About $200K Freelancer

Elizabeth MacBride and Elaine Pofeldt started $200K Freelancer in 2011 to help ambitious professionals make the most out of the big opportunity in today’s economy: working for yourself.

We’ve written hundreds of articles, edited magazines, established web sites, consulted for fast-growth businesses, and done a lot of other things on our paths to supporting families with freelance incomes. Our latest project is EmergencyEditor.com, a service to help businesses and organizations address their last-minute editing needs. We believe it is possible to work for yourself, and make enough money to buy health insurance and send your kids to college.

We’ve done well so far. We’d like to do even better. That’s where $200K Freelancer comes in. This is a site for people in the media and arts business, and maybe others, who are seeking no-nonsense, useful advice and information about growing and running a successful freelance business. The challenges are many, including the pains of breaking away, establishing a back office and figuring out how to grow your business. We hope by giving you to-the-point articles with ideas, sources and reviews of products that we’ve found, that we can help you establish your own business.

Only a select number of people regularly make $200K a year freelancing, and with the goal of hitting that target ourselves every year, we’re avid students of what they’re doing right. We have to be–each of us lives in a high-cost area: the suburbs of New Jersey, in Elaine’s case, and Northern Virginia, in Elizabeth’s.

The Lifestyle

We believe in the freelance lifestyle, which means keeping your workload manageable, keeping your expenses down, and finding time for what you love in life. For both of us, working moms, that means spending time with our kids. For you, maybe it’s making space in your life for a hobby, or gardening, or exercising, or volunteering. Whatever it is, a freelance lifestyle can help you feel fulfilled professionally and personally.

We’re here to show you exactly how you can achieve those goals.

Hiring A $200kfreelancer

To hire someone from the 200kfreelancer network for a journalism project, use the contact box at the bottom of the page to send us a note. We’ll do our best to meet your needs by finding someone in our networks. There are writers in the 200kfreelancer network who specialize in just about everything, including finance, investing, health care and entrepreneurship.

About Elizabeth

I’ve been a journalist for 20 years, and freelancing for the past seven years. My work has been published in Newsweek, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and Crain’s New York, among other places. I’ve helped to establish two startup blogs: RIABiz, a b-to-b blog for investment advisors that hit $250,000 in revenue within two years, and an investor education blog. I’ve helped an assortment of business and nonprofit clients with their writing and editing needs.

I have a journalism degree from the University of Maryland and after six years of part-time classes, I am due to graduate with an MFA in nonfiction from George Mason University in May 2011. I’m working on a book about women, motherhood and depression. It’s different than everybody else’s, I swear.

I’m married, with two young children.

About Elaine

I went freelance in late 2007, after working as a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine, where I spent eight years that took me from the magazine’s website to the print edition and back. My work has appeared in FORTUNE, where I write a column for the Venture section called David vs. Goliath; Money magazine, Working Mother, Good Housekeeping, Crain’s New York Business, Inc., CBS Moneywatch, BNET, TheAtlantic.com and variety of other print and online publications. I also help a variety of private clients with projects from writing business proposals to book editing. I graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in English.  I’m a recent transplant to suburban N.J. , where I live with my husband and four young children.