Ali C's Personal Finance Blog

This week I've been working on my invoicing habits. I...

--entered a month's worth of outstanding hours into one client's timesheet software.
--signed up for an account at cashboardapp.com--a time-tracking and invoicing application.
--set up estimates for all my projects through the end of the year, to help me plan (and keep me motivated to invoice).

Cashboard vs. Harvest
Cashboard is pretty amazing. I had been using Harvest, which is really great in different ways. The biggest difference I can see so far is that Harvest is much more clickable. So when I'm looking at all the time I've logged for a project, I can click on each task and see my daily entries. In Cashboard, I have to go through my timesheets manually to find them.

But Cashboard beats Harvest when it comes to calculating hourly rate and invoicing. Harvest doesn't have any invoicing tools and it doesn't translate your billable hours into a dollar amount. This is a big deal for me. I charge my newer clients a higher rate than the older ones, so it's not a quick mental calculation.

Both programs charge a monthly fee (unless you get the mini-plan that only lets you track one project). I'm on the lowest non-free plan for each. My costs work out to be:

Cost Comparison
Cashboard: $14/month

Harvest: $9/month
plus Blinksale (invoicing app): $0-12/month

Blinksale offers 3 invoices per month for free, and I haven't had to pay for their service yet. But I'm about to pass that threshold.

So I'm saving a bit of change--$7/month. It's more like $4.50 since these are deductible expenses. But the point is convenience and getting this stuff off my mind so I can focus on my actual work. That's worth a lot more to me than $14/month.


Got off topic a bit there. Anyway, July was a big spending month for me. Looking back, I can see that I wasted a lot of money. With two trips coming up and no checks coming in til September 1, I need to be careful for the next few weeks.

How nice to be welcomed! Thanks much.

Broken Arrow asked about my big "raise," so here's the deal:

Til March I worked full-time at a small web firm making a respectable salary of $58K. But it was pretty stressful and I had to travel more than I wanted. When I left, I decided to restart my freelance career.

Now I make at least twice per hour what I made at that job, and I get paid for every single hour I work. Certain agencies I work with even pay time-and-a-half for overtime.

I'm slated to work 55-60 hours/week for at least the next few months. That adds up to about $150K if I keep it up for a year. And if one of my contracts ends unexpectedly, I can easily replace it with work for another client.

So that's the story of my big raise.

There are other things I'm still getting used to as a freelancer, like not having a regular paycheck. F'rinstance, I clocked more than $12K worth of hours in July, but have only billed or received about half. So for now I look a lot better on paper than I really am.

To fix this I'm working on invoicing on time. Since my work is steady, the checks should flow in regularly as long as my billing is kept up to date.

I'm also going to keep one month's worth of income as a sort of float. Basically I'll use the money from two months earlier to make my debt payments, bill payments, and investments. That way I won't worry about when a check might come in.

I'm visiting a financial planner this week to talk about how to fund my retirement and minimize my tax burden. That should be exciting. Or at least encouraging. The difference between how good my income looks in Excel and how low my bank balances are is starting to get me down.

Hi. My name is Alicia. I'm a freelance writer. I live in Chicago (city, not burbs) with my boyfriend and two cats. We own a 1924 Chicago bungalow, which we're fixing up. I have a bachelor's in Ancient Languages, and $46K in school loans.

This summer, my income went from $58K to $150K. I'm working on a plan to use the money wisely and build a secure, happy life.

Here's an overview of where I started in June:

Assets
Checking: $4923
Savings: $1230
House: $180,000 (my half)

Liabilities
Credit Cards: $14,017 (11%, 12%, 15.25% interest)
School Loan: $45,600 (4% interest)
BF Loan*: $20,000 (0% interest)
HELOC: $10,500 (8.5% interest)
Mortgage: $130,000 (5.25% interest)

(*My bf paid the entire down payment of our house back when I was a lowly legal secretary. I have yet to start paying him back.)

The house value and mortgage info is divided in half because the bf and I keep separate finances. Those numbers are also estimated.

Since June, my credit card situation is much improved. I've paid off half the total, and the rest is at 0%.

Because all my non-mortgage debt is at 0% or 4% interest, I'm taking a more strategic approach to paying it off. More about that later.