The S&N Financial Independence Series is go!

Today I have something fantastic to announce: the first “S&N (Sarah & Nadine) Financial Independence Series” publication by my sister in planning, Nadine Edwards!

This series is a collaborative effort to help translators and other freelancers escape the fight-or-flight response to money issues by starting conversations and providing tools address our needs. It started with a conversation years ago about my emergency planning posts. Nadine and I both suspected that a lot of freelance translators have trouble with financial planning because it’s so big a topic that it’s easy to get paralyzed with fear. That’s what prompted me to blog about emergency planning… but emergency planning isn’t the whole picture. What do you do between emergencies?

Enter Nadine, who unlike me is a whiz at everyday financial management. Check out her article “S&N Financial Independence Series: Essentials of Short-term Planning” in the latest edition of the JLD Times newsletter! When Nadine first told me about the “pay yourself a salary” system she describes in this article, it blew my mind.

This area of finance is frankly not my strong suit, and I used to become paralyzed thinking about it in the same way that others become paralyzed thinking about emergency planning or retirement.

It quickly became obvious to both of us that neither short-term planning nor emergency planning is the full picture. Our goal, therefore, is to join forces and try to start a movement in the freelance translator community to tackle both our everyday and emergency financial planning, so that we can all enjoy greater financial independence.

We would like to thank the ATA’s Japanese Language Division for their support. I’d also like to apologize that one of the links in this article was broken for about a week; it’s fixed now if it didn’t work for you the first time. You can find Nadine on Twitter as @JPatSpecialist.

What are your biggest financial challenges? Do you have an awesome system you’d like to share? Is there anything you’d like to see us talk about in the future? Comment here or Tweet to us and let us know!

memoQ Light Resources, and a Freebie

Apologies for the delay in the next installment of the emergency series–I have not forgotten about it, I promise! It just turns out tech-related emergency planning takes a lot of research. But, speaking of technology and emergencies, here’s a Tech Emergency Quickie for memoQ users!

Do you have all your term bases and all the little hacks to your TEnT tools/CAT tools backed up? (And your invoices? See Backing Up Your Records in TO3000 Version 10; the first half of that post also applies to Version 11.) I’ve gotten pretty good about backups, but there are always a few little things that I miss for my memoQ setup. Term bases? Check. TMs? Check. Light resources? …Well, shoot, I didn’t think of that!

Luckily, others can learn from my mistakes. If you, too, hate having to figure out complicated “memoQ Web Search” settings and whatnot for each new computer, read on. These are more complicated to back up than you might think, but it can be done!

Continue Reading →

Life Happens

I’d planned to end the week with a tiny update of miscellanea on emergency planning. I’m still doing that, but originally it was going to be upbeat, and it hasn’t quite turned out that way. Still, here’s your emergency planning quickie:

1. And lo, planning works!

Almost a year ago, I had a hard drive fail on me that left me without a computer for a day or two. Luckily, I was not mid- freelance assignment, and the awesome IT department at my workplace helped me out with the full-time assignment! Still, it left me realizing I needed to plan for catastrophic computer failure. What if this had happened on the due date of a freelance assignment? So, I immediately ordered a relatively inexpensive, non-customized backup laptop, which later became my main laptop for non-video use. I installed a new hard drive in the old laptop with help from IT, and I resolved to keep BOTH laptops up and running, just in case.

At the beginning of the week, Main Laptop’s screen failed! Luckily it was under warranty, so the fix is free, but it will still take a week. Am I freaking out? Nope. Thanks to having a second laptop that I’ve kept most of the same programs and templates on, when a client came along with a $750 job, I was able to accept with no problems. Yay planning!

2. Life happens. (Also, here’s a PayPal tip.)

Like I said at the beginning of this series, emergencies can and will happen to anyone at any time. This morning, I got the call that an emergency is happening, and I need to get my butt on a plane tomorrow morning. I think many of us have been there. So yep, this isn’t just something I blog about. It’s all real!

Also, here’s a fun fact about plane tickets: American Airlines will now let you buy tickets via PayPal if you buy through their site. This is important because if you have PayPal Credit added to your PayPal account, purchases above a certain price generally have suspended interest for six months (check at time of purchase). So as long as you’re responsible and keep track of how much you’ve paid each moth, you can pay for that expensive ticket in installments instead of all at once. Which, in cases of emergency, is pretty awesome.

3. A timely video.

Remember how last time I was talking about finding a trusted colleague for emergency backup? That would sure be useful right now for this $750 project that’s getting interrupted by my second emergency of the week. I think I’ll still be able to finish it, but this is a good reminder to me of why having trusted colleagues is so smart. And here’s a video Corinne just posted on exactly that. Go check it out!

Emergency Business Planning: Illness & Injury

In my first post about emergency business planning, I asked the question, “What can go wrong?” That was a little terrifying, but now for the good news: Once we know what can go wrong, we’re ready to start strategizing!

You will probably have noticed that some disasters I listed on the “What could go wrong?” list were qualitatively different than others. #4 in particular is in a category of its own: “I could become sick or injured.”

Hopefully none of us will spend too much of our time so ill that we can’t work, but both short- and long-term illness/injury can happen to anyone, of any age. So we need to prepare for this. We don’t want short-term health problems to impact our client relationships, and we don’t want long-term ones to tank our businesses!

In preparing for this piece, I put together my own knowledge, my research, and notes from an interview with a friend who has unfortunately encountered this particular emergency. Here’s what I came up with:

Continue Reading →

Happy 2015! Do You Have an Emergency Business Plan?

Happy New Year! Yes, it’s January, that month when many of us think about what we want our lives to be like. We ask ourselves, Do I need to lose weight? Do I want to quit a bad habit? What do I want to accomplish most? We all know the “resolutions” drill.

But if you’re a freelancer or you run a business, there’s an urgent question that you may not be asking: Do I have an emergency plan for my business?

Any month is a good month to safeguard your business, but I’ve decided to devote this January to blogging about my emergency-preparedness plan for my translation business. Today’s post is all about the first step: admitting that eventually, there’s going to be a problem.

Continue Reading →