My day job wasn’t something I planned to write about here, but a reader commented asking me how I do it and I realized it is relevant on a blog where I talk about frugality and being a Work At Home Mom. When I am not trying to churn out blog posts here or playing with Baby Z, I’m busy creating websites and blogs for clients.

I’ve been honing my web design skills (primarily HTML and CSS and I recently focus mainly on WordPress) since junior high – There hasn’t been a solid year since the late nineties where I didn’t have some sort of personal blog site. I was hand-coding blogs before they called them blogs. There was a community of us girls with personal websites and web cams, but it wasn’t ‘cool’. This was before MySpace and only geeks and nerds were online. Of course I had considered making a career out of web design, but I missed the boat on getting a degree straight out of high school and didn’t consider any online degree programs. I assumed that path would be on hold for a long while.

Up until 2007 I worked retail, mainly at music and video stores (Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, Wherehouse Music). I realized, seemingly in one day, that I could probably make at least minimum wage working from home designing websites (still/already my hobby), so I up and quit working for the man and hopped onto the Craigslist computer section. I sometimes miss filing CDs and chatting up customers but I ultimately love determining my own schedule even more.

The buzz from my first gig was amazing! I charged my first client at least 10x too little but I was stoked. I wasn’t exactly making a living but considering working at home cut down my commuting and lunch costs, it was certainly something to be excited about. My rates crept up from there and continue to move up as I acquire more skill. My top two sources for work are currently word of mouth and Craigslist.

Around four years later and freelance web design is still what I do. For awhile I was self-conscious about the fact that I only do small sites and blogs but the truth is that I have no interest in the programming that typically goes into larger sites. Coding a stylesheet is the most fun a girl can have in my opinion. Learning an e-commerce platform feels a lot more like work. I also love the personal connection I have with my small blog and biz clients. Along with web design, I offer basic networking and SEO services, tutorials and site maintenance.

My income is supplemented by sponsored blog posts and ads. Ideally I would love love love for this blog to be my sole income source and pay all of my bills someday. I also do a fair amount of content writing for other people. For several months I wrote fashion and beauty posts for the now-defunct Sparkle Shelf.

(It is also worth nothing that one of my best online friends also dove into the freelance world right around the time I did. Not the first time we bounced around web niches in sync with each other – Maybe she’ll be mama blogging next…)

Without getting too personal, what I bring in is typically more than half of our family’s income. This is due to my income being limitless in theory, although it has definitely been lacking since the baby was born. Balancing work and motherhood isn’t terribly difficult but finding the time to seek out new clients and opportunities is hard. As a result, money is more tight now than it was pre-baby, forcing me to be frugal and creative, but I still think it’s worth it to work for myself. The biggest downside is lack of socialization and falling into a yoga-pants-everyday rut, particularly in the winter months. I’m working on that!

I am grateful that I began freelancing at 20, before I had a family and responsibilities, back when everything was a lot more flexible. I credit my amazing husband, then just my boyfriend, for keeping us afloat in our first apartment together while I followed my passion (trite but true) and steadily turned it into my career. I never would have been able to pull this off had I started after we settled down to start our family, and it’s awesome that I now get to be the next best thing to a Stay At Home Mom.

Images from Google & Tumblr – Email me for credit if they’re yours.