Found a podcast episode on freelance income last week, the kind where the host just interviews someone who’s been doing this for years. Not sure how I ended up on it, probably one of those autoplay chains at 11pm.
The part that stuck: she said most people budget off their average month, and that’s the mistake. Average means nothing when the gaps are 6 weeks sometimes. What she does instead is figure out her actual floor number — the bare minimum to cover rent, food, basics — and treats everything above that as next month’s buffer, not this month’s spending money.
I went back and did the math on my own floor number. It’s lower than I expected, which was almost a relief. 38 minutes into the episode and I’d already paused it twice to write things down.
Doesn’t solve the CD question. But it did change how I’m looking at it — less “can I afford to break it” and more “what’s my floor without it.”
Still haven’t decided. Writing this down helped more than the spreadsheet did, somehow…