For the last five years, I worked as a freelance writer earning more than $50,000 annually, and doing so with relative ease.
I covered sporting events, wrote features on interesting people, and occasionally traveled to interesting places and reported on things that made most people jealous of my lot in life. My starting pay was between $50 and $400 per assignment, depending on the client, and it was the same until a few weeks
ago.
It all changed when a number of my freelance gigs dried up almost simultaneously, and I suddenly realized that if I just continued writing, I could only make about a fifth of what I had been earning. With a house and car payment and countless other bills, that was simply unworkable, so I applied for a job at a local food processing factory where the starting pay was $8.65 an hour.
In the current job market, where nearly one in 10 Americans is unemployed, I was not too keen on turning up my nose, doing an about face, and stalking out of the office as if I had just been insulted. With a starting pay that would equate to just under $18,000 a year, however, it did come as quite a blow to my ego and is still something that I have difficulty accepting.
After all, I do have a bachelor's degree in psychology and about a year and half of graduate school under my belt. I was very respected in my profession as a freelance writer, and my salary afforded me certain luxuries, such as two vacations every year, expensive opera tickets, frequent trips to the ball park and the freedom to go to the movies or out to dinner whenever I wanted without concern about how much I was spending.
As I sat in the interview, I realized that my previous lifestyle meant nothing to my prospective employer, and even though the starting pay was not what I was hoping to receive, there were a lot of other people at the factory that were making as much or less than I would be making. There were also a lot more people that would have been extremely grateful for the job at the starting pay I would be receiving.
I later learned that 223 people applied for 15 positions.
In the end, I got the job, and will begin work in a few weeks. I still intend to freelance as much as I can, and it was reassuring to find out that there were opportunities for advancement within the company.
The starting pay is what it is, and I will not be doing much for a while besides going to work and coming home, but things could be a lot worse. I could be part of that 10 percent that does not have a job at all.