Hey everyone, Bridget from Money After Graduation here to tell you about the
things that really suck about being self-employed. For those of you that
don't know, I am self-employed and have been for two-and-a-half years now. Money
After Graduation is my full-time job and it consists of a blog, this YouTube
channel, eCourse sales, as well as paid speaking
engagements and other brand partnerships that I do. My first year of
self-employment was pretty rough. The second year was better but then I went
on maternity leave. And now that I'm in my third year, things are going really
well, I've learned a lot, but I've also learned some of the things that are not
ideal. When most people think about being self-employed, they think entirely of the
upsides. You get to work for yourself, you make your own hours, you work from
wherever you want, you're totally in control of your income, and you have
nothing but freedom to do what you want, when you want to, and so on.
And while all of that is true, there are obviously some downsides, but the ones
people will think about most often are things like being isolated or having an
inconsistent income, when truthfully those things are the easiest ones to fix. I
had a hard time with the isolation when I first started my business and I worked
primarily from home, but I remedied that by getting some office space in
downtown Calgary and now I have a real community that I get to interact with
other entrepreneurs on a regular basis. Likewise, the inconsistent pay was very
easy to fix. I now pay myself bi-weekly, I get the
same amount every two weeks and that's been true for this whole year so far. The
real downsides are actually much bigger and here's what they are. The
first is you have to do all the #$&*@ work. What I mean by that, is you have to do
all the menial tasks that are like, way below your pay grade so to speak. There
is no Karen from Accounting, there is no intern to do all the orders. You have to
do all the boring things from invoices and taxes to ordering paper and office
supplies. The worst part: a shocking amount of time is spent just keeping
your business running with these little tasks. You will spend a whole lot of time
scheduling phone calls, answering emails, checking orders, invoicing, doing taxes,
going to boring meetings. The real glam life of
running your own business of following your dreams and being creative all the
time is not really true. That does happen some of the time, but all the grunt work
needs to be done by you and there is a lot of it. The second downside about
being self-employed is you have no one to ask for help. This is something I
really struggled with in my first year of self-employment because I was unsure
of what direction to take my business. I didn't know how to grow it and I had no
one to ask for guidance. When you're working a traditional nine-to-five job,
you typically have a boss or a supervisor that's grooming you for your
next role in the company, and their guidance is really invaluable in
developing your skills and so on. When you're self-employed, there's no one to
do that for you, you have to figure out which skills are important and how to
build them and so on. It's really, really difficult to do. There's no one to ask
that's been there before you, and if there is, they're a little bit hard to get a hold of. My baby
is making noise in the background of this video as usual. Hi hunny! That would
be another one of the minor downsides of being self-employed, is there's always a
racket in the background. The third downside to being
self-employed is people seem to think you're either broke or a millionaire and
never anything in between. I don't know if this is just because I run an online
business and people aren't really sure how those earn income and so on, but I
found that people don't really understand how I make money and don't
understand how much money I make. They tend to think that I'm either a
starving creative or that I'm one of those like super YouTube stars earning
seven figures. Neither of those are true. The reality is actually much more in the
middle and I make a very average income to afford a very average
lifestyle. I mean, obviously I get all the perks of self-employment plus the
struggles that I've just mentioned but the income is pretty good but not
amazing but it also doesn't suck. So I find it kind of annoying to always have
to explain myself, defend myself, or you know, just pretend that I do make seven
figures. Just kidding, I never do that. I can't afford it. Finally, the last
downside of being self-employed and the one that's bugging me the most lately is
you don't get to be part of a company you can't build. Personally, I'm really
interested in a lot of technology companies but I
don't have the skillset to actually grow one of those businesses myself. Or maybe
I do, but it would take me much longer than it would to actually get a job at
one of these businesses. The downsides to being self-employed is you're really
limited by your own abilities and your own industry and what you can do with
the resources around you. Some people are really talented at scaling companies and
building teams and some people can really only work for themselves and run
a 1 or 2 or 3 person business and if you want to be part of a mega
corporation that does a lot of cool and innovative things, then it might be
easier to actually go work for that company, rather than trying to build
something. I personally love being self-employed because I like the
flexibility, particularly right now when I have a small baby at home, but going
forward I am a little intrigued at the opportunity of working for a bigger tech
company and applying the skills that I've learned as a self-employed
entrepreneur to a role in that capacity and working for a company that I
can't actually build myself. Whether you're thinking of becoming
self-employed or you already are and you're struggling with it, I totally feel
exactly where you are. I've been there myself and I would love to hear about your
experience in the comments if you want to share with me what you're doing for
work, if you wish you were working on your own business, or if there's a reason
why you would never leave your nine-to-five. If you enjoyed this video,
please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel and I will be back with
more personal finance wisdom next week!
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