Fall 2017 and a rant about finances

I found this beautiful leaf today on the street while walking through the stormy Fall weather. There are so many leaves with beautiful colors on the street, it is amazing. I could collect and scan them all I guess but since less is more, I decided to go for just one. 

Truth is I am super busy lately doing all sorts of administration work - I barely have enough money to support myself since paying my mandatory health insurance pretty much eats up all the money that I have earned this year. It is a pain in the ass to deal with all that and my financial struggles take lots of my energy and creativity. Besides that I teach several hours per week which is very time consuming as well.

I now understand why so many people in Germany quit being self-employed and freelancing after a short time because it really is tough to pay the health insurance when starting out and barely making money. That also is the reason why so many people don't even start out their self-employed journey. Apparently it is also not wanted from the state's side that you professionally do your own thing since there is not much support for you when starting out, no, it is quite the opposite. 

I have to admit, I am facing rough times lately and I really hope that it gets better soon. From the beginning on I knew that it will be tough to establish myself as a freelancer on an over-saturated market.

It seems that some people have luck and find clients right away while others like me struggle and have to work in another job in order to support themselves besides designing and blogging in order to find clients. It is not easy for me lately and I am not the happiest person these days neither but still I am sure that things will change at a certain point, even though it might still take sometime.

So many women who started out on their freelance journey have a supporting husband or boyfriend at home with whom they share a place, so in these cases it might not be such a vast problem if there is no money coming in from time to time in the beginning, but I am not one of them. I am all by myself, I have to pay all the bills alone so that makes things a little harder and there is more pressure to make financial ends meet each month. 

But I have faith that my hard work will pay off in the end - even if it still a long way to get there, I will not give up until I have established myself as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator. This is my biggest goal. 

I think most people are not quite transparent when it comes to the financial struggles in the beginning and then other freelancers who just start out feel like a complete fail just because they don't make money right away.

Even though I think that most freelancers also went through tough financial times in the beginning, they just don't really talk about it openly. So here that's me, I just started out this year, it is incredibly hard to make money right away, to establish yourself, to find clients. This is usually not an overnight success to make a living of being self-employed so here you are welcome to follow along my humble beginnings that already brought me lots of sweat and tears. I enjoy to blog and I want to be as transparent as possible about my struggles and hopefully one day also about  my successes. 

Anyone of you out there also freelancing? How did you get started and how long did it take to establish yourself?

xx, Phyllis