In 2015, which was my first tax season, I had no idea how to charge people or who to ask. How did you set your freelance accounting rates? How do you track your time to make sure work is profitable on fixed-price projects like tax returns? Our gas costs will be higher, but restaurants will be lower, so that’s why the monthly check ins are super important. Those months will be different than life at our home base. We’re always tweaking it and changing our lifestyle.įor example, my wife is pregnant, and we’re taking a “babymoon” to travel around Colorado for the summer. One of the biggest things we learned is that a budget is going to be moving with your various phases of life. Since we make our money up front we really have to be strict about it. Then we multiply the remaining days, times our dollars per day number, and we can tell if we have enough money to live on for the rest of the year. If the answer is yes, we’re confident that we’re doing it right. Each month we meet and see if we’re staying on budget. We try to figure out how we want to live and save in any given year (our fixed expenses, etc.), and then we break down EVERYTHING by day. Outside of tax season, I try to do 4 hours a day, 4 days a week. Tax season is 40-60 hour weeks, 6 days a week. The way we structure our lives now is to be at our base camp in Colorado Springs to hammer out tax season and make all the money we need to live on for the rest of the year. How do you manage workflow and cash flow throughout the year? I had started out charging something like $40 an hour, and everyone said I needed to increase my rates. That fall we headed to Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is a huge destination for digital nomads, and we started talking to people and getting advice, which was a huge help. New Zealand is where everything really clicked for us and we realized we could really make careers and travel work (it was also the later inspiration for our RV travels around the U.S.) I was always looking for the best Burger King since they had the best free wifi over there at the time. We were living in a camper van in New Zealand that spring. When you’re a CPA everyone thinks you know how to do everything – taxes, etc., so you need to be able to offer those services. How did you start your own freelance bookkeeping and accounting firm?īefore we left, a buddy of mine said, “That sucks that you’re about to leave! I wanted you to help me with my accounting.” I told him I could still help him from abroad, and he became my first client. We hit that goal, and set off in June of 2014. We had been doing a ton of research on sites like Backpacking Matt about budgeting and bootstrapping, and knew we needed to save up about $30k for that first year. Then a friend totaled my truck, which was unfortunate, but I got a decent insurance payoff, and we decided it was time to go. When a close family member passed away, that was a big wakeup call to start living the life we wanted. So we knew wanted to travel for at least one or two years abroad. You just don’t get an opportunity to really get rooted in a culture that way. I’d done the Semester at Sea program in college. But that actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise since my wife and I really wanted to travel more, and we needed to be independent to do it. That job just didn’t work out - the director and I didn’t see eye to eye and it wasn’t a good fit. Then I moved over to a natural resources company. I graduated from the University of Georgia in 2009 and started working at an auditing firm in Colorado Springs, where I stayed for 4 years. Have you always worked for yourself or did you start out working for someone else?
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