Why $100k Per Year Is The New Minimum Wage For Freelancers

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 262

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.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome. So glad to have you here. This show is for creative freelancers who are trying to earn more money from their creative skills without selling their souls. If that sounds like you, you are in the right place. For my returning listeners, I am fresh home from my trip to Orlando with my wife. She spoke at a conference this past weekend. She is a book influencer. I don't know how else to say it.

She's amazing. She spoke at a conference. She did a few different panels at this conference in Orlando. And then we went to Disney World on Monday. And I am feeling refreshed. I am a little sunburned. We nearly escaped a storm. We got to eat a ton of food because we were at Epcot. I cannot recommend it enough. We're there for the flower festival, like spring flower festival or something. So they had a bunch of different, like temporary food booths set up where they'd bring like these fancy chefs in to create these awesome menus with different ethnicity cuisines from all the different countries represented at Epcot. And then we just went around and just ate all day. We were there for like 12 hours. We did a bunch of rides. I rode the best ride I've ever ridden in my life, which was the Guardians of the Galaxy ride. For anyone who ever gets a chance to do that, it is insane. I don't want to spoil it for anyone. So if you were like, I'm going to Epcot soon. I don't want this ride spoiled for me. Skip ahead 20, 30 seconds. I don't know. But it's essentially similar to a roller coaster. You're in like what looks like to be a roller coaster. Oh, I'm going on a roller coaster. Awesome. We did front seats both times, which I highly recommend. Just wait the extra two turns, like five minutes, to get the very front seats.

And you're in this dark room. There's stars all around. They make you feel like you're flying through space.

The seat you're in rotates left and right, where you're not actually just always facing forward. Sometimes you're facing backwards or sideways, depending on what's going on in there. There's massive screens. You're circling planets, like you're in orbit of a planet. They have six different songs they play, so you want to do it multiple times so that you can enjoy each different song. And one of the six songs is September, which is my wife and I's song. That is our song, because our anniversary, our date of our anniversary is September 21st. Do you remember?

Anyways, unfortunately, we didn't get that song either time. We got the same damn song twice. So we had a lot of fun with that, and I'm back home, and I am doing this episode a little late in the week, later than I wanted to do.

And so we're going to see what we can do today. The topic of the show today, but which I'm sure you already know, because no one really listens to an episode of a podcast unless they know what they're going to talk about. The topic is why $100,000 is what I believe to be the new minimum wage for freelancers. I'm going to give you my argument on this. I'm going to give you some facts to support this. I'm going to give you some reasons why this needs to be your new belief. And then we're going to talk about some of the things you probably need to do to get there, some steps to look at to see if it's even reasonable for you to get there. So I hope this episode is valuable, but the biggest thing I want you to take away from this episode is to think bigger for your business. I've been talking to a lot of freelancers recently.

Many of them have very, very modest goals for their freelance business. 50K, 60, if I could just make 60K, it would be the best. And I'm here to tell you that that's probably not enough, like actually minimum wage for those of you who live in bigger cities, in more expensive cities. So if you live in New York, LA, even Nashville, Austin, Toronto, anywhere where cost of living is high, I'm gonna show you why 100K should be the minimum wage you shoot for as a freelancer, because 100K as a freelancer is not the same as $100,000 salary. It is actually a lot different. And I think most people, since they come from a day job and they stumble their way into this creative space as a freelancer because it's their passion, they never really think through the numbers and look at all of the elements that are involved with what your money goes to as you're a freelancer. So you're not really thinking through this the right way. And I'm hoping to like, jar you into consciousness to help you wake up as a freelancer because really you are a business owner. Some people, they just create jobs for themselves. And if you never get out of like, I've created a job for myself with a thousand little bosses or all my clients, you never get out of that. That's fine if that's the way you want to live your life, which is again, no problem with that. It's typically you're doing the thing you love as a creative, so that's not a big deal. But you have to think like a business owner, even if you want to act like you've created a job for yourself.