#171: The Freelancer's Guide To Passive Income And Smart Personal Finances | With Graham Cochrane

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 171

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, and I'm here with you all alone today. And that's because this episode, we're actually pulling an interview from The Vault that I think every single person should hear right now. This is an interview that we did with Graham Cochrane about personal finances for entrepreneurs. I've actually been listening to a lot of Graham Cochrane's podcast lately. This is just something that's been really relevant to me. A lot of things he's been saying, and I like his attitude. I like his vibe. I like what he shares. And honestly, I think a lot of our listeners listen to that podcast. Anywhere I see, like, 6 Figure Creative Podcast, fans also listen to blank. Here's a podcast, like in Spotify or Apple or wherever it shows relevant podcasts. Graham Cochrane's is always one of the podcasts that are in that feed there. So I know a lot of you already listen to his podcast, but I think he's a really good communicator. He's something that I would love to strive towards as far as being better at communicating ideas and thoughts. And I think the reason he resonates so well is because he comes from a really healthy, good hearted place when it comes to his business and his education and his teaching.

And also I just thought this topic is something that's top of mind for me right now. It's like we're getting into the holiday season right now. I just got home from a big month long trip with my wife, which I've talked about on the podcast. And so personal finances are one of those things that is hard to stay top of mind to me in busy seasons. Like just the whole trip we just did, the fact that we're about to start doing holiday shopping, we're going to be doing Thanksgiving soon, then we have Christmas coming up.

And I don't know about you, but as a solo business owner, I tend to do what I call pendulum swinging. I don't know how else to say it. I pendulum swing from one side to the other of a lot of different topics.

Personal finance is one of those areas where I tend to swing really hard one way, where I'm like super gung-ho.

I'm going to be the perfect personal finance person. I'm going to budget every single thing every single month. And then I over time swing to the other side where I'm like, I'm going to spend whatever I want on whatever I want and no one's going to stop me.

And that's not a very healthy place to be. So I am closer to the side of like not really taking personal finance too seriously. And so I was re-listening to this episode today and it's just a really good reminder that we have to take this stuff seriously. As solo business owners, as people who are personal finances are so closely tied to our businesses because we are the business in most cases and most service based businesses, we are the business. So anything that affects our personal finances affects our business. So I thought this was a really good episode to bring back from the past, back from the vault, back when we were the 6 Figure Home Studio podcast, back when we only talked about the business of running a recording studio, which by the way is the exact same thing as running any other freelance business for the most part. So which is why we rebranded our whole podcast to 6 Figure Creative.

I think that no matter what service you offer, what sort of business you run, this conversation is highly relevant to you. I'm excited for you to revisit this. Even if you heard this episode back in episode 90 when this episode first aired, I just think it's one of those really good reminders to help swing that pendulum from the side of, oh, I'm just gonna spend my money carefree, not a care in the world, and then start swinging that pendulum back to a healthier side, which is, okay, it's probably time to revisit some of those healthy spending habits, healthy budgeting habits, healthy investing habits, and reduce some of those frivolous spending habits that I think we all tend to gravitate towards if we're left unchecked for too long. Another interesting part of this conversation that we actually tackle this part at the very beginning of the conversation with Graham is adding some sort of scalable kind of passive income element to your business as a service-based business. This is something that's really notoriously difficult to do, but it can be done and it has been done. And we talk about some examples that we've seen in our past from people who have added some sort of scalable income to their service-based business. That's income that's not directly tied to their time. So if that's something that's interesting to you, we talk about that pretty much the first thing in the episode for like the first 15 minutes. So without any further delay, here is our interview with Graham Cochrane, host of The Graham Cochrane Show.