Categories
Finances & Money

Paid Vacations for the Self-Employed

Paid Vacations for the Self-Employed

One clear difference between self-employment and a salaried job is the lack of paid vacations. I am paid hourly so when I don’t work, I don’t get paid. Without a bit of advance planning, it is easy to feel like I can’t take time off or relax without feeling the financial burden.

Having just spent a Christmas without that worry, I thought I’d share how I balance work and time off.

My secret is simple: I plan to complete the necessary work in 20 working days per month. Every month (except February) has more then 20 week days. This allows a few extra days per month for time off. I don’t have to wait for the end of the month for those extra days. I use them during the month as convenient. As long as I get 20 working days in during the month, I know I’ll make enough money. If I don’t need the vacation days, I’ll work like normal and save the billable time/money for days that I do want to take off.

Using this method, 2013 provided 21 extra week days:  enough for a full month off. I’ve used that time for sick days, birthdays, holidays, “mental health” days, and if I choose to work, “bonus” money.

This math also makes it easy to figure out how much money I need to bill each day: I calculate my pre-tax monthly required income (paycheck + income tax), and divide by 20. That is the dollar amount I need to invoice each day. Divide that amount by my hourly rate and I get how many hours I need to work on each work day.

Should I want additional time off, I work more than my hourly requirement on days where nothing too exciting is happening. There are some days I settle in and work 8-9 hours instead of my normal 5-6. This allows me to get ahead and build up some extra vacation days. I bill monthly (see my How We Travel Without Being Independently Wealthy Post) to allow me the flexibility to average my hours over a longer period of time. Billing every two weeks would shorten that time span, but can also work well.

Time easily converts to money: If I want a bonus instead of time off, we bill for the extra hours I work instead of saving that time for vacation.

Because I know my plans rely on a 20 workday month, I’m free to enjoy my days off without stress and worry.

Questions? Confused? Please ask!

 

Categories
Photo Gear Photography

BlogStomp & PicMonkey – Two Amazing Tools for Your Photos

Blogstomp & Picmonkey copy

BlogStomp: A Photographer’s Best Blogging Friend

As a photographer, blogging your photos used to be ridiculously painful. So many companies sold “blogboards” or templates with actions you could use in Photoshop to automatically insert photos into cool grids and storyboards. While the photos looked great, it still took FOREVER to do. Then along came BlogStomp and the entire photography blogging world turned upside down. I’m telling you. Worth. Every. Penny. And then some. You drag and drop photos into the desktop program (yes, you have to install it). After selecting a group of photos, BlogStomp will automatically generate storyboards based on the number of photos and their orientation (vertical or horizontal). You then hit “stomp” and voila! Ready to go. Okay, okay, you have to configure some settings first, but once that is done everything is pretty streamlined. You can even auto add a watermark.

Do me a favor and buy through THIS link. It’ll help pay our campground fees.
BlogStomp Tutorial: http://blogstomponline.com/support/blogstomp-tutorial/

Blogstomp Screen Shot 2 copy

PicMonkey: A Blogger’s Best Pinterest Friend

I’ve cruised Pinterest and seen the super cute title overlays that those bloggers always manage to put on their main photos. When we first started blogging, that was my biggest question. How do they do that? I pulled a few photos into Photoshop, played around with text and shape layers and immediately thought that this was WAY too much work. Ridiculous. No one has time for that. While I’m sure there are more automated ways to handle title overlays (actions for one) I didn’t want to go that route. I knew from my experience as a blogging photographer that there had to be the “thing” that everyone used. There had to be. A quick Google search came up with a pretty awesome tutorial for an online photo editing program called PicMonkey. Super genius! It has quite a few tools, but I use it mainly for adding text & the reduced opacity shapes you’ll see on my photos. Is it the “thing”? You tell me. Its definitely turned into my #2 (BlogStomp will always be #1) getting-photos-Pinterest-worthy-and-ready-for-the-blogging-world tool.

As to not reinvent a perfectly good tutorial (once again, no time for that) I’ll just link to hers. She put all the effort into it, so she might as well get the credit, right? Check it out HERE.

Picmonkey screenshot copy

So there you go. 2 great tools for photo editing and displaying online in blogs. You don’t have to be a professional to use these either! Dress up your photos for Facebook or create a collage of your vacation photos for your personal blog. Come back and leave a link so I can see what you do with them!

Categories
Finances & Money

How Much Does it Cost to Live in an Airstream? December Edition

How Much Does it Cost to Live in an Airstream Dec 2013Sam & I talk often about the costs of living on the road full time. How much money is it going to take? Can we really make this work? Honestly, we are not sure yet. We have a few numbers in mind from our own experience as well as others’, but because we are so new at this we don’t have much data yet.

As an experiment, we thought we’d do a monthly summary of our main expenses over the last 30 days or so. We felt like this would give our readers a general overview of what it takes financially, as well as give us a running comparison of numbers. So, here we go:

December 1st: Tampa, FL
December 31st: South Houston, TX
Total miles driven: 2,247
Total miles towing the Airstream: 1,228
Average Towing Miles per Week: 277

Camping Fees (State parks, RV campgrounds): $842.45 ($31.20/night average)
# of Nights Courtesy Parked with a friend/free parking: 4
Gas: $626.88
Propane: $83.62
Groceries: $776.32
Laundry: $29.75
Dining Out: $180.58 (ouch! I didn’t think we ate out THAT much. It must’ve been the beignets in New Orleans!)

Obviously there are more expenses (clothing, entertainment, decorative upgrades, etc.) but these are the main ones. The thing is, what it costs to live on the road is highly subjective. Just as living in a house can be. How nice of an RV Park or Campground do you want (camping fees)? How far are you traveling every week (gas)? How many people in your family (groceries)? How cold is it outside (propane costs)? What do you like to do for fun (entertainment)? These costs completely vary from family to family just as they would in a brick house.

There are definitely plans in the works to cut down on both camping fees and gas (just bought new batteries for the Airstream, we’d love some solar panels, traveling SLOWER). Getting to milder climates will also save on propane, and dang. We could definitely eat out less. That number still surprises me. Was it the seafood? The ice cream?

If you’d like another opinion on costs of traveling full-time, our instagram friend Kyle has a great article that breaks down various costs on his blog Where Is Kyle Now? Go check it out and let us know what you think!

Categories
Faith Most Popular Posts

Everyone Else in the Campground Probably Thinks We are Really Weird

Everyone Else in the Campground Probably Thinks We are Really Weird

Sometimes I wonder what other people think when they see us. Especially on Sundays. Let’s face it – most people go to a campground on the weekend to get away. A mini vacation is just what some (okay, a lot) of us need after a stressful week. Pull out the camper, pack up the s’mores, buy the firewood and off they go! Everyone else sits around the campfires in the evenings, or plays games by the lantern light on the picnic table. The family next to us tonight is even having an outdoor movie night. Something Christmas-y.

We’re different. Most of the time we’re inside at night (hopefully that will change come summer). We rarely build a fire and roast s’mores because I hate everyone climbing into their sheets smelling like smoke (I just washed those!). We don’t go the campground to get away, because, well, we ARE away.

We are living, and part of that living includes going to 3 hours of church every Sunday. We don’t just believe our faith, we LIVE it. So we go. We shower the kids Saturday night, and Sunday morning (hopefully not TOO early) the girls put on the dresses, the boys don their ties and we drive anywhere from 10 minutes to 45 minutes to the closest LDS meeting house.

One Sunday afternoon in a particularly remote campsite, Sam decided to call his mom to catch up, and since we didn’t get very good cell reception went roaming the campground in his white shirt & tie trying to get a signal. He walked past the couples lounging in shorts and t-shirts outside their campers, past those in swimsuits on their way to the beach, and the families with smaller children out riding their bikes. He didn’t think twice about it until he got back and said to me, “I wonder if everyone else thinks we are really weird?”

Maybe they do, but this is our life. We are going to live it.

Categories
WanderLog

New Year’s in Houston, Texas

This Week On Instagram Dec 28-Jan 3

Travel Dates: Dec 28, 2013 – January 3, 2014

We’ve never been much into staying up late and ringing in the New Year at the stroke of midnight, so our week was actually pretty laid back. We stayed up over the weekend, however, having late night talks with friends before moving on to an RV park in downtown Houston. We’ve explored the museums & zoo, had a traditional New Year’s Day breakfast, bought new batteries for the Airstream, celebrated Sam’s birthday with Blue Bell Ice Cream, toured the USS Texas, and started gym class with the kids for homeschool. See? Not much going on.