Financial Essentials for Freelancers: Managing Your Cash Flow

1. Introduction: Welcome to financial essentials for freelancers, managing your cash flow on a freelance income. I'm Ben Henry Moreland. I'm a certified financial planner and the founder of freelance financial planning. I start out my career as a professional opal singer. Now, I help other self-employed people who make a living doing what they love to make better decisions and achieve their financial goals. One thing I've learned in my work as a financial planner is that a lot of freelancers need help in managing their cashflow. By that I mean, having the money available to pay your expenses when you need it. As a freelancer, your income might be sporadic or unpredictable but your expenses never go away. You might earn plenty to make a living but because of the way that you get paid, you might not always have the cash you need available to pay your bills when they come due. Now too many freelance careers have ended early because of this basic cash-flow problem. Today I'm going to talk about a process that you can use to manage your cash flow and take control over your financial life. First, I'm going to talk about setting goals, which is a really important step to make the process more meaningful and attainable to you when you're getting started. Then I'm going to cover the basics of financial organization and talk about some of the tools that you can use to stay organized. Next, I'll go over tracking your expenses, which is the easiest thing that you can do to make it better and more informed financial decisions. Finally, projecting your cashflow so that you can predict when you'll have more or less cash than you need and how to make a plan just smooth out those peaks and valleys. Now not everyone is comfortable working with financial numbers and spreadsheets. I've gone ahead and done a lot of the work for you by creating a template that we'll be working through during this class. By the time you're done, you'll be able to fill it out, personalize it to your own situation, and understand the story that's telling you about your financial life. You can download your template under the your project section of this page. Your class project is going to have a lot of personal financial information. I don't expect you to post it publicly. However, I do encourage you to share your goals, challenges, and triumphs with your fellow classmates as you work to master these concepts. Whether you are new freelancer, Who's curious about making the transition from a nine to five job or if you're an experienced freelancer who just sick of living on credit cards in between paychecks. I hope this class will be useful to you. Please share your progress questions and feedback and the community section on this page. Keep an eye on this channel for more classes on other financial topics for freelancers and feel free to suggest anything else you'd like to learn about. With that, let's get started. 2. Setting Goals: First, let's talk about setting goals. This is a really important step that you need to have at the beginning of the process to give shape to what it is you're about to do. Imagine your financial life as a jigsaw puzzle. How would you put that puzzle together, if you can look at the picture on the front of the box to know what the finished product was supposed to look like? Some people might enjoy the extra challenge, but for me that process would be pretty trying, if I can reference that picture in front of me. Your financial health is the same way. For any of the actions that you're about to take, to have any effect, you're going to want to have a pretty good idea from the outset of what it is you're actually trying to accomplish. When you're setting a goal, you also need to think about why that goal matters to you. Let's say, one day you decide you're going to cook for yourself more and order less takeout, because you want to save money and eat healthier. Well, it's nice to want to save money and eat healthier, but why is that important to you? How is the richer, healthier version of you going to be any happier than the current version. We're talking about behavioral change here and that's a tough adversary. So many diets fail, so many budgets get ignored, because goals like, I want to save money and eat healthier, just not strong enough to change people's habits long term. If they were, then everyone would be going to the gym more often, no one would be getting takeout, and everyone would have a lot more savings than they do in reality. Well, that brings me to the first part of this class project, setting your personal goals. Open up your project template. The first tab I created, is for you to write down your goals and both your financial situation and your life. Because the two really are intertwined. I find that having your goals written down somewhere where you can look at them regularly, makes them that much more tangible and effective. On the template I gave you four questions to ask yourself about each goal. What do I want to achieve? Why does it matter to me? When do I want to accomplish it? and what do I need to make it happen? Answering these four questions will help you create goals that are powerful enough to overcome your ingrained habits and really motivate you to change your behavior. The point is to be as specific in your answers as possible. For instance, let's say you want to move to a nicer apartment. For this section, you might ask yourself, what features do you want it to have? How big is it? What part of town is it in? Then in the second section, say why it matters to you. What values do you have this goal lines with? You'll be happier once it's accomplished. Maybe you're a hospitable person. You like to cook for people and have dinner parties. Instead saying, I don't want to move to a nicer apartment, you say, I want to move to an apartment with a kitchen and a dining room big enough to host 12 people, that's convenient to a good grocery store. That's a specific goal, that's going to give you a lot more motivation to take action and stick with it. For the next section, having time frame in mind is always a good idea, even if there's no real deadline. Psychologically, you'll have more motivation to accomplish your goal if it's tied to a real point in time. Then the last part of a strong goal is specifying what resources you need to get it done. You're not always going to know exactly. But again, the more specific you can be, the better your chances are of seeing it through. You can always adjust your targets later when you need to. You're watching this to learn how to manage your cash flow, and that's a good thing to aim for. Obviously, that's why I created the class. But to really effectively use what you'll learn today, there needs to be a higher level goal that's meaningful and motivates you to follow through when the class is over. Now you hopefully see, how important it is to set specific goals in order to stick with those good habits that you're trying to create. Before you go any further with this class, I'd encourage you to pause the video and try to write down one or two of your own goals in the class project template the way that I have described. I'll stick around till you get back. 3. Getting Organized: Let's go back to that analogy if your financial life is a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are all mixed up similar around the box, somewhere on the floor, maybe the cat ate one. How are you going to start putting that puzzle together? If you started by just pulling pieces one by one out of the box and trying to fit them together, you'd never get anywhere. You start to come up with a system. You put all the edge pieces in one pile. You sort the others by color or pattern. You're able to put pieces together into small sections, then fit the smallest section into bigger sections until finally you see the whole picture in front of you. It all started with that crucial step of getting organized. The first organizational tip, I recommend that every freelancer is to split your financial life into two separate halves, the business side and the personal side, and keep them separate. Your business should have its own bank account and you should only use it for business expenses. Likewise, your personal checking account should only be used for your personal expenses. Why keep things separate? First of all, for income tax purposes, you need a record of all the business expenses that you plan to deduct during the year. If you pay it all those expenses from your personal account, you'd have to go back through every single transaction you made and pick out just the ones that were business-related. If your business has its own dedicated account, which could be an actual business bank account or just another personal checking account that you use for that purpose. Keeping a record of your business expenses for your income taxes is as easy as pulling up that account on your bank's website. From just a time saving standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to separate your business and personal lives. But there's another reason to keep things separate. You've heard of the concept of work-life balance. Even though that's become kind of a corporate buzzword, it has real meaning for freelancers who don't want to feel like they have to be working 24/7 all the time to be successful. Having separate systems for your work and personal lives makes it easier to have goals and priorities for your own life outside of what you do for work. You should plan and set goals for yourself on both sides, because your personal goals give meaning and motivation to the business goals you have, and vice versa. 4. Tools for Staying Organized: There are a lot of different systems that freelancers can use to organize their finances. From paper files to Excel spreadsheets to Google Docs to paid services. How do you know which one to use? Well, there isn't any one system that's better than all the others, so it's really important to figure out what system works best for you. You need to think about how much time you want to devote to designing, implementing, and maintaining your organizational system, what level of detail you want to have available, and how comfortable you are giving third parties access to your bank accounts and other financial information. The answer's really different for everyone. But if you're just starting out, I think it's best to stay simple. You can look to add more features once you get a hang of the basics and find yourself needing more. Let's talk about some of the tools you can use to stay organized. At the very minimum, you should have a method of tracking your income and expenses. Just knowing after the fact how you use the money that you made in the past gives you some really powerful information for deciding what to do with it in the future. Not that long ago, someone who wanted to keep track of their spending, would have needed to save all the receipts in a shoe-box, write down all the transactions in a ledger, and then reconcile that with their bank account statement at the end of the month. Luckily, these days you don't have to spend nearly as much time or paper to stay on top of your spending. If you do most of your transactions with a debit or credit card, you should be able to pull up all your spending on your bank's website. Some banks allow you to categorize transactions to make it easier to stay focused on your budget. The Excel spreadsheet that I created for this class is a good place to start on categorizing and tracking your expenses. I'll go over how to fill it out and use it for yourself later in this class. If you want to go another step further, you can use an online service that will download and categorize your expenses for you, letting you track your spending over time with very little extra effort. The most popular free option for this is mint.com, which also has tools to create budgets and savings goals and has other features like sending you alerts about unusual transactions. Most of the other software in this space isn't free. Quicken is the software your parents use for personal finance. It's a little more robust it's budgeting tools, and it includes investment and tax planning features. The starter version costs $35 a year. You Need A Budget is another popular tool that's specifically focused on improving financial behavior. It requires a little more hands-on effort because it makes you account for every dollar that you spend but can be very effective for people who are willing to put in the extra work. You Need A Budget cost $7 a month, but they offer a one month free trial for you to test it out. Well, those are all good options for staying on top of your personal finances. While on the work side, I strongly recommend that you use bookkeeping software to keep track of your business income and expenses. These also come in a wide range of price points and capabilities for business owners with different needs. For freelancers and sole proprietors with uncomplicated bookkeeping needs, Wave and FreshBooks provide inexpensive options for logging transactions, creating invoices and processing payments. For business owners with payroll or inventory tracking, QuickBooks and Xero have more robust capabilities, but at a higher cost. Business owners with more complex needs will probably find it worth the expense to hire a professional bookkeeper. But most freelancers are capable of handling the task on their own. Try dedicating a half hour a week to logging and categorizing your transactions, another hour each month to reviewing how the last month compared with your expectations, and the few hours around the time you do your taxes each year to review the past year and set goals for the year ahead. One more tool I recommend for staying financially organized is to take advantage of cloud storage. You might already use Google Drive or Dropbox or any number of good Cloud services out there. To keep track of projects and share work with your clients. Well, those surfaces can also be a great way to get rid of that old shoe-box filing system. Scan and upload your receipts, contracts, statements, tax documents, any other kind of financial records. Make sure that you have a good filing and naming system for your documents so you can easily track down anything you need in the future. If you're on the road a lot or if you're short on storage space where you live. Using the cloud for financial organization eliminates the hassle of dealing with paper documents and is one less headache for you when tax time comes around. How do you stay financially organized? Help out your fellow freelancers and share your tools and techniques in the community section below. 5. Bookkeeping: I talked about some of the different options for bookkeeping software back in the last lesson. At a very minimum, you want to be using it to track and categorize your business expenses, but your software may offer some other features that you can take advantage of to help you manage your cash-flow. Some software has time tracking ability that will let you log and keep track of the hours that you've spent on each project so you don't have to try and guesstimate it after the fact. It can then turn around and automatically fill out the invoice with your hours worked and hourly rate streamlining the process that much more. Most bookkeeping software also allows you to quickly create and send custom invoices. You just enter your client's information and pick from a list of your services and hourly rates, then click send. Another common feature of bookkeeping software is an online payment option. When you e-mail a client their invoice, they'll also get a link where they can pay electronically by bank transfer or credit card. There's almost always a fee involved. Around three percent of the amount of transaction is pretty standard. But if you can get your client to pay instantly rather than having to wait for them to cut a check and snail mail it to you, in my book, that's worth the three percent. Because your invoices are generated from the bookkeeping software, it should also be able to keep track of which invoices are past due and who you need to follow up with for payment. Remember that it isn't just a lack of getting hired or not working enough that causes cash-flow problems for freelancers. Oftentimes, it's the inability to get paid for the work you've already done. If you don't have a system for tracking down your outstanding invoices and getting them paid. You might find yourself doing a lot of unintentional pro-bono work. Remember that cash-flow management is about having the money available to pay your expenses when you need it and getting paid for the work you've done as a part of that. Most bookkeeping software out there has tools you can use to get paid faster. If you're not already taking advantage of them, try exploring new softwares website for training resources, so you can learn how to get the most out of what you're already paying for. Do you know of any great techniques for getting the most out of your bookkeeping software? Do you have any recommendations or know of any products that freelancers should avoid? Help your classmates out and post in the community section on this page. 6. Tracking Expenses: One of the most enlightening things that you can do in your financial life is to sit down and figure out where exactly your money's going. I think that pretty much everyone who tracks their spending for the first time find something that surprises them. But a lot of people avoid it for the same reason. They're afraid of what they might find out. It's important to put that feeling aside and really commit to taking an honest look at the way you spend your money. It's not judgment of your values. It's more of a way to make sure that your values align with the way that you use your resources. With that knowledge you will be empowered to make the decisions you need to take control over your financial life. In this lesson, we'll be going over the personal monthly spending worksheet in your class project template. By the time you're done, you'll have a better idea of where your money's going every month, which is the basis of making more informed decisions about your financial behavior. The best way to start tracking your spending is to break it down by month, since most expenses occur monthly. From there, you want to give every transaction you make a category, so you don't have to track dozens of similar transactions every month. Some categories like rent will have just one transaction a month, while others like coffee or bus fare, might have quite a few. It makes it easier to lump them all into a category rather than have to track every single one. To do this, you're going to need to pull up your most recent statements from your bank account, credit card and whichever other accounts you use to make personal transactions. Remember that we're treating your personal expenses separately from your business expenses. Only look at the accounts or transactions that you use for personal use. Once you've accounted for a transaction on your statement, check it off so you don't double count anything and be sure you've accounted for everything when you get to the end. The easiest expenses to track are called your fixed expenses. Which are the ones that you pay the same amount at the same time every month. Things like rents, car payment, cable bill and subscriptions. Variable expenses still might occur every month, but they won't always be the same amount. Things like your electric bill, gasoline, groceries and entertainment will vary a little or a lot every month. Since you can't predict them exactly, you're going to need to estimate them. Now if you use a program like mint to automatically track your expenses, you'll be able to easily see how much you spend in a given category every month and come up with an estimate from there. Otherwise, it's best to look back at a minimum of three months of your bank card and credit card statements. Add up the amount that you spend in each category every month and average them out to give yourself a rough estimate. After you've accounted for all your fixed and variable expenses, it's time to segment them in a different way according to how necessary they are in your life. On one side of your essential expenses, you need food, you need power. You need to pay a rent. If you rely on your car, you need to make sure it's drivable. Everything else is known as a discretionary expense. In a strict sense this is everything beyond what you need at a bare minimum to survive. But in reality, it's what's necessary and what isn't look completely different from one person to the next. You might consider your gym membership to be invaluable. You'd never give it up unless you truly had to. Another person might say that going out for the social and networking opportunities is necessary for them to keep their life and career moving forward. This isn't a value judgment, but it is an opportunity to ensure that your values do align with your spending. The class project template shows your spending divided between essentials and discretionary expenses. I've put what I consider to be the essential expenses on the left with the discretionary in the next section over, you should feel free to add, delete or modify categories as you see fit. Well, there's one more thing to consider when you're tracking your spending. Some expenses don't happen on a monthly basis, but ignoring them can be hazardous to your cash flow. Things like gifts, vacations and car repairs may only happen once a year or so. I've provided space for you to account for those non monthly expenses. Think about what you'll need to pay for in the next 12 months, so it won't come back to bite you later on. 7. Debt and Savings: Once you've accounted for your expenses, the last pieces of the spending puzzle are your debt and savings. Between student loans, car payments, and credit cards, debt payments make up a big part of a lot of people's budgets. Until those are paid off, there may not be much other room to contribute to savings or spending on things you enjoy, but I'd still encourage you to make a habit out of saving, even if it's only a small amount like $20 a month to start out. Making saving a priority now, even when you can only afford to do a little, will make it easier to start saving more significant amounts when your income allows it. One thing I always recommend when it comes to savings is to have a separate account for each goal that you're saving for. These days it's easy to open up a savings or investment account online and funded electronically with recurring transfers from your checking account. Use that to your advantage. It's best to set it and forget it. 8. Income Projection: Now that you've learned about how you spend your money, it's time to use that knowledge to look into the future. Corporations use cash flow projections all the time to make sure they have enough money on hand to keep their operations going. You can apply this same principle to your own operations, aka your life, so that you don't have to guess whether or not you'll be able to pay your bills in a few months. I've created a template for your cash flow projection on the third and final tab of your class project. Going from top to bottom, you'll see your bank account balance at the beginning of the month, your income and expenses from freelancing, any other non freelance income you make. Like if you have a day job or part time work , then there's the mighty, put away to pay income taxes and put a pin in that for now, but I'll elaborate on it more and a little bit. But the subtotal there is your total take home income, the amount that you have available for savings and personal expenses. The next section down is just the personal expense categories, right from the last tab. Your monthly net cash flow then, is the difference between your take home income and personal expenses. I'm going to skip the liquidity account for now and come back to it later. But the ending cash balance is what's left in your bank account at the end of the month, which automatically rolls up to the next months beginning balance. Remember when you are entering numbers on this worksheet, that all your cash inflows should be entered as positive numbers while you're outflows should be negative. That'll make sure all of the embedded calculations in the worksheet will work correctly. All right, so you might be saying that's great Null, but how do I do this from my income is unpredictable? I don't know what I'm going to be making in a couple months? Why bother trying to project it? Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that none of this is an exact science. Even the most sophisticated corporate cash flow projections are all based on educated guesses and assumptions, none of which are a 100 percent likely to come true. But there are ways to make informed guesses about your cash flow that do have some basis in reality, the easiest way to project the future is to look at the past. If you have a few years of experience as a freelancer, go back and look. Were there any patterns in your income? Were there months or seasons where you got paid more than others. Use that as a guide first to try and find out where the peaks and valleys of your income are going to fall. The other way you can treat this cash flow projection is as a way to set income targets for yourself. If you've never done this before, it's a great way to envision the type of career you want to have. Think about how much you want to work, what rates you want to charge, and what lifestyle you want to fund. If you can go from thinking, I have to work as much as I can so I don't run out of money. To this is the life I want to live, and this is why I need to make it happen. You'll feel much more in control over the work that you take, what clients you keep, and your ability to have a life outside of what you do to make a living. 9. Case Study: I've created a case study to demonstrate how this process works. Since I used to be a classical singer, that's the profession I'm using for the hero of this particular example, Brian Baritone. We're going to start with Brian's monthly expenses. Brian rents an apartment with his girlfriend and his share of the rent is $800 a month. He has a used car that's paid off that he uses to get to out-of-town gigs, and he also has a monthly train pass for getting around town. He pays for an individual health insurance plan and has disability insurance, since he can't get paid if he can't sing for any reason. In total, his essential expenses are $2,000 a month and his discretionary expenses are $500 a month. He's also making student loan payments and he puts $50 a month into a savings account for emergency expenses. Brian also knows he'll need to get his brakes replaced before winter, buy Christmas gifts for his family in December, and pay for a vacation to Mexico in January. Let's go to the next tab and see how to turn this into a cash flow projection for Brian. Because he's a singer, his income is very much aligned with the performing arts season. In the summer months, he may have some wedding gigs and music festivals, but it's a little slower. His income starts to ramp up as the season gets going in the fall, and December is by far his biggest month out of the year. Brian knows from his bookkeeping software, that his business expenses run around $200 a month. When he has more gigs, his expenses also go up with extra travel costs and voice coachings. He also has a part-time job teaching voice lessons at a high school, where he makes $1000 a month during the school year. He's decided to put aside 25 percent of his net freelance income to pay his income taxes. Brian's expenses are exactly as shown in the monthly personal spending worksheet. He's also made sure to include the non monthly expenses in their appropriate months. You can see that by totaling the net cash flow row, that Brian actually makes more income than he spends over the course of the year, but there's a problem. He's got $3,000 in his bank account at the beginning of July, but because he doesn't work as much in the summer, that account actually goes negative in August. Even though he earns more than he spends for the year, because of the timing of his income, he's got a cash flow problem that he'll need to address soon. 10. Liquidity: Our fictional freelance singer, Brian Baritone, has a cash-flow problem. His bank account is going to go negative next month. In December, and going into next spring, he's going to have plenty of cash, but that doesn't do him any good right now. What Brian needs right now is liquidity. Funds available immediately to pay his expenses. He can't sell his car and pulling money out of his retirement fund doesn't seem like a good idea. What are his other options? Well, if Brian is like most freelancers, he's probably used credit cards at some point to give him the liquidity he needs during these downtimes. The problem is, you need to pay those cards back on their terms and the interest rates they charge, means you could end up paying much more than what you needed to begin with. They can also have a harmful effect on your credit rating, impacting your ability to get an apartment, a house, a car in the future. If Brian borrows money from a credit card to cover his expenses for the next two months, the repercussions could stick with him for years. Let's say instead, that Brian has been putting away extra money from his busier months into a liquidity reserve account, a savings account dedicated solely to smoothing out his cash flow throughout the year. He's accumulated $5,000 in the account. In August, when he knows he'll be short on cash, he transfers $3,000 to his checking account. Now, he's back above water. He's essentially borrowed money from himself. He'll still need to pay himself back to replenish the liquidity account, but instead of racking up 15 or 20 percent interest rates on a credit card, he can still pay himself back whenever he has the money at zero percent interest. Brian wants to keep his checking account steady at around $3,000. This fall when he starts working more, he'll start to transfer money back into his liquidity reserve. By next summer, he's transferred more back into the account than he took it out to begin with. He can see that his net cash flow is positive for the year. He can contribute to his retirement fund or maybe save for a down payment on a house. You can see on the graph below that his bank account balance, which had fluctuated by almost $7,000 before, smooths out considerably when he uses his liquidity account. Most people are wired to think primarily in the short term, it's just human nature. It's very possible to get irrationally panicky when you bank account balance gets too low, or likewise, irrationally exuberant when it gets too high. These kinds of emotions breed bad financial decisions. Liquidity reserve is like ballast tanks in a ship, that either let water in or force it back out to keep the boat floating in an even level. By smoothing out your income, your liquidity fund will let you stay focused on your overall goals rather than getting caught up in those short-term fluctuations. Do you know any other techniques for staying liquid and getting through the downtimes? I'd love to hear more about your experiences. Help your fellow classmates out and post on the community section on this page. 11. Taxes: Well, I promised that I would come back and talk about taxes. But first, I need to say that tax advice is best left to the professionals, and I'm not giving you advice on your own individual situation. You should always speak to a CPA or another type of tax professional for advice on what you should do. All I can tell you is that it's never enjoyable to pay taxes, but it's a lot easier to do it when you have the cash available. So far, I've talked about personal accounts, business accounts, and liquidity accounts. Well, there's a fourth type of bank account that I think all freelancers should have, and that's an income tax account. Traditional 9-5 employees have their taxes automatically withheld by their employers because the IRS knows that they're more likely to get their money if taxpayers can't spend it all beforehand. Just because you, as a freelancer, have the ability to spend your tax money doesn't free you from the burden of paying taxes if you do. If you find yourself owing back taxes that you don't have the cash to pay for, it can be really unpleasant for you in the short and long-term. There are penalties and interest for late payments plus a higher chance of being audited in future years. The best way to avoid this is to pretend you're your own employee, take a set percentage of each paycheck and move it to your tax account where it will sit untouched until you make your quarterly tax payment. How much to set aside is going to be different for everyone, but you need to remember to include federal income tax, self-employment tax, plus any state or local taxes. It can be upwards of 30 percent of your paychecks, which sounds harsh, but remember, everyone pays taxes. Most people just don't have to put any thought into it. It's a lot better to pay now than to owe money and find yourself on the IRS's bad side later on. 12. Staying On Track: Now you've learned how to set goals, track your spending, and project your cash flow. Hopefully you've been able to complete the class project template and make it your own. So what happens next? Well, any plan or system that you use to manage your cash flow is only as good as your ability to stick with it. It's important to revisit these exercises from time to time to make sure the numbers match up with what's happening in reality. I would spend a little time every month on tracking your expenses. If you let go much longer, those transactions pile up and it gets harder to catch up. Spending that regular time thinking about your spending will also have a positive impact as you go about your daily life. Having that knowledge at your fingertips ensures you can put your resources towards meaningful ends. Your goals and cash flow projections should be revisited at least once a year. There are more oriented on the long-term, so they can require less regular attention but it's important that you still know that you're on pace to reach your goals. Of course, you should assume that things won't work out in reality exactly the way they do in the projections. You need to build in enough leeway so that it won't blow up the plan if an unexpected expense hits or a project doesn't work out as anticipated. The best financial plan strikes a balance between being specific and being resilient so you can handle changes while still working towards the goal you want to achieve. 13. Wrap Up: Well, we have been over a lot. So here is a refresher on the main points of this class. Set specific meaningful goals to effectively change your financial behavior. Keep your business and personal finances separate and use technology to stay organized. Track your expenses to align your values with the resources you use. Use separate accounts for each goal you're saving toward. Take advantage of your bookkeeping software's features to get paid faster. Project your cash-flow to take the guesswork out of your financial life. Have cash in reserve rather than relying on credit cards for liquidity. Put your taxes aside right away so that you'll be able to pay when they're due. Revisit this process regularly to stay on top of your goals. I truly believe that everyone has the wear with all to handle this process on their own. But if you'd rather allocate more of your time to your work in your life than doing these numbers, maybe you want to hire a professional advisor. I founded my company, Freelance Financial Planning specifically with the needs of self-employed people in mind and I'd love to talk to you about how you can build financial security in your own life. See my teacher bio for a link to my website, or else just Google search for Freelance Financial Planning. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about this class. I'll also be keeping an eye on the community section. I'd love it if you can leave your feedback there as well. I've really enjoyed talking to you about managing your cash flow today. I hope you feel empowered to go out there and take control over your financial life. No one should have to sacrifice financial security to do what they love for a living. With a little bit of knowledge and the drive to live a meaningful life, you can have the financial freedom to pursue your passion. Thanks for watching.