here’s the order of your priorities:

1. Your “bold” expenses – rent, car, groceries, etc.

2. Your “fun” expenses – but within reason. I recommend reading that post about how to budget for fun stuff to determine what you can afford to be budgeting for fun stuff based on your financial situation.

3. Replenishing any of your Lean Month account that you’ve used.

4. Contributing to your Roth IRA (the maximum annual contribution is $6,000, so I like to do $500/mo.).

5. Anything left over (in a fat month, like September, in this example) goes straight to an individual, taxable brokerage account.

While you can’t necessarily take advantage of things like auto-transfers, you can strategize around making this a routine.

On the last day of the month, make it a personal finance date with yourself

Go to your favorite coffee shop, treat yourself to a fancy drink (I will pride myself on being the only personal finance site on the internet that will instruct you to go buy a $5 coffee), and get cozy with your checking account. Add up your incoming payments to see what you’re working with for the previous month.

After you subtract your TOTAL from the list above, what’s left? Maybe you’re in the red. If it’s negative, you know you gotta tap that Lean Month account. If you’re sitting on $5,000 extra, fantastic. Cycle through your list – replenish anything you’ve used, try to max out the IRA with $500, and put the rest in your taxable brokerage account.

An optional resource for math-ing your way through this

Look, I get it. I just threw a lot of shit at you, and if you’re sitting there with your head spinning, I want to congratulate you for reading the entire article. A few months ago I created a workbook to help people figure out how to set up their budgets, but it was based on a salaried income.

I’ve recently revamped it. If you’re interested in a workbook that’ll help you determine how to best allocate your freelance or commissioned income on a monthly basis, you can check it out by clicking the link below.