As of late, I’ve been getting an unusual amount of emails asking me what I do and how they too, can “make big bucks” (their words, not mine), and start freelancing without any experience right out of school or fresh from a job that has no connection to consulting whatsoever.
I will never tell you what I do, only to say that I’m a business consultant, and I don’t mind helping, and I’m even glad to do so but I’m starting to feel like there’s a big one-sided view out there (my view), that isn’t representative of what “consulting” is.
So here’s my clarification.
You might find the whole post a little harsh, but there’s nothing like a little tough love and a dose of reality.
Please don’t think of this as being discouraging or as a “hey, don’t bother” post.
This is really for me to tell you what it consulting is at its core for me and from my perspective.
I am not saying I’m the golden girl who can do everything or is the only one in the world who can get into a job like mine, but I feel like people are starting to get the wrong idea, and that it’s so easy to get into.
You need a mix of capability, skills, experience, and opportunity.
To get the perfect cocktail of all that to hit on exactly what you want is not that easy…
Becoming a consultant is not a single path that is set in stone where you study for 4 years, get a degree, get a certification and then POOF! you’re being paid money for whatever it is you do.
Even if you do EVERYTHING RIGHT and by the book, there is no guarantee you will become a consultant. Companies are fickle.
Update: To all the skeptics out there
If you really think you can make a lot of money by being a freelance writer/blogger or a novelist because I am clearly lying about being a consultant, then why don’t you go ahead and try writing for a living?
I have no reason to lie about being a consultant. If I were a writer/blogger full-time, I’d say so. Just because you have a book with your name on it, it doesn’t mean you’re “rich”.
And really, what would be the point of trying to hide it behind this nonsense of Anonymity? I’d be an idiot because I’d WANT people to give me book deals, go on TV and get people to hire me.
I’d be promoting myself with my name and picture plastered all over the blogs if I were a writer/blogger/novelist.
For the record, I actually LOVE my job and I work hard at it.
If I earned a quarter of what I did and didn’t have the headaches of administration, I’d still do it.
You will find a lot of people who are happy, and make good money will tell you that they enjoy what they do. It’s the first “rule” I guess.
If you make tons of money but you’re unhappy, you will ultimately detest your job and not care about how much you make. True story.
If you do what you love, you may not make a ton of money but you will wake up each day happy to go to work.
This sounds trite but many people say that the money will follow your passions, but they fail to mention that you have to also be good at what you love to do. 😛
It’s slightly insulting to get emails that just talk about your job in dollars and cents
I find the work interesting and fulfilling, so to have someone say: WOW!! How can I become a consultant and make sooooooooo much money too!!?!?
It’s like saying to a doctor: WOW!! you make so much money saving lives, how can I make tons of money off sick people too?
See what I mean?
I know what I do doesn’t “save lives”, but I love it and I enjoy it, and I feel that people only want to enter the field just to make lots of money, but they don’t really love it.
Why not do something you do love, rather than just looking at the salary?
Would you want to become a surgeon if it made you big bucks? Well you need skills for that, so what if you didn’t have steady hands or good eyes? What next?
It sounds so stupid to tell you to love your job (even to me), but it is insulting for me to think that others feel you are only a consultant because of the money.
I’m not in this for the money.
I didn’t even know it was there!
The money is a nice, unplanned bonus for me.
I never expected in a million years I’d ever make this much.
In fact, I told myself early on I’d be happy with just making the bare minimum I need to live as long as I was able to enjoy life a bit and save.
For me right now, this salary is around the $30,000 – $40,000 range.
Before that, I even thought I’d become a teacher, or go into advertising, and I was just lucky enough to fall into a totally different calling that I not only love to do but also something I understand and am good at.
So really, when I landed this job at $65,000, it was far was beyond my initial expectations.
What I get paid is highly unusual as well
Not all consultants make a lot of money, so don’t think that this is the whole picture when you see what I make per month.
My job is ONE SMALL slice of the pie, not the whole pie.
Some make $30/hour which is $60,000 a year but they only work part-time (contracts are tricky like that), so it’s really $30,000 a year.
Others go by a fixed rate of $10,000 that is spread out over 6 months and all they do is work for that client day and night.
That’s $1666/month or $67/day, which is $8.93/hour.
But they do it anyway, because they’d rather work for themselves at $8.93/hour than to work at a company for $10/hour.
My job is highly specialized and I worked hard to get the experience I have, so my pay is unusual as well.
Many consultants don’t even charge for overtime!!!!
They do it because they want to do a good job and get more referrals to other clients to build the business.
That in itself, is unusual, that I get paid by an hourly rate, I work a full 35 hours a week for a single client, and I can charge for overtime.
I don’t talk about the hard parts of the job
That’s because I love most of it, most days, and it feels great to hear such good feedback from the client.
But some days, it’s awful. It’s rough, people yell at you, you feel tired and wonder what you’re doing working for people who especially hate you because you’re an outsider and think they have a right to treat you like dirt because they pay you a lot of money.
I don’t talk about all the bad stuff because I can’t unless I heavily disguise it for the blog, which distorts what I actually do.
The other hard thing is the travel. It sounds glamourous to people who don’t travel for business, but it isn’t for pleasure when I move from city to city.
I only like to travel for fun (but even then, I HATE it because of my sensitivity to motion sickness).
I usually end up in cities I hate working in, or even if I love it, I may only be in that city for a short time, or be so exhausted from commuting that I collapse on the bed when I get home.
You are also the one-person-show as a consultant. You are everything you take for granted in companies — salesperson, public relations rep, problem solver, accountant or bookkeeper, travel agent, budgeter, human resources, career advice, medical & health benefits, client-soother, representative for your name and so on.
I also can’t tell you how to become a consultant
What slightly bothers me is when people email me without any solid idea of what they have to offer as skills, and then expect me to tell them how to find and crack open the golden egg of wealth.
I can’t tell you what you’re good at, and I can’t tell you how to make money with your skills.
Only you can do that, but I can ask you questions to help you find that path (see below).
You need to find your own path for this, and it may turn out that consulting is simply not for you and working a full-time job at a company is far better than trying to find contracts here and there for a month or two.
The stress may not be worth it if there isn’t enough work to go around.
Also, you don’t need to be making SOOOO much money to become wealthy. You just need to stop spending so much, have a budget, track your expenses and live way, way below your means.
This is true for any income level. My motto is: The more I make, the less I spend. The rest? I save.
What I can tell you is the following:
You can start by joining companies and getting experience to use later on as a consultant, but frankly, many industries are not open to consulting after you’re an employee. Basically, you’d have to be in an industry that is full of companies that need help and expertise in their own industry or niche.
Really, you could work 30 years in an industry and not be able to transition to being a consultant.
It really depends.
For instance, you could probably be a consultant for the oil industry if you were awesome at helping figure out and predict WHERE to drill. Oil companies will pay big bucks to someone, even at a quarter of a million a year, if they can hit a motherlode of oil that will bring in billions.
Or if you’re really into numbers and statistics, you can help the insurance industry predict (sadly) the most “profitable” products and services to target and to show them the upcoming trends of what will be in demand in the future (e.g. Baby Boomers retiring = a market for what?).
What I’ve noticed is that if you transition from being an employee, your experience and title matters.
Many C-level executives or directors become freelancing consultants to help other companies grow and manage their businesses better, but they worked hard to get where they are, and they worked hard for that insider knowledge.
They also have the knack for turning around companies, proven by their rise in the ranks. Or they simply know how to sell their skills and deliver value to the client, and they can say: I back this up by having turned around this department in 6 months, achieving a savings of $1 million a year.
So what do you do?
Ask yourself the following: What skills do I have (hard or soft) that are able to be sold to companies, that they would be willing to pay for?
Once you get a list, then ask yourself: How much can I charge, per hour or by project, and would it be better than working full-time at a job?
Remember!!
- No health benefits/insurance/coverage
- No “sick days” — you don’t show up, you don’t get paid
- No retirement benefits
- No one to lean on for knowledge or help
- You will NOT be working full-time as a freelancer
- You will have to be able to continually find work
- You will have to know how to save for the lean years
- Need to hire an accountant or do the books yourself
A lot of freelancers I know went into it for a year or two, couldn’t handle the stress of not being able to work all the time or find steady contracts (they made HALF what they made as employees) and went back to being an employee for a more stable income.
So what do you charge?
A good rule of thumb is to look at what you’re paid now: $40,000 let’s say.
That’s $20/hour ($40,000 / 2000 hours in a year).
You will at a minimum HAVE to charge $40/hour, because you have to factor in all of the above “perks” that don’t come with working for yourself.
Then you have to save all your money, pay for your own health bills and dental care and handle everything on your own.
To get contracts, you also don’t just apply to online ads that say: Looking for a general consultant to pay a lot of money for doing nothing but waxing poetic at the office while asking for random facts and statistics!!!!
That would just be too damn easy.
Cold calling a company also won’t work unless you have done your research and you KNOW that they need someone like you. Then you have to go in there with your experience, your background, proven results and get them to give you a chance to present.
After that, you have to present and sell them on your services. Not easy things to do, when companies are looking to save their dollars and use them wisely… let’s say, on their machines or their employees, not on a consultant whom they are not sure of.
Companies already know what they want, and if your skill sets don’t fall into what they want, then you are out of luck.
They usually want specialized skill sets, like if you know how to set up, operate, train and run a manufacturing device that is brand new and cutting edge on the market.
If they need people to come in and do that for them, then you can be a ‘consultant’ who helps them set up such a manufacturing device, or to improve their numbers as an efficiency expert.
Anyway, all of that I mentioned above?
Needs experience and SKILL.
You have to have something concrete you can offer to clients, and they will see the value in paying you because you have been there, and done that.
You KNOW the job, and they can see that if you came in to help them, they would save X amount of dollars per year in increased efficiency, or whatever other return on investment they can deduce from your suggestions.
So that’s it folks. 🙂
Consulting is a broad, vague term that covers anyone from a social media consultant (someone who helps you set up a Twitter account and Facebook page) to an efficiency expert (as described above) and more often than not, a better pay isn’t quite that easy or simple to come by.
Just a girl trying to find a balance between being a Shopaholic and a Saver.
I cleared $60,000 in 18 months earning $65,000 gross/year.
Now I am self-employed, and you can read more about 
Hi FB. I’ve been following both of your blogs for a while now, probably around a year, and I discovered business & management consulting on my own. It was a thrill to find out that was what you did as well. I have read back through your blog posts, and this one especially, but I will still ask if you have any advice for us just leaving our undergraduate careers (in May 2012). I have a lot of experience with leadership development, event planning, programming, finances (within a nonprofit corporation), and I really can only summarize my passion as making things run more smoothly and making them better. I believe that I am leaning more on the management side of consulting, but right now I have no idea of what kind of formal education is preferred/needed for that. I have tried looking at well-established consultants, but many of them are established based on experience. Do you have any thoughts or advice regarding education avenues for people interested in consulting?
Also, thanks for inspiring me to buck up and take on my own student debt and uncontrolled spending =)
My best advice to you is get experience in any industry you find interesting. Aerospace, Oil, Healthcare, anything you want to end up eventually becoming a management consultant in, go into it.
OR… just join a management consulting business right out of school. Some corporation or a boutique firm is okay too, as long as you get to work on a variety of cases.
The only education they need is business education, but you also need to go to the right schools (unfortunately the name counts here), to get the degree and then to be scouted by them at the career fairs.
Many firms don’t go to smaller universities so maybe you can travel to another bigger well-known name’s university to go to their fair (not sure if that’s legal or OK.. I haven’t done it.)
Honestly, I don’t understand why everyone is getting so pissed off or why they’re so obsessed with your day job. Why don’t they focus on your post and learn from it, and go get their own kick a-s job? Just saying……
AND you know way too much about consulting to be lying. I know what consultants do……
I don’t even know what to say to this whole comment thread. Are you kidding me? Is this for real? I know it’s not worth it but I’m kind of flabbergasted by the lame (by which I mean, falls far short of adequate) attempt to force you to get real here using some really poor reasoning.
There is absolutely no reason anyone should stick around and read if they feel they can’t believe what you’re saying here but good grief, the attempts below to poke holes in the “cover story” are just strange and irritatingly baseless.
You’re trying to get a book deal? You’re … trying to get a book deal based on your “confabulated” claims which are unrealistic because they are too specific to you and your mysterious industry/profession but at the same time your advice is too generic. Ok, which is it?
And THIS:
“People who make six figures tend not to have a lot of money problems, even if they aren’t particularly frugal, so their financial advice isn’t much use to the average person. It’s like taking dating advice from an exceptionally good-looking person.”
First, what a generally denigrating and devaluing statement. Someone’s intellect or knowledge is valueless to you because, in your eyes, they come from a superficially different strata. Way to be completely dismissive. Oh, and wrongheaded.
Because “They tend not to have a lot of money problems because they make a good income??” Seriously? The myth that high earners are automatically exempt from having money problems has been disproven time and again. Income does NOT equate to wealth. No matter how much you make, if you don’t have the knowledge or ability to keep the money, you won’t be wealthy so the idea that money *basics* that apply to high earners cannot possibly apply to low or middle income earners simply isn’t true.
And honestly, writing a blog, A BLOG, as a hustle. REALLY. That’s the secret here? She’s secretly making loot off the blog? Granted, FB is many levels of magnitude more popular than the average blog but that doesn’t mean she’s secretly making a living from this – you have to be pulling in hundreds of *thousands* of pages views and unique visitors per month, you have to be pulling in full on advertisers and sponsors and you have to be seriously working your blog to earn a living wage from your blog. Talk to a problogger to find out what kind of work goes into making a living off a blog takes, because it’s rather daunting.
…. I don’t know why I bothered but this whole “you’re a liar because you are on the internets and won’t show your face and your resume and your paystubs” thing just got under my skin.
After all, if you were a writer out to make it for a book deal, the first thing you would have out there is your face and name. You need to protect your professional reputation because you DO have a real job and negotiations to conduct. Guh.
Ok, I’m also appalled that people think FB’s looking for a book deal out of this. Granted, she might be able to write a book about the consulting, but if she were looking for a book deal then you’d approach it in an entirely different fashion. There are plenty of people out there who ARE looking for book deals and in most cases they haven’t spent 4 years writing completely anonymously. That’s a horrible way to try to get a book deal. She’d want to have her name/face out there (and the only reason for hiding them is if you know you’re better off not showing up on Google for this blog because you don’t want to scare off prospective clients). She should’ve been building a personal brand based on her name—or even on her blog name, but tied to her name.
No, just no. Maybe these people have no idea what being a blogger is like (and I’d bet they don’t), but if you want to transition into pro/author then you don’t hide yourself, or you at least wouldn’t hide your name/work. Shaking my head at the temerity and stupidity of some people.
Incidentally, I do know FB’s real name because of a business transaction a couple years back and I may have looked at her LinkedIn profile (sorry FB, I was curious) and I’ll vouch for her real life persona seeming to match the rest.
Thanks for not revealing 🙂
That’s basically it — I WANT to hide, not reveal myself. It’s the opposite of people trying to get offers for deals/TV things. Anyone who wants to be ‘famous’ on that level, has to reveal their name and face at least, to get out there to network under the blog.
I’m apprehensive about the whole thing, and I admire people like Krystal from Give me back my five bucks who wants to, and CAN go out there and do that. She’s my heroine.
If we ever meet up in real life, then you can change that “seeming” to a confirmed “matching”.
Shoot, as a former PF blogger and an anonymous, I know I’d have had a breakdown if someone had outed me on my site. I’m a library student and I want my web presence to reflect libraries/tech vs. personal finance. I also don’t want a prospective employer/classmate/anyone I know in real life googling me to find out about my finances.
Exactly. 🙂
And as usual, Revanche has managed to say everything I feel in a much more concise and elegant way than I ever could to defend myself.
I love it when you comment vomit. 🙂
Consulting seems to be a challenging field. I was reading up about freelancing at Freelance Switch and its challenging as well. It takes awhile for freelancers to get their business going, but that sounds much easier than becoming a consultant. I’d like to be able to freelance so I’m taking business classes in college. My mom owned her business for many years until she sold it, its definitely not for everyone but even through the down times it was worth it for my mom to run her own business.
@ Margaret-Some people choose to blog anonymously because they don’t want to ruin their professional prospects. I don’t know the writer of this blog but she does seem to want to stay anonymous. Its hard for anonymous bloggers to be taken seriously sometimes because many people like to know who their reading, which is why so many bloggers put up a photo of themselves.
Anyway I did some research on Google and found out through Payscale that business consultants get paid quite a lot. Awhile ago I did ask FB who she was but she prefers to retain her privacy. Its up to you on how much you want to trust her writings.
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Consultant,_Business_Process_%2F_Management/Salary
http://www.indeed.com/salary/Business-Consultant.html
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/business-consultant-salary-SRCH_KO0,19.htm
I’m not asking FB to give up her anonymity. I actually haven’t asked her anything, but I would like to know what her consulting speciality is. Apparently it provides her with an extremely high income and lots of time to blog and travel, and all by the age of 25. Many people with a lot more experience and skills than FB would LOVE a gig like this. It would have to be an extremely competitive field, and yet she somehow just fell into it? If this is true, it is so exceptional that her experiences are simply not relevant to the majority of people. Take your financial planning advice from a regular person with a regular job and regular expenses, who managed to build up a good nest egg.
Oh, and those salary websites are not reliable. Check census data – it’s based on people’s income tax returns.
I don’t really come here for the financial advice. I read the blog for entertainment. I’ve read books such as Your Money or Your Life, Your Money the Missing Manual, Suze Orman books as well, etc. That’s where I learned a lot of personal finance basics from. I’m also taking business and accounting courses in college which teach you a lot.
I hope to become either an accountant, a graphic designer, or have my own small business someday. Those are my life goals. I don’t think the writer will tell you what she does, she says it at the top of the post. I’m curious as to what she does too. Maybe she got extremely lucky? I’d love to know too!!
Thanks Jamie, I appreciate the support. I just realized that I left the reply-back commenting for too long (I do it on weekends, been kind of lazy during the week not wanting to do any blog stuff).
I’m lucky and I know it. But I’m also smart, and other people who have entered my field have quit because they can’t handle it. *shrug*
I’m a business consultant, and for me to tell you my niche specialty, I might as well post my face, my resume and my address.
The pay scale you are referring to is for experienced consultants, not for those who just finished reading the college books like this FB. I’m one of those who don’t buy what FB has been saying. I guess the only people who believe her are either teenagers with big dreams or those who never achieved anything in life and don’t know anything about it. What she says is her blogs is general, common sense. Nothing special or something that nobody else ever said.
I just found Margarete’s post and I agree with anything she says.
I appreciate that you let me post, but I was hoping for a response from you. Several members of my extended family are consultants, in a variety of fields, with years of experience, some with major consulting firms, and do not earn as much as you claim to. I have hired many consultants myself, some of them the leaders in their field, and their fees were not high enough to garner them the sort of income you claim. This is in a major Canadian city, not a backwater.
By the way, when you were living in hotels, who paid for the hotels when you were between jobs? You must have had some weekends off, some gaps here and there. Were those nights charged to client? Because I can guarantee I would not, nor would I be allowed to, pay for a consultant’s hotel room during the gaps between jobs, and certainly not because the consultant finds it a drag to pay for an apartment she’s never in. Or did the consulting firm just absorb the cost?
This is why I find your claims to be literally incredible. They just don’t jive with the reality of consulting that I have personally observed, and I have observed quite a bit. I personally know several people who earn a similar income to what you claim, and NONE of them are under 30. Most are over 40. It generally takes at least 10 years to get enough experience to make it worth someone’s while to pay you an income in the top 5% of the country.
To everyone else reading: please read my response’s to Margaret’s other comments.
In short: Margaret you are so smart to know everything about consulting, seeing as you are probably a consultant yourself, right? No? Well then. I bow to your obviously smarter “expertise” then, seeing as you’re telling me can’t possibly make this kind of money at my age….. yet I do.
Yes agree with you. Plus the bad economy here in the USA and Canada, would make ever harder to make it in the consulting business. She stated she got $15 over other experienced people got. So she got all that right after graduating from college. WOW!!! What a smart gitl and the rest of the world is so stupid.
Um, yeah. This advice is so generic, it reads like it was cribbed from some how-to websites. Quite frankly, I don’t buy the story you’re selling. A 20-something with skills so marketable as to make $17-20K in a month, or $85K in 3.5 months, would work too damn much to have time to blog. I think you’re just a blogger trying to hustle, maybe get a book deal out of this or something. Nothing wrong with that, but make your story plausible. You lived on $2083/month gross for 18 months? Where do you live? Regina? Moncton? It’s got to be someplace cheap. Or did you live rent-free with a boyfriend? And if your consulting work pays so well, why sell your budgeting tool? Why not just give it away? Hell I have a budgeting tool also – on an Excel spreadsheet.
Margaret, you do realize that FB writes a lot of posts when she isn’t consulting, right? If you had been following her blog for some time, you would already know that, along with what she was paying.
FB doesn’t actually blog about work all that often, so I can’t imagine she’s “just a blogger trying to hustle, maybe get a book deal out of this…”.
I would also like to say that I live on LESS than $2083 a month – I live on less than $1500 a month, and I pay rent and buy food. My vacations come out of the money that I save (not counted in that $1500 a month), and some months I do live on the full $2100 I take home (like when I have to buy a new computer, or Christmas gifts). It is not impossible to live on less money than $2000. I live in Toronto, and rent is $1220, split 50-50 between myself and my fiance, and the remaining cash I have is spent on insurance, groceries, meals out, going out with friends / fiance, etc. It really isn’t that shocking.
Yup. But the consultants I know spend their time between jobs looking for the next consulting job. It’s a very competitive industry; jobs don’t just come to you. Blogging about nail polish isn’t a good investment of one’s time when one is looking for the next gig.
FB’s lack of blogging about her consulting work doesn’t mean she’s not looking for a book deal out of this. What I think is that her blogs are her *real* business, and she’s trying to swing it into to a book deal or some other opportunity – which is a perfectly reasonable goal.
As for living on $2083 per month, FB actually claims to have lived on quite a bit less than that. (The $2083 is my figure, based on $65K per year x 18 months – $60K, and my math was wrong, since I took the $60K out her gross income, not her take-home income. So the real figure is less than $2083.) Again, I don’t buy that because consultants need to have good clothes for work. Good clothes still cost good money – H&M doesn’t count.
More power to you for living on less than $1500 per month in Toronto, but there’s a key consideration in both your and FB’s story: splitting the rent with a bf/fiance. What happens if the relationship breaks up? You could live with roommates for a while, but that will get old fast.
Living in a studio with a futon on the floor and a bf to split rent with is fine in your early 20s, but what about buying a house someday, getting decent furniture, having kids, retirement savings? Not to mention periods of unemployment, or divorce, or needing to help out family members.
And how does FB propose a woman should manage her finances on the more realistic figure of $45K per year? People who make six figures tend not to have a lot of money problems, even if they aren’t particularly frugal, so their financial advice isn’t much use to the average person. It’s like taking dating advice from an exceptionally good-looking person.
This whole blog would be much more credible if all the stuff about the high income from consulting etc was removed.
Just say it: I’m a blogger/freelance writer, the pay is erratic and sometimes on the low side, but I still manage to have a satisfying fun life anyway. Here’s how I do it.
Not everyone needs to make six figures in fact many people don’t and they manage to save for retirement, have emergency savings, and so forth. $45k per year is actually a good income for a woman. Especially if its just her and her bf. I’d love to make 45k per year.
I could save a lot of money that way. Although it does depend where you live, that money wouldn’t go far in an expensive city like NYC but it would go far somewhere like Denver. Btw, she has monthly updates on her net worth and according to FB she has $100k in her net worth.
So if she and bf break up I think she’ll be fine.
https://www.networthiq.com/people/brokeinthecity
Well, if someone says their net worth is over $100K on the internet, it must be true, right? No one ever lies on the internet.
No doubt $45K sounds like a good salary to someone who makes less, but it really isn’t, and it *definitely* isn’t in Toronto or other expensive cities. Not over the long term, not to have what most would consider a typical middle-class lifestyle, not to raise kids on.
Anyway, I don’t want to give anymore clicks to this website, so I’m signing off. Think back to this conversation in 20 years and ask yourself whether you still buy FB’s story.
Yeah I do see your pov and I think FB should’ve come in and said something.
Say what? Sorry, but this commenting system has been broken for a bit and now it’s finally back on track with Disqus
She could be a part-time escort/courtesan/companion, hence the ‘tours’ to various cities+hotel stays+relative income. Just sayin’
Right. Because that’s a job that everyone can get. I’m flattered you think
that, but that job has a short shelf-life and is kind of degrading.
I just came across your websites a few hours ago and kept reading and start wondering..why would you lie about your income.? I’m a blooger and read a lot on the internet, but hon really no one is that dumb to believe what you are saying about your income It;s either that you are a grandeur or your mind is still in the teeneger’s age. Or you do consuling for play..boy
ha, I thought you said somewhere on your blog that you are in a unique niche and that’s why you can make so much money. Simple bull..shi..t
Funny how it took FB like six months to finally come up with an explanation. The explanation is full of circular logic and straw men, and doesn’t directly answer any of the questions posed. And it turns out both this blog and Everyday Minimalist have been SOLD to a guy who blogs about personal finance. So yeah, that pretty seals it: FB always was a writer on the hustle.
But she needed a hook. Just writing yet another blog about being frugal isn’t the way to stand out. Many people can do that – and they do. But this whole “I’m really young but make a top 5% income and spend hardly any of it” thing is certainly unusual. There isn’t a single detail to back it up, but there IS a disclaimer that it’s all just entertainment. At least that part is honest!
What FB has proven is that there are a few thousand gullible people out there.
AND the reply is on Formspring, which makes commenting/rebutting a lot more hassle. Why not here? Where her readers were?
SCAM SCAM SCAM
You’re right Margaret, I’m staying Anonymous and posting my net worth because I’m a liar.
$45,000 is a good salary to most folks, the average in Canada (particularly in Toronto) is $70,000, but for living in a long-term manner, it is tough to make it, that’s true.
There was really no need to be so rude to everyone just because you feel like life hasn’t been fair to you or others. Don’t say things in comments when you aren’t willing to say them to other people’s face in real life.
I guarantee you would not be so rude to anyone in real life as you are being right now. Thank you for the “clicks” which I haven’t been going after since I started blogging and I cannot in good faith say I am sorry to see you go. I don’t want you reading blogs you don’t like.
I think $45k is good money. People just don’t know how to spend it. If you lived in an expensive city, $45,000 won’t go far, but it isn’t $20,000 living below poverty. $70,000 is the average household income these days in big cities, but I wouldn’t turn my nose down at $45k if I couldn’t make any more.
And whether or not she believes I have $100k+ in net worth, makes no difference to me. I’m not comparing myself to others (and she may have more than I do), and frankly I couldn’t care less.
I’m the one with the $$ in the bank, not her, therefore it’s foolish to worry if someone thinks I’m lying.
Margaret, you’re so smart I don’t know why I didn’t talk to you before writing the post.
Heck, you must be a consultant to, to have such inside knowledge.
Jobs do come to you when you have a broker who hunts them down for you. I don’t hunt for jobs.
I’m NOT a full-time blogger. I’m a freelancing CONSULTANT. Not a writer. All that stuff is a side hobby. But I am flattered you think that I am, seeing as I don’t have a blog on Blogspot any more, and apparently I must have good enough posts and a theme for a blog for you to think it’s full-time.
I also don’t have my blogs as my real business. That’s actually kind of funny you’d think that, because I might as well work at McDonald’s for what I get paid for the hours I put in and the blogging I do.
You’re right that I split the rent with BF as 50/50 and if we break up, I’m independent enough to go back to living on my own and paying for everything. This isn’t a big deal to me.
Actually I’m getting tired of replying and trying to justify myself to someone who seems to know so much. If you’re so smart, why are you reading?
It is possible to live on less than $1000 not $2000, but just in certain areas, not NYC or LA . I live on less than $500 n(I’m not lying) not because I am poor or on welfare. I retired at the age of 40, saved money for a few years and I have about $1000 available per month now. Maybe I should write a book about it. I posted a comment about the type of clothes she doesn’t have and/or look professional.
Thanks for the support Emma. I really appreciate it, but please don’t feed the trolls any more. It’s not good for your mental health.
For the record I’m not trying to get any kind of book deal out of this, nor am I interested in TV deals, or being famous, or meeting with other people to write a story. I’ve been doing this for 4 years without wanting to come out at all, but people who are cynical tend to take a different view on things.
If it ever came down to the blogs and my consulting, I’d delete the blogs in a heartbeat and keep my real job. This is just a hobby for me, and it will stay like that.
I don’t need to prove myself to anyone. I am who I am.