| It's a great thing to try, just make sure you have enough runway when you start. First you need to start tracking your expenses - not just roughly, but keep a spreadsheet (or use an app) that keeps track of all your daily/weekly/monthly expenses and use it religiously for at least 6 months (preferably 12, so as to account for both winter/summer spending). Once you start to get an accurate picture of your spending habits you can then figure out how much you'll need to save in order to have a decent runway after quitting your job. By tracking your expenses accurately, you'll probably also find out all the ridiculous ways you spend money and figure out ways to cut down on frivolous spending. $4 here and $3 there doesn't seem much, but accumulated daily over the course of a year it can total in to over a thousand dollars. Then you can look at how much money you currently have saved, how much you are currently able to save each month and from there figure out how many months you need to work before you have enough savings to have an X-month runway. When doing this, always be pessimistic about your expenses (round up rather than down, assume higher prices rather than lower prices etc) and also allow yourself an emergency buffer on top of everything. When I left my office job, I had saved up enough to give myself a runway of 1 year and was then able to work on a mix of my own projects and freelance work without too much worry about running out of funds. The other thing I would advise when doing freelance/contract work is to bill hourly rather than on a project-by-project basis. Even if you are in the position where you can accurately estimate (to the hour) the time required to complete a task (e.g. you are doing boring and repetitive work you have already done a hundred times before), your clients will respect your time much more when they have to pay for it and this will help you avoid all manner of rubbish that you don't want to have to deal with. |