Freewheel Finance: The Power of “Faking It” Mindfully

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Syd Schulz

According to google analytics only about 2,000 people read this blog on a monthly basis, which means that about 10% of you are also sending me emails asking how the bleeping hell I afford to do what I do.

Fair enough. Point taken. Everyone can relax now, as I have written a blog post.

In fact, I’ve decided to start a monthly(ish) series called Freewheel Finance, with the hope of clearing up some of the confusion and proving that it is actually possible to be a freelance athlete/writer and travel the world while simultaneously feeding oneself and [generally speaking] paying bills on time.

Back in November, a reader emailed me requesting that I write a blog post about “how I make ends meet on the road,” which made me realize two things. A) People are super curious about this and B) my blog makes it look like I have my shit together WAY better than I actually do.

I think my response to this email was something along the lines of “if I manage to pay my credit card bill at the end of this month without going into debt, then I will most certainly write that blog post because if I pull that off I might actually be qualified to tell other people things about money and while I’m at it I should just add some fancy initials to the end of my name like Syd Schulz, F.F.W., for fucking financial wizard.”

Spoiler alert — I paid off my credit card bill for that month and for the three subsequent months. And this year, I’m on track to actually make something close to a living wage. So I guess it’s time to write that blog post.

The theme of this particular blog post is “faking it until you make it” and how that works from a financial perspective. I know at least three of my relatives are cringing at this statement, but hear me out. I’m not saying goof off and pretend you know what you’re doing until a big pile of money falls into your lap — I’m talking about intentional, mindful faking. I’m talking about doing what you want to be doing, doing it well and doing it the way you want to do it — even if you’re not getting paid. Yes, I’m telling you to work for free. I know, I know, haters gonna hate, probably big time, but here’s the thing — if you want to build a living out of doing what you love, and you expect to get paid for it, you have to prove to people that you can do it well — or, in some cases, that there is a real need for what you do.

(In case you’re thinking I’m crazy, I didn’t pull this whole “work for free until you get paid” thing out of the ether — listen to this guy’s TED talk.)

2014 was my trial year. I told myself that if I ended up broke and destitute and borrowing money from my parents after a year I would go get a real job. But for one year I was going to throw all my energy into doing the things I wanted to do — traveling, racing bikes, writing — and see what happened. Here’s a brief summary of how I survived 2014. It’s not very glamorous or impressive. In fact, it’s a little bit pathetic. But remember, it was all about “faking it.”

I started the year with about $6,000 in savings from my college job. I signed up for a new credit card, which got me 30,000 American Airlines miles and my flights to New Zealand and South America. My savings lasted through early June. From then on I survived on a few freelance writing gigs (around $2,000), the money from selling off a lot of bike equipment and other possessions (another $2,000) and a generous loan from the Bank of Boyfriend ($1,400 thanks Macky I love you!). For most of this time I either lived in a van/tent, at Macky’s parents’ house or at my parents’ house. By scrounging, hoarding money and spending every cent I made before it even landed in my bank account, I was able to afford plane tickets to Italy and Thailand. When I wasn’t traveling or begging for freelance gigs to pay off my credit card bill, I was doing the following things, largely without financial compensation:

– Writing a lot of blog posts
– Figuring out social media and social marketing and building a following on twitter/instagram/facebook
– Riding my bike A LOT
– Networking with sponsors and making new connections in the bike/outdoor industries
– Representing sponsors in exchange for free (and sometimes discounted) gear
– Writing blog posts, posting social media updates and taking photos for sponsors
– Racing my bike nearly every weekend for an entire summer

It was brutal. It was stressful. It was easily the best year of my life.

And it paid off…

In 2014, I earned $200 riding my bike (and spent don’t-even-ask-how-much on bikes). 2015 will put me just shy of $7,000.
In 2014, I made about $2,000 as a freelance writer. In 2015, through a combination of freelance writing, social media consulting and copywriting, I should make around $9,000.

So no, I’m not rolling in it. I’m still spending every dollar that comes into my account (usually before it gets there. More on living “ahead of the curve” in a future post). I still spend the latter half of every month wondering when I’m going to get paid and if it will make it in time for me to pay my CC bill. My income has gone up, but so have my expenses (hello, Enduro World Series), and I’ll probably be selling off a lot more bike stuff to try to close that gap. Oh, and I’m still going to be doing a lot of work that I’m not getting paid for, because I’m still trying to build a career out of nothing, and it’s a bike-racer-eat-bike-racer kinda world out there.

This strategy requires a certain amount of financial and emotional risk. Good bye stability, hello roller-coaster. I get not everybody wants to live like that. But I would also argue that, in the long term, the “build-your-own-career” plan is no less risky than a lot of the options recent college grads are facing in 2015. Throw all your energy and time into a corporate job that you hate and that may dry up by the time you turn 25? Make minimum wage bussing tables while you spend all your time (and money) trying to get interviews for dream jobs that 10,000 other qualified people are applying to? Spend [another] $50,000 on grad school? Or spend a few years scraping together freelance work, working remotely, living on next-to-nothing and create your own job doing what you love?

Obviously I’m biased, but I’m really not judging anyone — all of these decisions are fine choices given today’s over-saturated and hyper-competitive job market. But the important thing to realize is that they’re all risky [i.e. I’m not actually crazier than you]. Maybe in 1975 you could get a master’s degree and be guaranteed a lifetime of employment, but it’s not 1975 anymore, and all three of these options are equally likely to blow up in your face (and also equally likely to work out great).

This isn’t a “get-rich-quick” plan. In fact, it isn’t a “get-rich-ever” plan. My goal is not to make heaps of money, but rather to have heaps of fun, ride lots of bikes, have lots of adventures and be fulfilled by what I’m doing. But I’m not nearly as big of a dirtbag as some of you may think I am. I do have career plans; they’re just a tad unconventional.

So, for everyone who’s been dying to know how I’ve been “making it,” you now have the truth. I’ve been faking it hard, and now I’m sorta making it.

If you make a living doing what you love, leave a comment — I’d love to hear your strategy. And let me know if there are any particular topics you’d like me to cover in a future post!

November Wrap Up and OHEMGEE, IT’S A VLOG!!!

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Syd Schulz

Back in August, Macky and I sat down over dinner and starting going through everything we had done so far in the year. We made it to, like, February. It’s been a big, big year. And if our plans for next year come even CLOSE to fruition, 2015 will be even bigger, which means that we are in grave danger of forgetting things. What’s the point of doing awesome things if you forget them?!?!?! Eek! So, for totally selfish reasons, I’ve decided to start doing a monthly here-is-everything-we-did post. Around the same time, Macky and I decided we needed to do a vlog, because we film EVERYTHING and then never use any of our footage. So, voila, monthly wrap up and vlog. Here we go.

~NOVEMBER~

Where we were: Athens, Ohio, spending time with my family. Here is a handy map for locating Athens.

What we did: Rode bikes. Built a trail. Went to Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park in Cleveland, Ohio. Hung out with my family. Tortured the family dogs. Helped my family cut down and chop up a bunch of trees.

Training: (Because a surprising amount of people are curious about this) Unstructured, fun base miles. I also got my very own heart rate monitor (Thanks, POLAR!!!) and have started using Strava more than once a century — so if you’re into that sorta thing, you can follow me here. The whole heartrate monitor/strava thing might not seem like a big deal (in fact a certain segment of the population might be appalled that I WASN’T using one before), but it’s actually a huge part of the whole me-trying-to-take-myself-seriously-as-an-athlete thing.

What we ate: Turkey. Lots of turkey. Also, lots of venison. In fact, we even learned how to field dress a deer in my backyard…and by LEARNED, I mean watched someone do it without puking. Tonight, we are going to eat part of that deer. As Macky said, “it could only be more local if it had been standing on the porch.”

The Big News: We bought a home! And by home, I mean a home on wheels. Her name is Great White and she is a 1998 Ford E-250 van. You can look forward to a whole blog post all about Great White in the coming weeks, but here’s a synopsis: she’s in pretty good condition, if you can overlook the rust and the giant gaping holes in the floor. She used to belong to AT&T, so we spent the latter part of the month wrestling out the hideous and clanky utility cabinets and battling the ladder racks. We really REALLY wanted to keep the flashing light that you can see in the picture below, but unfortunately it was so rusted to the ladder rack that even a crow bar wouldn’t budge it.

And now, the moment ya’ll have been waiting for. The VLOG. This is our first stab at vlogging, and as you’re about to see, I feel super awks about it. But we had to start somewhere….Please let us know what you think!

Flesh-Eating Bacteria and Other Minor Annoyances

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Syd Schulz

Disclaimer — I love my life. I don’t want to change a thing. I get to travel, ride bikes, and explore somewhere new almost every day. I don’t have to sit in a cubicle and I almost never have to deal with an excel spread sheet. (Except when I do and then I throw things.) I have very few complaints. However, every now and then I have a conversation with someone who is all “uggggh I’m so jealous, your life sounds so amazing and romantic and I wish I were you.” Okay, fair enough, there are romantic moments every now and then, but for some reason whenever anyone says something like this, I am overcome by an urge to throw it back in their face and say “NO, NOT REALLY, SOMETIMES IT SUCKS AND SOMETIMES MY LIFE IS HARD, TOO.” I realize this is an immature impulse, probably a product of our society’s constant victimhood peddling, but it’s also kind of true.

Life on the road is not all late-night campfires and beautiful sunsets over the open road. Sometimes it really does suck. Sometimes you’re swarmed by gigantic mosquitoes. Sometimes you can’t get some important document because you have no stable mailing address and such-and-such bureaucracy will not pay attention to your constant address change requests. Sometimes you’re just tired and hungry and grumpy and totally OVER cold showers. (See photo)

Oh, and sometimes you contract a mysterious flesh-eating bacterial infection and don’t get it attended to until it gets so bad that you begin to worry that your leg might be about to fall off so you have your boyfriend drive you an hour and a half in the middle of the night to the closest open emergency care facility, which (obviously) is not that close at all.

So yeah, that happened. And fine, flesh-eating might be a minor exaggeration, but I did, it turned out, have a pretty healthy and potentially antibiotic resistant staph infection. FUN TIMES, PEOPLE.

At the risk of providing too much information, I will just tell you that my left leg developed a series of unpleasant, red pustules and then swelled up to twice it’s normal size. I also had a fever and all sorts of other alarming side-effects that prompted our late night journey to the ER. The doctors didn’t seem to think I was in imminent danger of amputation (but can you blame me for freaking out?!?!), but they did put me on a cocktail of antibiotics and drained my wounds (sorry sorry gross I know). I won’t, however, post a picture because, frankly, I don’t need to add to the reasons why google-image searching “staph infection” is a terrible idea.

I felt somewhat better the next day, as I no longer thought I was in imminent danger of losing my leg and that obviously puts a person in better spirits. However, I still had a fever and was largely incapable of doing anything. I spent the entire day flopped in the back of van while the others rode their bikes, shivering and sweating and doing the only thing my addled brain was capable of — mumbling my way through the Duolingo Italian lesson on animals. Luckily no native Italian speakers happened by or they probably would have been somewhat alarmed by the glassy-eyed, gauze-encrusted creature curled into a fetal position and muttering, over and over again, “the horse eats the apple, the monkey drinks the water.”

And while I won’t post a picture of my unbandaged wound, I do feel like I owe you this — the unsexiest picture of me to ever make it onto the internet…in the height of pathetic, the night we cracked and finally got a hotel room because I was just done with coping. I was trying to look positive for this photo (happy MRSA day!), but instead I just looked like a sick puppy.

Through this entire experience, I just kept thinking how much I wanted things to be easier. I wanted chicken soup. I wanted functional internet. I wanted my own bed. I wanted more than three dollars of disposable income.

I think the main reason I get irritated when people romanticize my life is not because my life secretly sucks. Actually it’s almost always awesome. Last week it happened to suck, but don’t we all have sucky days? Don’t we all contract the casual case of flesh-eating bacteria once in a while? No? Okay, guess that’s just me.

No, the main reason I get irritated is because this assumption is the conversational equivalent of erecting a big, stone wall. Recently, I’ve become convinced that many people don’t want to hear about the day-to-day life of a professional traveler/hobo. (The exceptions, of course, are you lovely readers of travel blogs, bless yer hearts.) People want to assume that if you’ve managed to work out a lifestyle that doesn’t involve an office or a 9-5, that you have achieved the unachievable, that you are unbelievably privileged and your life is all stars and roses and midnight campfires. People don’t want to think that you’re anything like them, because then they could be doing what you’re doing, and they’re not. The truth, at least for me, is that I am poor and I live in a tent. The truth is that my lifestyle is a choice, and one that has come at what is, for many people, an unfathomable sacrifice. The truth is that I’m a normal person, just one who would rather camp with a staph infection than give up one iota of freedom. (Not recommending camping with a staph infection. Horrible idea.)

Sometimes, we’re tired.

If you want to live on the road, prepare to eat sandwiches for dinner and to sometimes be cold and wet and miserable. Prepare to be sick and very far away from a warm bed. Prepare to be kicked out of your campsite by a park ranger at least once. Prepare to be tired and frustrated and elated all at the same time. Prepare to cry every time you have to deal with a multinational company. Prepare for your phone battery to die at the most inopportune of times. Prepare to feel guilty when you buy a beer because you know your bank account can’t handle that kind of extravagance. But most of all, prepare for the moment when all of these things happen in one day and then some stranger tells you how “jealous” they are of your “romantic life.” Prepare to smile and say thank you, because in that moment you will know that, no matter what, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s worth it for nights like this. Photo cred: Sean Leader

What would you give up in order to live the life of your dreams? And, because I just have to ask, has anyone else had a brush with flesh-eating bacteria???!?!