#346: How Wendy Helfenbaum Takes 4 Months Off Every Year While Maintaining a Healthy 6-Figure Income

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With over 1.3 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries, freelancing is amazing. Until it isn't. You wake up one morning and you realize that you've created a very demanding job for yourself. And chances are you take less time off than than you ever did in any previous job you held. Sometimes it even feels like you're working for a tyrannical boss who makes you feel terrible anytime you ask for even a small break. And that boss, by the way, is you. Sound familiar? Well, not to Wendy Helfenbaum, my guest in this week's podcast episode. Wendy is an established freelance writer out of Montreal and For the past 18 plus years she has taken four months off every single year. And when I say time off, I mean real non working time off. No client work, no working on the business, no marketing, no nothing. Just time to be with her family, to decompress, to enjoy life, and to savor the freedom freelancing is supposed to afford us. Just as impressive, Wende has consistently maintained a six figure income for years, even while taking a full third of the year off. I was super excited to bring Wendy on the show so she could tell us how she does this. It was a very lively and insightful conversation. I learned so much. I was super inspired to move in this direction and I can't wait for.

You to hear it.

This is a great follow up, by the way, to the wonderful conversation that I had last month with with Sada Sarma Hightower where she discussed how she was able to take a four month maternity leave recently. And you haven't listened to that episode. I urge you to give it a listen because it complements this week's episode really well and frankly, it goes beyond just maternity leave. So this is for everybody, even if you don't have kids. Just another perspective on what's truly possible in terms of improving your lifestyle as a freelancer. Now, one quick note before I turn it over to Wendy. You're going to quickly note when we start the interview that my audio was not very high quality. So it turns out that my system settings got all out of whack when I rebooted my computer and the recording app used my AirPod microphone instead of my regular podcast microphone, and I didn't even know about it until the very end. So I apologize upfront for that. But please don't let that get in the way of what I think is a very inspiring conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Wendy, great to see you.

Great to see you and thanks for having me. Ed, I'm looking forward to our chat.

It's going to be a great chat. I've been looking forward to talking with you for a long time. We connected in LinkedIn a few months ago about this topic, and ever since, I've been wanting to bring you on the show and I'm glad we finally made it happen. Before we get to the topic of today, why don't you start with a little bit of background? So start with today, what you do, what kind of clients you work with, what you do for them. Maybe a little bit about how you got here and how long you've been doing this, just so listeners have a little bit of context.

Sure. So I live in Montreal and I have a mix of American and Canadian clients. Clients. And I call myself a bit of a fence straddler because my background is in journalism. I have a journalism degree. I worked for many years in television news and production, but I do a lot of content marketing, brand storytelling, and copywriting as well. And I just make sure that my niches don't really overlap. So I work with a lot of different types of clients. I know that the trend today is to niche down, and I have done exactly the opposite of that. I do have a handful of industries that I work for regularly. Things that I cover. I cover a lot about real estate, interior design, travel, parenting, health and wellness, business and HR and career and automotive. But I like to call myself a generalist because I love to do different things every day. I can't imagine doing just one thing. And my background in television has really helped me to become a better writer because I think very visually. So for content marketing especially, that's proven to be a very good skill because I think a lot of brands need that sort of visual element in their copywriting. So that's really helped me. So I work for a mix of universities, nonprofits, companies, and publications, and it's been a real fun gig for me. I was working full time in television until my son was born in 2005, and then I went back to freelancing as a journalist. So that's what I do. And I will never sit in someone else's office again, ever.

Amen to that I'm curious, because what would you say is the ratio between your journalism work and your content marketing work? Is it 80, 20, 50, 50?

It's pretty much 50, 50. I keep a pie chart every year to track where the money is coming from. And so many people are saying, oh, there's no more work in journalism anymore. It's not true. Maybe you're not looking in the right places, but I'm finding It's pretty much 50, 50 these days, and that's the perfect mix for me. I don't want to do more than that in either of those areas. I love the balance because it keeps my brain fresh and it just keeps me energized to just constantly be doing different things.

And are you a generalist in both sides? Meaning, you know, on the journalism side, it sounds like that's definitely very, very diverse.

Yes.

But on the content marketing side, same level of diversity as well in terms of industry topics.

This past fiscal year, my content marketing has leaned heavily into travel, thought leadership, destination sponsored stories, and those kinds of things, which was surprising to me. But there's a lot of investment in that field. So all you travel writers out there, if you're not afraid of doing content marketing, there is a ton of work in travel content marketing.

I've been interesting. Yeah, see, that could be another topic for us talking about down the road.

All right, so let's talking about travel.

The reason we connected is I forget exactly what I posted, but I put this idea out on LinkedIn that, hey, as a thought exercise, you know, what if you took two or three months off at once as a sabbatical, for instance, Just kind of refresh, especially if you're nearing burnout. I forget the details, but a lot of people were starting to really kind of shoot down this idea. Right. I just put it out there. It's just to get people thinking. And you were one of the few lone voices you said, well, actually, I take four months off every year, and I've been doing this for a long, long time. And immediately I started realizing, wow, okay, so some people are doing this even in our line of work. And I'm curious to know a little bit more about how you do this. So when can you take us back to when you made this decision to start taking that kind of time off? Like, what drove the decision? And then how did you make it work, like, early on?

So first thing to know is my husband is also a freelancer. He's a sound recordist who works in TV and film. So we are a freelance Family. So we have kind of crazy schedules all the time. This taking time off for extended periods began when I had my son and somebody forwarded me the most depressing article I'd ever read, which was about how every parent only has 18 summers with their child. And then that's it, they're gone, and that's it. It put me into a bit of a panic mode. And I realized my son was a baby, he was about three months old. And I said to myself, you know what? I'm going to make every One of those 18 summers count. I'm going to take all of them off when he's not in school, I'm not going to work. And I started sitting with that idea and thinking, is this doable? Could I still make a living if I did this? And that's what I started to do. We have a cottage up in the Laurentians in Quebec that's been in my family for many years. And so that first summer with my son, my husband was working, so he joined us when he wasn't shooting. My son and I went up to the cottage and spent the entire summer there. And I did not crack open my laptop. And it was the most transformative experience that I've had in a long time. I realized, wow, this is something I have to make happen every year. And so I sat down that first summer and did some math. How much do I have to make? What happens if I take June through Labor Day off? What does that mean for the rest of the time? How can I manage my income? And I realized that it's actually really doable if you plan it out. Now, hope is not a strategy. Wishing is not a strategy. You have to sit down with an Excel spreadsheet or whatever system you want and figure out how much you have to make to sustain you if you take certain amount of weeks off. After that first summer, I started realizing I also wanted to take off several weeks at Christmas, several weeks during March break when my son was off school, and every other professional day where the school was closed and the teachers weren't there. I turned into an adventure day with my son. And before I knew it, I was up to 16 weeks off a year. And yet I was consistently hitting my income goals. And I know there's been a lot of flack on social media lately about people harping on six figure freelancing and how that shouldn't be a goal. Well, it was a goal for me because I had determined that that's the amount of money I wanted to make in order to to pay the bills and live the kind of life I wanted to live. And to my astonishment, taking 16 weeks off did not put any kind of a dent in my income. And the only reason that that happened is because I planned for that. I knew how much I had to make in the weeks and months where I was on duty in order to afford my little sabbaticals throughout the year. And you have to make that happen. You do have to do the math when you make this decision. That's really, really important is to look at your expenses, look at your budget, and figure out what income has to come in in order to make this work for you. You can't just randomly jump off a cliff and take off four months and hope that everything's going to fall into place, because it won't. It won't.

Well, okay, so that leads to a follow up question regarding the time when you do work. So if you're essentially taking four months where you're making that space, theoretically, what happens is there's now four months worth of work you're not doing during your break, which now gets shoved into the other eight months. How did that work? You know, because I'm wondering if listeners are asking themselves, gosh, the other eight months, like my whole year is already pretty busy. So to now pack those eight months with additional work, you know, does that work? Can I make that work or is that just going to burn me out?

Well, that's the other part of it. I don't generally work nights or weekends during the eight months where I'm on duty. I think a lot of it is about managing client expectations. And I do have a number of retainer clients that are very well aware of when I take time off. And this is another important point. You can't just announce a week before you're leaving that you're not going to be available. So for example, for the biggest chunk of time I take off, which is the summer I start sending notices to my clients almost right about end of April to remind them that basically as of mid June, I'm gone until Labor Day. And so I don't take on any new work starting, let's say in May. And I'm very clear about when I need revision requests in. And I do not have WI fi at the cottage that is a hill I will die on. Much to my son's chagrin. I do occasionally check email because, you know, stories that you file or deliverables that you send in, you can't just disappear. But I do communicate with clients very early to let them know what my schedule is. And very often something will come through for a semi regular client or a client I haven't worked with in a long time who will reach out to me during one of the times where I'm away and I will say to them, you know, I'm off, but I'm available on XX day if you want to wait or I can refer you to somebody or I can wish you luck. And many times they're like, no, no, okay, we, we can wait, we can wait. And so I don't lose the work and that just gets pushed to when I get home. And as for the times where I am working, you obviously have to figure out your best productivity hacks so that you can get the most done in the hours that you want to work and not drive yourself crazy. So I've become very good at learning how long things are gonna take me. And that's something I see a lot of newer freelancers struggling with. They'll get an assignment and they have no idea if it's going to take them two hours or two weeks. You have to know that. You have to know for, let's say a thousand word story with three sources, how long is it going to take you to get from A to B? And everybody's different. So you really have to know what your superpowers are, what your limits are, what your abilities are, so that then you can cram in only as much work as you know you can reasonably do. I never want to promise more than I can deliver, and I always want to deliver more than I promised. So that kind of gets me onto the mindset of what can I realistically take on that's going to meet my income goals in the time that I have? And that's more math. You have to track your time. You have to track your time on certain types of assignments so that you know that you know. I do a lot of marketing material for the National Film Board of Canada. I know exactly how long it takes me when they want me to prepare a package for a new animated feature that they're sending to the Oscars. I have it down to a science. And that's a very big part of the puzzle. If you don't know how long things take, you start by tracking your hours and figuring it out so you can take a look. Oh, I can take on this many features, that many copywriting projects, this many marketing bundles, whatever it is that you want to do, you can have an idea of how long it's going to take you and Then you can slot it into the time that you have available. And guess what? You may have more work than you have time for. And so you have to make decisions. Which clients am I going to prioritize? Obviously, the great ones that pay quickly. But, you know, you have to make those kinds of decisions all the way through.

So I wanted to point out two things. First of all, you're the second person that I interview in this podcast about taking extended time off. But the other example was very different from you, that totally different situation. If 1. There have been a few common themes. One of them is the whole math. You know, just doing the math and then planning and strategizing and not just kind of making this up. That is a very consistent theme, a very important one. The second one, which is kind of subtext, is this idea that when you create an intention and you move forward in faith toward that intention and that goal, the answers start surfacing. You know, that's what I'm hearing from you, that once you made that decision, you made that declaration. And of course, there was this math and the planning and the brainstorming things just kind of had a way of working out. Like you were able to make it work. Not magically, but you're able to. I think constraints are really important thing in our lives because they force us to make better decisions. I think when we have too much time, you know, too many resources, we waste so much of it, but suddenly we gotta get this done. Cause we got eight months to get it done, and instead of 12, we just magically make it happen. We become more effective, more productive, more focused. So that's another thing I just wanted to underscore that I'm hearing from you, which really resonates with me.

Well, I mentioned to you when we first started chatting that I really believe in that whole cliche of putting on your own oxygen mask first before you can help somebody else. I think that so many writers either on the brink or in the full throttles of burnout, and that is caused by running on fumes and not keeping your glass full. And it's so important to take the time that you need to recharge your batteries and find the things that bring you joy. Because if you don't do that, and all you do is is chase after, you know, the next client, the next assignment, the next invoice, it's not sustainable as a way of life. And you're not going to be any good to your clients, to your family, to your partner, to your children, to your friends if you have no energy in reserve. And what I have found is taking those 16 weeks off in various chunks throughout the year. Sometimes it's just a long weekend, sometimes it's three months altogether. Has really replenished my cup and has really helped me refocus what's important in my life. And I think that's something that's sadly missing when people go freelance. And let's be honest, with all the media layoffs, there's more and more and more people every day that suddenly find themselves freelancing and they're operating from a place of fear and they're worried, they're terrified they're not gonna be able to pay their bills or, you know, support their children or whatever their goals are. I'm here to say that there is a way to make an excellent living as a freelance writer while also avoiding burnout. I mean, it really is possible, but you have to make the decision that that's what you're going to do. It does not just happen. If you allow things to be decided for you, then you're going to be working seven days a week and bringing your laptop to the beach. That's just what's going to happen to you. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

You used a word that's really important right now, and that's fear. Right? Fear is driving so many decisions for freelancers right now. Can you talk a little bit more about that and your experience with fear and how it's led you down the wrong path and then how doing what you've been doing for the past 18 years has really brought down kind of that fear mindset.

So I'll start by telling you that, you know, I make a pie chart every year to see how many clients I've worked with, what kind of work I was doing, and I look at the percentages and my year end is April 30th and I took a look last week and realized that I had lost nine clients this year. Oh my God, isn't that terrifying? But you know what? I got eight new ones. So it's really not the end of the world because I balance that out. I am not afraid of not finding work. I think there's never been more work. I think that with every brand and organization and university now being a publisher, if you're a writer, everybody needs your services. And so you really start to change your mindset about who needs the talents that I have. And there's lots of wonderful people out there that have great exercises of how you can find more clients. I'm thinking of my good friend Jennifer Goforth. Gregory has some fantastic exercises. One of her best things that I'll never forget is, oh, you write about parenting. Great grab at Parenting magazine. Flip through. And every time you get to an ad, go send a letter of introduction to that company. They need writers. They probably have a blog. And I mean right there, you're going to come up with a list of 40 or 50 clients that you can pitch to. I waste as much time as everybody else. I'm guilty of procrastinating, but I have a little trick I I give myself permission to procrastinate if I do a marketing task. I'm actually constantly marketing. Not just in the eight months where I'm working, but all the time. I'm always talking to people, thinking of story ideas, looking for new pathways of places that could potentially need my services. And I give myself permission to procrastinate on a task that I'm working on if I send a letter of introduction or pitch a story or make a LinkedIn connection, something that's gonna further my business. And I would argue that if you're not marketing every day, you're leaving money on the table. I can't tell you how many times a simple note to connect on LinkedIn has led to thousands of dollars worth of work and it took 10 seconds of my time. You really have to understand that money is going to come to you, but only if you scatter a lot of seeds. So be a gardener. Just throw out heaps and heaps of flower seeds. Lots of them are just going to blow away in the wind, but there's lots of them that are going to root. And the way to stave off the fear that scarcity mindset is to keep scattering those seeds. If you keep scattering the seeds, I guarantee you it's a numbers game. It will come back to you. You will find projects that take root. But if you're just sitting around fretting and complaining that there's not enough work and that another magazine has folded or a company has ghosted you, you're not going to get anywhere. Just move on. Those nine clients I lost, well, you know, the budgets dried up, their direction shifted. My contact got fired. Whatever the reason was doesn't matter. You have to replace those clients, so you have to keep throwing those seeds out. That's how I deal with the fear. I just use my gardening skills.

I love that. What percentage of you have to guess of your ability to take this time off every year is dependent on your consistency and quality of marketing.

Wow. I'M going to say all of it because I know that I can't take 16 weeks off if I don't hit my income goal. And I have projections, I see month to month what's coming, what's not coming. If upcoming month looks light, I will double down on my marketing efforts to make sure for people that don't know that are aspiring to earn six figures in a year, you have to make $8,333 over the 12 months. Well, if you're only working eight months, guess what that means Some of those months are going to look like a lot more than 8,300. You're going to have to double.

You got to make up. What is that, like $33,000 or so.

Exactly.

Or now have to flow into your eight months.

Exactly. So, I mean, I am certainly no math whiz, but in that Excel projection spreadsheet that I have, which I have named on the books, there's a calculation that's showing me how off I am, you know, how far away I am from my income goal and how many months I have left to get there. So it's not like I'm going to punish myself and say, oh, you can't go to the cottage to ski for two weeks over Christmas because you didn't make your money. I don't do that. But know that over those eight months, I have to reach those income figures. And so I take as much as I can realistically do in those times and market like crazy if I see things are getting a bit low. So, you know, it goes hand in hand. You have to figure out how much time things take for you to do. And you have to keep marketing to make sure the work keeps coming in.

Yeah, I posted the other day on LinkedIn that, you know, I was conservative. I said 80% of your success and happiness are directly impacted by your marketing consistency, something to that effect. And I know that, you know, right now people don't want to hear that. I think right now people want to hear that it's okay. And it's not you, it's the economy, it's this and then the other. But nobody wants to take ownership. I shouldn't say nobody. A lot of people don't want to take ownership. What I'm hearing from you is you've taken charge, you've taken ownership, you've declared, this is what I'm going to do. In order to make that happen, I need to then reverse engineer what I need to do to make it happen. And the lead domino here is marketing. That's what I'm hearing. If that's the lead domino, the other pieces can start falling into place, which enables me to have this more balanced, richer life.

Right. And I think it's important to point out, Ed, that marketing can take many, many, many forms. If I had to pick one chain, one path that leads me to the most work, it's referrals from other writers. So if you're terrified of marketing, if you're an introvert and you think that you can't send out cold emails and you can't call people and you can't strike up a conversation at an in person conference, then go to your tribe and make connections with your peers and let them know what you do and tell them that you're open for referrals and that you're happy to refer them. One of my longest anchor clients that I've been writing for since 2014 came from a referral from another writer. That's how it works. So it's not just about, you know, lurking on LinkedIn, but you've got to go to writers conferences, you've got to talk to people when you're out. You've got to make mastermind groups with some peers where you maybe have a meeting every two weeks and check in with each other and share leads and those kinds of things. There's a lot of different ways to market that aren't nearly as painful as writers think they are. You just have to turn it into a bit of a game. I think gamification works if you have to make a little chart for yourself and say for every 10 marketing efforts, you're going to give yourself a little treat. Some people need to bribe themselves. Try that. If you can't motivate yourself. It's really, really important and everything counts. You never know where your next client is coming from.

I want to go back to a couple of things you had mentioned. One of them was the fact that you give plenty of notification to clients. Okay. Which is great. So there's a lot of planning that goes into this. But you also mentioned that you have several retainer clients. So I'm just curious about, in a retainer situation, when you're going to be gone, or let's say in the summer, that seems to be your biggest extended period, right when you're off, you're going to be gone for two, three months. How does that work in a retainer situation? Do you hit pause, obviously on the billing? But what about the work, you know, is that also paused completely and then they make do on their own. Do they find someone who could help them for two or three months while you're gone? Or do you basically get the work done ahead of time so that during those two or three months, you know, nothing happens?

Yes, I front load. So for stuff that I know is recurring, I will say to a client, listen, for example, one of my clients is a CN railroad and I do profiles of different railroaders and it's on a quarterly basis. And I already know today the ones for May and June, so I'm getting those done this week. So I'm going to say to them, if there's any way you can give me the next quarter so that I can get them done before June 10, bring them on and you'll have them. And those will run during the summer. So that's an easy thing. There's some client I like to work with clients that are organized.

I was going to say that requires planning on their end.

There's a caveat there. If most of your clients are, you know, last minute, Lucy's who are just going to throw things at you because they don't know where they're going, this might not work. But for clients where you can actually say to them, I'd like to front load as much as possible, you know, I have another client, Garden Weasel Tools. I write a lot of gardening blog posts for them. Those I can do whenever I want. So if they run monthly, I can just do three of them before I leave, fit them in anytime between now and June 10th and I'm done for the summer. So I do try to do those kinds of things. There's other recurring clients that are much more last minute. And unfortunately in those situations I have to say no because I'm not going to suddenly whip up my laptop at the lake and start working on a last minute because so and so wasn't organized enough. So I have to make peace with the fact that they're going to have to go to another writer for that. Frankly, I'm okay with that. I have yet to have turned down an assignment in 18 years where I look back and say, oh, I wish I had done that instead of that two hour kayaking adventure I had with my family. Never. Never. There are no assignments where I am going to be filled with remorse. I'm just not in that place in my life where I'm going to regret those kinds of things. There's always going to be another opportunity. And quite frankly, if you are in that big time away and your dream client comes up with something that you can't turn down and you really want to do it, then do it. The sky's not going to fall in. I just don't want to do that. I want to have that time scot free. But you may decide you're going to take eight weeks off, but one week in there, you're going to say yes to a dream client. That's okay too. Again, it's what works for you.

Tell me a little bit about what you do. Let's start with the summer. Summer months, you know, you go up to the cottage. How do you spend. And I'm sure this has changed as your son has grown up, right? But how do you spend that time? What do you do? And do you ever find yourself getting a little itchy about work? Do you ever find like I gotta do something, I gotta do something work related?

Never, not once. What do I do? You know, I love to garden. We have a big garden up there. I spend a lot of time gardening. We love to go out on the boat or on the water. I love to just watch my son fish. We go hiking. I love to bake and cook. So I do a lot of that kind of stuff. I love to read. We love to catch up on movies and have fires outside bonfires at night when the mosquitoes are gone. One thing I have found though is that when you free your mind to relax like that, it's amazing how many great ideas you get. So I do write a lot of things down. I may get a story idea. I may meet somebody at the grocery store in the village that sparks a story idea. So I write it down. I don't pitch it, but I write it down.

Just write it down?

Yeah, I just put it in my phone or I scribble it in a notebook and I put it aside, or I make lists of people that I want to follow up with or places I want to go and pitch story, you know, travel story ideas. But that's about as much work in quotes as I'll do if something comes into my mind. If a thought comes in, I will welcome it, I will write it down, I will put it away. I will certainly not feel compelled to run to my laptop and write up a pitch and send it to a magazine that I won't do.

Do you journal while you're there as well? Not work stuff, but just.

No, you know, I used to, but I don't journal. I. I find it incredibly liberating to just spend as much time outdoors in nature, even if I'm just staring at the Water. Sitting on the dock and staring at the water. Four hours can pass and I don't get bored. You know, I watch the ducks. I get a lot of pleasure of watching the ducks on my lake. I really do. It sounds crazy to a lot of people because actually I'm a very type A personality when I'm on duty. And I keep going back to that phrase. When I'm on duty and I'm working, I am very productive, I'm very focused. I'm very obsessed with getting all my work done. But boy, when I'm off duty, I am all in with the off duty.

Was that a process or did you find yourself. You were really good about flipping that switch from day one.

I think at the beginning, when I just took the summers off, you know, when you have a baby or a toddler, you certainly don't have a lot of time for reflection. There's. It's just really, really busy. And yet it was a lot of fun. And over the following years, when I kept adding more and more and more and more time off, it became more intentional. And I think it was a process in the sense of I'm not somebody that gets bored easily. I really don't need a lot to entertain myself. And I really have taken a lot of pleasure in very small things in life. I mean, when you wake up and you can listen to the birds. There's a mother robin that makes a nest under our balcony at the cottage. For the last 10 summers or so, she's 10 springs, she's made her nest. And I can't tell you how much fun it is for me to watch her standing guard in the grass and watch her check her babies and watch them hatch. I mean, it's been. That's something like 15 or 20 years ago, somebody would have said, I would have really gotten a kick out of that. I would have rolled my eyes. But that's really. I've come to appreciate a lot of the smaller things in life because I've allowed myself to slow down. I think we miss so much. Look, the eclipse was a perfect example. So many people stopped what they were doing, joined a bunch of strangers out in the street and looked up at the sky and had a really amazing experience. And it made them realize how important it is sometimes to just stop what you're doing and be in the moment. And that's sort of become a bit of a philosophy for me with my work and my life.

So summer is your biggest time off. I think you said you take some time during spring break and March, you take a month off.

Christmas. Yep.

At Christmas. What are some of the other periods that are, you know, pretty much recurring every year?

So my husband's shooting schedule is usually four days a week. So whenever he has a Friday off, I take a long weekend off too. And I'll, I won't work Fridays. I know a lot of freelancers that don't work Fridays, by the way. That is a big thing and that's a great way to start. Start by giving yourself long weekends and see if you can do that. And then give yourself a four day weekend and see what happens. And you know, you don't have to just decide you're going to take four months off. You can do it in increments. And so that's what I started to do. I will take the occasional day off again. My son is now in college so he doesn't have this anymore. But all through elementary school and high school, if he had a day off from school on a Wednesday, we'd have an adventure day. So those, you know, once a month days, I added them to my days off and it's been fantastic. And you have to make plans for those days, by the way. Give yourself something to look forward to so that, that gives you a sense of purpose as well. Whether it's planning a hike or a picnic or a day at a flea market, or just going kayaking or going to see a friend or going to spend time with your parents. Have a plan for that time off because that is part of the joy and part of the cup filling experience. Don't just sleep in until noon and sit around, you know, in your pajamas watching TV all the time. You can do that sometimes, but you can't do 16 weeks of that.

No. And I, I have found the same thing. My wiring is such that if I don't plan something, I will walk around mindlessly and then there's a danger that I'll end up doing some work, which I have done. So like this weekend I'm going camping, you know, Friday through Sunday. I'm leaving early Friday morning. So I need to do things like that in order for the accountability, I guess, and so that I don't just waste a day because I've wasted. Even if it's not work, I'm just kind of like you said, there's still value in puttering it around. Puttering and just thinking, just laying there watching the water lake, that's fine. But on a Friday I find that I need to do a little bit of planning. Let's talk a Little bit about. I want to come back just briefly to the finances. We don't need to talk numbers in here, but can I assume that essentially what you're doing is you're essentially building up your buffers so that you could drain that and live off of that during the months when you are not working? Is that typically how it works?

Yeah, that's basically it. So it goes back to knowing what your expenses are and trying to keep your expenses low so that you're not just working to pay off your very expensive shoe buying habit. For example, you know, you try to have a mindset where, okay, what needs to go out and what needs to come in. And keep in mind, my husband and I are both freelancers. So we both have, for lack of a better term, a non steady job. Of course, now we know in the world there's no such thing as a, a secure job anyways.

But no, but your income is variable type.

Yeah, it's variable. And we have to know, okay, how many months is he working? How much do I have to work? How are we going to figure this out? And that's what we do. It's just a constant sort of readjustment and juggling act. And I think it's important, you know, for me, I don't think I would take four months off consecutively. For me, I need to plan it throughout the year because that's what works for me. I like to sort of do it in fits and starts. I like to work and then take time off and then work and take time off. Back in the days where I worked in television as a producer, I had the same schedule as my husband. I would be shooting and then off. And often when you work in production, you work crazy, crazy hours, 16 hours a day, but then you have three months off. So I was sort of used to that stop and start kind of lifestyle anyway. And it melds very well with what I'm doing now. So I look ahead and I think, okay, if I want to be off, you know, June 10th, I better make sure that I'm making this much in March, April, May, and then that I have stuff lined up for September through December. And that's what you kind of have to work that I have stuff lined up for September through December and that's what you kind of have to work towards. And some things, you know, are already going to be there if you have anchor clients. Other things you say, well, I've got to pick up some more work here and there and buff those months up so that I can you know, like you said, drain them later. That's the plan.

Yeah. That's smart. That's smart. I'm curious if you have started to think about the next phase of this idea. So obviously your son is now in college and you know you're entering a new phase of your life if you want to use that as a milestone. Right. Have you thought a little bit more about, hey, what might this look like over the next 10 years or so? How will this evolve?

So I think what's going to happen is that those 16 weeks are going to slowly start growing until they resemble a type of semi retirement. I guess I'm not really interested in retiring just yet. I feel like as long as I can keep the kind of pace in my life where I have enough time to seek joy and do the things I want to do and travel and be with my family, I'm very happy to keep working on projects that I want to work on. And I think it's really important here to say, don't work for clients that are going to burn you out. Don't work for clients that aren't going to bring you joy. I think a lot of the stress that freelancers take on that make them want to dream of retiring or leaving the profession and doing something else is because the people that they're working with just bring them aggravation and dread. So I have learned over the years to get rid of those kinds of clients. You're allowed to fire a client, I'm giving you permission. If they don't pay you well, if they don't pay you promptly, if they don't value you, you don't need them. Replace them with somebody that does. And then if you're working with good clients, you want to keep working with them. And as I move slowly, slowly towards this semi retirement phase down the road, I'm just going to keep the very best of the best of the best clients that I love until I don't want to work anymore. That's the plan.

I love that because you are absolutely right. I feel like the story about retirement that we've all been sold is based on an old paradigm of people working in a job they hated, with people they hate until they can't take it anymore, they need the rest. They're so burnt out, they need a break from that. But when we're self employed and we have the control to decide who we work with, what kind of work we do, I'm a big believer, like you, that you should create the kind of situation that you don't need to run away from. And that's a very powerful thing. But the reason I asked this question is because in a way, you've lived such a balanced light that I was curious about your perspective, you know, when you don't feel like you're burnt out, that you need a break from that, what does the second half of your life look like? And I'm happy to hear that you enjoy your work so much that you're in no hurry to necessarily go take a break and just retire from it all.

I think. You know one of my favorite editors, Richard Eisenberg, who is. He's coining the phrase unretirement because he left his full time job as an editor at PBS and is now freelancing and living his unretired life. And he's writing a lot about that. And it's really resonating with me because I think a lot of people, as you mentioned, have an idea of retirement that just doesn't make sense for our generation at all. And I think that you have to have something to go to. And for a lot of people, if you love what you're doing and there's no reason for you to stop doing it, and you can make your own hours, choose your clients and the type of work you want to do, why wouldn't you want to keep your hand in it? As long as you love it and still want to do it? So that's what I see happening. I see myself continuing along this path until it turns out that maybe I'm only working 16 weeks a year, and the rest I'm off, I don't know. But for now I'm really happy with this pace. It's the perfect amount of time off. You know, some years it's a little more than 16 weeks, some years it's a little bit less. It depends. And I don't hold myself to this iron schedule. You know, sometimes my summer will start June 1st and sometimes it'll start June 29th. It depends. It just depends on what's going on with the rest of our family. So I think you can be flexible. And I think that's the best part of freelancing is that you're in charge. You're in charge of your destiny. You're in charge of your finances, you're in charge of the projects you take, and you're in charge of your schedule. And that, to me is just glorious. And I think it's so important to focus on that part of it that you really have to be at ease with the pace that you're setting for yourself. And I would argue that most freelancers are not. They're either completely stressed and burned out or they're not working enough and they're terrified that they're not going to make their mortgage payments. And both of those are not the way to live.

Well, it leads back to what you started with, which is you have to treat what you do as a business, you have to run it as a business, you have to operate as a. You have to think of it as a business. And that's been the common theme of everyone who has real choices and freedom in what they do. They all have that in common, including you. So kudos to you for, you know, for doing that, because that is the start of everything. You said something to me in an email, we had a couple of email exchanges and we start wrapping up. I kind of want to you to maybe touch on this a little bit. It's kind of self explanatory, but it's so important. You said. My best tip is if you want something badly enough, you'll find a way to make it happen. Trust me. Speak to that a little bit. We've kind of touched on that indirectly. But when it comes to creating this kind of lifestyle, is that true for everybody?

I think it should be. I think that once you really dug deep and figured out what is important to you, you will reevaluate everything around you. My husband had a health scare five years ago that completely changed the universe for me and made me realize even more that we have to live for today and we have no idea what's going to come for tomorrow. But we can project. And for me, when I say if you want something badly enough, you'll figure out a way to get it, that means that you have to do your math, do your planning, do your thinking, figure out who you are, what you want, and then look at the different pathways to get to that goal. Whether it's losing ten pounds, learning how to play the guitar, or, you know, starting a new side hustle. Hope is not a strategy. You have to sit down and say, what are the different ways that I can get from 0 to 1 and take that first step forward. If you want to take more time off in your year, then take a look at a calendar, block out some time and make that happen. Highlight it in bright yellow as untouchable and figure out a way to work around it so those weeks happen. Start small. You don't have to start with four months. Start small. See what works for you. But prioritize the things that bring you joy. If you decide that you want to take up a new sport, you have to sign up for that class and learn how to do it or join a recreational ice hockey league or whatever it is that you want to do. It's not going to happen if you don't take a concrete step. So take that first step and the rest will follow. I think that people who give up too easily, and it's really interesting when I mentor new writers or I give workshops and I talk to writers later, the ones that are struggling all have the same problem. It's all in their mindset and they need to get out of their own way. If you decide you're going to be successful, money is going to come to you. If you decide that you want to take off family vacations and not bring your laptop to the beach, leave it at home and just don't pack it. I mean, just do it. You know, you can't just hope for things. You have to actually take a step. And if something that you try doesn't work for you, guess what? As a freelancer, you get to press reset and do something different. So, you know, there's a lot of trial and error involved here to figure out what the right balance is for you and for your business and for your family. But I guarantee you, if you want something and it's really important to you, the only person who can make it happen is you. Nobody's going to do it for you. So you have to have the strength and the persistence and the resourcefulness to just do it, period.

I'm inspired. This is. You speak so much truth, and I'm glad you're saying it because this is a message that needs to be heard. So thank you. And Wendy, thank you for sharing your precious time with us and your story and your advice and your wisdom. So I. I appreciate you coming on.

It's my pleasure. And I think this is really important information for freelancers in all kinds of fields, not just writers. I think the word free is really important in there. You are free to do what you want and make your own rules, and you just have to have the confidence to do it. And I'm giving everyone that confidence today because everyone can do it. If I can do it, anyone can do it. I'm not special. I just made some decisions and moved forward, and anyone can do what I do.

Beautiful. Beautiful. So if anyone wants to learn more about you, connect with you, where should I send them?

I'm happy to share my email. It's Wendy at Take two Productions CA and you just spell it out. And I'm always happy to talk to new writers or people who are struggling with their scheduling and their client load. There's always a way out. You're not trapped. There's always a way forward. You just have to figure out what the right path is for you. Because everybody is different.

Well, thanks again, Wendy. I appreciate you.

It was my pleasure. It was great to talk to you, Ed.

Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder, grab your free copy of my latest book, Earn More in Less Time the Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper as a Freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com where you will also find the detail show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.