Frugal Side Hustle: Freelance Writing with Miranda Marquit – EP 257

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A gateway to eventually achieve income flexibility without doing it full time: Freelance Writing. Together with Miranda Marquit, this episode will open your eyes to the level of accessibility this side hustle offers, especially, if you enjoy and are competent in writing. You do not need a fancy writing degree, or prolific spelling and grammar. As long as you enjoy and are competent in writing, you might find yourself considering freelance writing by the end of this episode. 

You don’t need a fancy degree to do this. If you have reasonably good writing skills and you have the capability to improve your writing skills, then you can do the biz.

Sponsors:

  • Fire. No, not financial independence or the dumpster fire that describes life sometimes. But the fire that burns within you to know more. This year’s listener special is coming up and we want your burning questions! Want to know something about investing? Shoot! Got a specific question about debt that we probably won’t answer in a general episode? Come at us! Want to more about our personal lives!? We’re an open book until the chapter on social security numbers. We’re accepting questions for our listener special through November 20th so if you have a question you want answered by the Frugal Friends head to frugalfriendspodcast.com/special to submit it.

Miranda is an award-winning freelancer who has covered various financial markets and topics since 2006. She has contributed to numerous media outlets, including Forbes, TIME, The Hill, NPR, HuffPost, Yahoo! Money, and more. In addition to writing about personal finance, investing, college planning, student loans, insurance, and other money-related topics, Miranda is an avid podcaster and co-hosts the Money Talks News podcast. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University and an MBA from Utah State University.

Getting started with freelance writing

Miranda, who got married and pregnant in the middle of her senior year in college, decided together with her then husband to work their way through graduate school. Instead of getting a real job, she decided to try freelancing, using her shiny new journalism degree to be able to stay home and take care of their son while being a student. With great persistence and effort, Miranda was already earning her six figure income during her 5th year in freelancing. 

Questions people should ask themselves before getting into freelance writing

While freelance writing does offer a lot of freedom and flexibility, Miranda had to work her way to achieve that. You may or may not write glamorous articles all the time, as a lot of it is going to be boring stuff wherein you will have to sacrifice several hours at a time to finish. 

The most important for a new freelance writer to get better jobs

Have your own website or a blog where you can write and post because if in case, you don’t have any clips from anywhere else, you can at least present your own writings from your website/blog. You may also want to hit the job boards (e.g Pro Blogger, Media Bistro, Upwork) or set up your LinkedIn profile that identifies you as a freelance writer. 

The common mistakes most new freelance writers make and how we can stay away from them

Trying to figure out the balance between how much work I should do for free as a beginner and how much I insist that I’m getting paid for can be difficult. Don’t do a ton of free work, be smart and strategic. Spending so much time doing free or super low paid work that causes you not to have time to open yourself to other opportunities or even develop your own place can really hold you back in this career. 

If you were to write fiction as a side hustle, what genre would you like to go for?

  • Miranda: Fantasy (that is all about adventure and magic)
  • Jill: Children’s book
  • Jen: Non-annoying children’s books

Bill of The Week

Thank you Miranda for sharing your bill about being a politician in Idaho!

Thanks so Much for Listening!

Thanks so much for listening! We wanted to go OG today and share a kind review we read:

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Thank you 🤍

I’m diving into budgeting and working on being debt free. Im learning that just listening to podcasts ABOUT these topics is really helpful - even if I don’t take much from it. Episode 222 really impacted me. I’ve been scared to budget because I used to be NUTS about counting calories and dieting. I restricted and said “I can’t because Im on a diet.” Now, I have a healthy diet that is balanced and like second nature. It took about 5 years to get the hang of it. I don’t restrict but I am conscious! I never thought about budgeting like this! It will take time, I’ll purge, I’ll restrict too much, I’ll fall off track. But with slow, steady, intentional action it will become second nature.

Thank you for the great podcasts!! I also loved “breaking the cycle of poverty” - it was my first listen and I felt immediately seen and related. I’m breaking A LOT of cycles. I also appreciated when you firstly mentioned your own privileges in that episode - something we should always consider when giving financial advice. Thank you ladies!!

Thanks for listening and if you want to check out our monthly challenge community head to frugalfriendspodcast.com/club to see what challenge we have coming up next.

Keep leaving us reviews on iTunes or Stitcher, and sending the screenshot to reviews@frugalfriendspodcast.com. And don’t forget to share your favorite quote from the episode by using the hashtag #FrugalFriendsNote. 😉

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