Unpopular opinion: having two slow months in a row saved my freelance finances long term.

Last spring I had a brutal April and May where I made only $1,200 total, but that forced me to finally cut my $80 monthly software subscriptions I never used, and now my overhead is half what it was. Has anyone else had a slow period that actually made you money in the end?

3 comments

3 Comments

black.oliver7d ago

$1,200 over two months - that's rough, I've been there. The jessica makes a fair point but I think the robin gets closer to something real. When you're barely scraping by, those $15 subscriptions and $80 software charges start feeling like actual bricks tied to your ankles. I had a stretch where I was paying $30 a month for a project management tool I literally never opened, plus $20 for some cloud backup that doubled my data for no reason. Once I finally cut all that dead weight, my monthly nut dropped from about $400 to $180, and that lower baseline meant I could take better clients instead of grabbing anything that paid.

the_robin7d ago

Have you ever had that moment where you're staring at your bank account and just feel sick... I went through something similar last fall, three months of basically nothing coming in, and I was so scared I was going to have to quit. But it made me finally sit down and unsubscribe from all those little monthly charges I'd been ignoring, like a $15 app I hadn't opened in a year and some cloud storage I didn't need. It's not fun going through it at all, but sometimes the panic is the only thing that gets us to actually look at our own bad habits, you know.

the_jessica7d ago

Having two slow months in a row saved my freelance finances" is some serious mental gymnastics. That's like saying getting food poisoning saved your diet because you lost five pounds. You didn't save money, you just got lucky that your bad months happened to expose bad habits you should have fixed ages ago. Most people who have back to back slow months end up eating into savings, maxing out credit cards, or taking garbage clients they regret. The real lesson here isn't that slow periods are good, it's that you were running your business wrong from the start and the slow period just forced you to clean up your own mess. I'd rather fix my overhead before the emergency hits instead of pretending a near financial disaster was some kind of strategic win.