Money, money, money: The year in financial review

Financially, this was not as good a year as last. Between the trips to Mum, an unusual amount of travel, the move (and some time lost from TYG’s surgery) that’s not really surprising.
While I didn’t make as much as I would have back at The Destin Log, I still wound up with more take-home pay (despite paying state NC tax as well as federal). The added costs of home-ownership are biting into that, though I look forward to taking expenses for my home office off the tax bill (it’s only about 7 or 8 percent, based on the percentage of the house it occupies, but it still counts).
For next year, barring disasters (and there’s no guarantee they’ll be barred, of course) I should make more. Demand Media articles have been a steady income stream since I moved up here. I must admit I would like to broaden it though. Just as a practical point, having more clients is a hedge against anything going wrong, and while Demand’s pay is good, some markets pay more. And having a variety of projects just makes things more fun.
Regrettably, none of the other stuff I’ve tried this year—Hyperink, a ghost-writing gig, my newspaper freelance pieces, one magazine article (the magazine asked for a quick turnaround, then apparently folded before ever publishing an issue. Which happened to me once before, but at least that time I got paid for it)—paid as well. Which is no reflection on them (okay, it’s a reflection on the defunct magazine, but otherwise). And in the newspaper stories, it’s mostly my fault—I’m working as if I were still an employee on the clock, when as a freelancer I need to be much more efficient.
This was enough of a problem that I actually turned down a shot at being one of About.com’s City Guides—it could have turned into a lot of work and ended with me not getting anything out of it if I wasn’t picked. I couldn’t afford that.
I have a variety of nonfiction, non-Demand Media projects I intend to work on this year, and I plan to be more aggressive about sending out queries for jobs, articles, etc. But I will have to structure my time so I don’t actually hurt my bottom line.
One way, as I’ve said before, is to do slightly less Demand stuff each week—about three hours a week should do for now. I can also try putting in more writing at lunch and saving nonwork stuff like cleaning until the evening (when as I’ve noted before, my interest in hanging with my wife tends to outweigh everything else). There are other dodges I can try; I may experiment a bit to see which works best.
Despite my frustrations, I’ve been supporting myself freelancing for three years now, and (again barring disasters) there’s no reason I can’t keep going. So if I’m not scaling stratospheric heights yet, that’s still pretty cool. Huzzah!