One week down of being “really” self-employed!
How is it? Feels pretty awesome, actually.
Top 5 Perks (so far):
1. Work Schedule – No 8AM meetings, midday naps acceptable/encouraged, and major flexibility! Sure we sometimes work late into the night or on the weekend, but we enjoy our “time-off” whenever we want. (and see #5)
2. Work Location – Anywhere, including outdoors!
3. Puppy Time! ——————–>>>>>
4. Time together/Working together
5. Loving it – Working towards your personal goals is the best! “If you love your work, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
It’s been a pretty busy week, too!
The past week as been about setting ourselves up: healthcare, filing business paperwork, talking about strategies, and planning.
Major Milestones Accomplished:
1. Healthcare – When you have a full-time job with benefits, you can kind of take healthcare for granted. And why not? Your employer heavily subsidizes your monthly payment, so you pay next to nothing for coverage in relation to what a self-employed or self-insured person would pay. Big eye-opener! We are now signed up with our own Obamacare, which was just as laborious as you’ve probably heard on the news. And while our monthly premium is almost 10 times what our insurance through Dow was, we’re still within our budget. More on the whole process later 🙂
2. Business Paperwork – As you know, part of this adventure is starting our own business(es). This week we got our business and it’s Employer Identification Number (EIN) all official! We’ve also go our FAA Exemption application submitted to get official approval to use drones for compensation and hire. Yee-ha!
3. Strategies – we have so many ideas! And we are so excited to have the time to pursue them. Nonetheless, we are still approaching our new ventures with a business mindset: who is our audience? what value are we bringing to them? what is our overall purpose? While we had these ideas before, we are still in “start up” mode – testing and re-calibrating until something clicks! (Caitlin just loves this stuff)
4. Planning – Still lots to do with prepping our fifth-wheel, packing, and making ready to depart. We’ve also had some new things come onto our radar – friends weddings, Drone Conferences, new connections – that we’ve been trying to fit onto our map and schedule after we depart. Good complications 🙂
Let us know if you have any questions about what is going on! We’ve been a bit “heads down in the trenches” getting some of this stuff done so that the adventure can truly begin 🙂 Would love to hear from you.
Tiffany lindsey
Saturday 4th of January 2020
Just curious, what kind of business did you actually start?? Did you have any other source of income at the time?? What options are there for working from the road?
Ariel
Tuesday 7th of July 2015
I absolutely love what you guys are doing! I'm considering starting a few small business myself in the near future and would love to hear more details about the legal requirements you have had to go through so far. For example, do you plan on getting a unique EIN for each small business you start or do you know if there is an option to have one business under your name which runs several small, unrelated businesses under the one EIN? What other licenses or registrations did you find you need?
Sara Pionke
Saturday 30th of May 2015
This is the first time I've gotten a chance to read your post and check out the website! It looks great! So minimal and easy to navigate - keep this up along with the well written entries and I'm sure you'll get more people following your adventure than you expected. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you two now that I'm done with school (:
Andrea Jaszczak
Friday 29th of May 2015
I'd love to hear how you plan to live in an RV longer term! Patrick and I have thrown that idea out loosely, but have little idea how it actually works. Do you just have to stay at RV parks for water/electricity, etc? Are there other places available? I love that you two are doing this!
Caitlin Morton
Saturday 30th of May 2015
Hello Andrea, thanks for the question! I'm working on putting the answers together in another blog post to publish in the next day or so and I'll let you know when I do that. :) And of course, you guys can always give us a call when/if you decide to get serious about RV life! ~Caitlin