I’m in New York City this week working on a new project, a great new web site, Crain’s Wealth, aimed at helping entrepreneurs manage money. It’s a pleasure to spend time with many journalists who work at Crain, one of the steady bastions of quality through the past decade.
At dinner, I talked to one of them, one whose husband had recently been laid off from a job in the insurance business. You’d think that health care would be a steady job if ever there was one, what with the aging population. But, of course, that’s not true. She explained that the Affordable Care Act had thrown the market into an upheaval. Fortunately, her husband has found another job.
But the conversation helped me remember that though it seems freelancing is the ultimate insecure job, it’s actually the ultimate secure one. As long as I keep a good mix of clients, and don’t rely too much on any one for my income, I can never be fired in a devastating way. The perfect job, the one that tempts me to leave freelancing to return to a newsroom or to be part of a company team, may come along. But until and if it does, independence equals stability.