Six Financial Questions to Consider Before Becoming a Full-Time Writer
A former financial advisor talks about when, and if, to make the move
Many people romanticize the idea of writing full-time.
They dream of leaving their day jobs, devoting all their time and energy to honing the craft. They imagine publishing a great work and having it be financially sustainable and assume that future work will be equally successful.
The reality is much different. Writing full-time is a long hard slog. It can take years to “make it” and even when you do, the promise of repeated success is never guaranteed.
As a former financial advisor, I would like to pose the following six crucial money questions for any aspiring full-time writer:
1. Do you have enough savings set aside?
Full-time writing is a career built on what-ifs.
Audiences are fickle. You never know when your work might blow up. And just because a novel, article or short story proves to be popular, doesn’t mean your next work will be just as profitable.
There’s a well-worn adage about the stock market that also relates well to the writing profession:
Past performance is no predictor of future success.
For a writer, its crucial to have emergency reserves in place. Having a cash cushion gives you the time to build up your portfolio, to weather those awful early days when you’re not sure if any of your writing is good, or if anyone would ever want read it.
I recommend setting aside enough savings to cover at least 6–12 months of living expenses, with the money placed in a mix of high-interest savings and low-risk investments that can be liquidated into cash at a moment’s notice.
Even once your writing begins to turn a profit, you’ll want to keep emergency reserves in place, because you never know what might happen.
Lesson: writing requires lots of startup time and can be very unpredictable, so set aside ample savings before you start.
2. Are you aware of your real expenses?
Modern consumerism prioritizes spending as an unthinking reflex, and writers are just as susceptible as everyone else.
Too often we’re drawn to those shiny things that scream the literary lifestyle: a rare first edition book, a hand-bound creative journal, a state-of-the-art writing software that promises to increase your productivity ten-fold.
All this begins to add up quickly.
Are you aware of your own expenses? Do you have a grasp of how much you actually spend?
Writers often have to go months on end without earning income from their projects. We don’t have the benefit of underestimating our expenses. We need to be honest about our money habits, and dispel any illusions we might hold.
As a financial advisor, I used to have clients send their bank and credit statements for me to enter into my firm’s tracking software. It was always enlightening to see how they thought they were doing, compared to the actual numbers.
You don’t have to enter all your bank statements by hand to get a grasp of your spending — although it can be a very revealing exercise. But consider signing up for a free financial software like Mint, then commit to reviewing your spending on a regular basis.
Lesson: make sure that as a writer, you are aware of your true expenses.
3. Are you willing to keep your expenses down?
It’s important to know how much you’re spending. It’s equally important to reduce your spending when at all possible. Here’s how I do it:
- On the first of each month, I transfer enough money from my savings to checking account to cover my fixed spending plus a small margin. This stipend is meant to get me through the entire month.
- I set up bank alerts so that every time I use my debit card, I receive a text notifying me of the purchase, and showing me my updated balance. Because I only ever use debit or cash, I know the balance reflects reality.
- At the end of the month, I transfer over a new stipend, minus whatever I have left in my checking account.
- I have my savings account set up with overdraft protection just in case I overspend.
This exercise helps me to stay aware of my spending in real-time. It forces me to face the consequences of every spending decision — a diminished bank account — and challenges me to find new and creative ways to save. It teaches me to separate essential purchases from mere luxuries. It makes saving into a game, one where I challenge myself to see how long I can stretch out my money.
My tactic may not work for everyone. Perhaps you find it useful to rack up travel points on your credit card, or maybe you have lots of annual one-time expenses that can’t be avoided, such as technology, memberships, or writing conferences.
Regardless, you must set up a system that puts your spending right in front of your face, incentivizing you to cut back whenever possible.
Lesson: as a writer, you should have a system in place that updates you on your money decisions in real-time.
4. Are you disciplined enough to treat this like your day job?
This advice is given so often its practically become cliché. That doesn’t make it any less true.
Successful writers spend as much time on their craft as accountants spend balancing books, or salespeople making cold calls. By craft, I’m not just talking about writing. There are a whole host of other pesky tasks that writers must do regularly to succeed, such as marketing, branding, and self-promotion.
I usually write for about 7–8 hours every weekday. I go into my co-writing space early in the morning like its my office, crank out 2,000 to 3,000 words, then spend the rest of the time doing support work: building my platform, responding to emails, trading critiques. I even pack my own lunch.
I learned all of this through my day job, which taught me to be disciplined and consistent.
How you approach your day job is a strong indicator of how you will approach your writing:
- If you’re able to set tangible goals and milestones on work projects and keep them, then you’re more likely to achieve your word counts and writing deadlines.
- If you know how to tough it out when work gets hard, you’ll be able to push through hard scenes in your novel.
- If you’re good at connecting with coworkers and clients, it’ll be that much easier to promote yourself with agents and readers.
The strengths and weaknesses from your day job inevitably flow into your writing career.
Lesson: look at your track record at your day job. Take stock of the skills you’ve gained that will benefit your writing career. Be honest about the weaknesses that will hold you back.
5. Are you flexible enough to take on multiple types of projects?
I became a full-time writer because I wanted to write novels.
But finishing a novel takes months and there’s no guarantee that an agent will want to represent you, or a publisher take a risk on your manuscript. Even if you manage to land a contract, first-time writing advances are dismally low these days: somewhere in the range of $10,000 — $15,000.
That’s hardly enough to sustain a livelihood.
If you want to make it as a writer, you must be willing to take on projects outside your niche. Perhaps it’s submitting to short story contests between novel drafts. Or pitching articles to online publications while waiting for an agent to get back to you. It could mean teaching workshops and seminars to other aspiring writers. You might even consider writing for Medium.
Cast your net wide.
It may be helpful to think of your writing as an investment portfolio.
I would never recommend someone to put all their money into a single investment. Rather, I’d advise them to diversify out into a number of different investments with varying levels of risk and return potential. That ways, if the market takes a plunge, it wouldn’t sink their entire portfolio.
As writers, each of us has a specific focus: novels, non-fiction, short stories etc. This is your primary investment, the anchor of your writing portfolio. It’s the reason you decided to start writing in the first place.
But you also want to diversify out, to take on other writing gigs that may not be as satisfying, but nevertheless offer immediate, stable income. These are the low-risk investments that cushion your fall when times are tough.
And finally, there’s those crazy, random, unexpected opportunities that pop up without warning. Writing projects that stretch you outside your comfort zone. Chances to partner with other established writers, or to expand your audience by considering topics you would never have considered on your own.
These are your high-risk investments. The special sauce that gives your writing portfolio a competitive edge. You don’t want to be taking on these projects all the time, since it’s better to focus on your core strengths. But saying yes to them every once in a while can open up unexpected doors.
Anchor. Low-risk. High-risk. It’s all about balance.
Lesson: Treat your writing like an investment. Don’t be timid about diversifying out.
6. Are you willing to go back?
Writers have to be flexible. Sometimes that means going back your day job.
This may sound like creative death, but plenty of writers manage it without compromising their craft. Some even benefit from the consistency and structure of having a day job separate from their writing.
As bestselling novelist Leigh Bardugo puts it,
“Very few people have the wherewithal or the safety net to be able to pursue writing full time from moment one. And I want people to understand that you can absolutely work a job, sometimes two jobs, and have those responsibilities — and still write.”
Going back to your day job shouldn’t be seen as something shameful. Rather, you can choose to see it as a strategic decision that will sustain your writing in the long-term.
Remember, you’re more than just a writer. You’re a human being with a multitude of talents.
Putting words on a page is only one of them.
Lesson: have a contingency plan in case you need to go back to work.
James L. Yu is Taiwanese-American author who loves writing about history, religion, and social change. Originally from Houston, TX, he moved to Los Angeles after college to complete a stint of inner-city missionary work. Along the way, he helped start a socially-conscious grocery store/cafe, got licensed as a registered investment advisor (Series 7 & 66), and eventually left the financial sector to pursue writing full-time. He is currently working on The Soaring Tigers, an Asian epic-fantasy series inspired by republican-era China. You can follow him on Twitter at @jamesyuwrites or sign up for his monthly newsletter.
