I am not going back to freelancing. Last month, I came on full-time with Technically Media, a company I helped launch and produces Technically Philly. Still, going back on my own, in some form, has returned me to thinking about and combing through some of the advice I collected in 2009, during my year freelancing. [...]

The federal tax deadline is barreling toward us. I thought I’d share what little I know and what I’m reading about deducting home expenses for those of us who have done just that this fiscal year. It’s a great way to keep your home costs down, but, of course, the rules are a bit more [...]

Beginnings say as much about who begins them as they do about what they begin. Journalists and writers, of professional kind or independent and online, take very seriously the ledes they produce and how others see them. It’s very likely that I have had harsher scrutiny for ledes I’ve written than for anything else, and [...]

After announcing I took a step away from freelancing, a legal aide with aspirations of a cushy freelance career shot me an e-mail. “Can people still even start a freelance career?” I did it for just a year and did so out of college, so I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert. Yet, [...]

I pursued lots of advice in my young freelance career. A lot of it has been good. A lot of it has been repetitive. In fact, I’ve heard five pieces of advice perhaps more often than any others. Funny enough, they may be among the pieces of advice the ones I still have the most [...]

Budgets are fine things. They can help set goals, limitations and create healthy habits. Whenever I’m due for a relatively big change in my life — new income, new priorities, new costs or the like — I play with a wonderfully useful Budget Calculator from CNBC. Suppose, you pulled in roughly $2,800 a month from [...]

Once I admitted I was late, I just kept delaying the inevitable — buying business cards. I got into the full-time, freelance writing back in December, so I ought to have had something right away. I could have passed them out when I spoke at a high school journalism conference and with the many sources [...]

I am on month five of full-time, professional freelancing. I think only now am I finding the hum and the rhythm of this craft, particularly in the doldrums of a sour economy and struggling print industry. You’re a college journalist, unsure about the future. So, tell me, why aren’t you trying to make in-roads in [...]

I apprenticed with a plumber on and off for a couple years at the beginning of my college career. He’d always tell me, “Don’t do work for friends.” It rarely ends well. Someone ends up feeling screwed, but no one wants to say it when friendships are on the line. When it comes to soft [...]

A former boss of mine has taken to calling me around 6:30 a.m. sometimes. I’m not awake, so he’ll leave a message. “Are you taking a nap or something?” he might ask. “Because I know you can’t still be asleep from last night this late in the day.” I’m a freelance journalist without much of [...]