I Made $9,400 Freelance Writing on the Side — Here Are the Real Numbers

There is a specific kind of personal finance article that treats freelance writing as a get-rich-quick scheme. "How I made $200,000 my first year writing online." "How I quit my job in six months to write full-time from a beach in Thailand." I read approximately seventy of these in 2022, looking for guidance, and almost none of them matched the reality I eventually experienced when I started writing on the side in 2023.

I want to give you the honest version. I'm not a six-figure freelance writer. I made $9,400 last year writing on the side, in evenings and weekends, while still teaching full-time. I'm going to tell you exactly how I got those clients, what I charged, what I refused to write, and how long each project really took.

If you're considering this side hustle, I want you to have the unromantic numbers, not the success-story numbers. Both are real. The success-story numbers are exceptions.

How I Got Started

I had been writing personal finance content on my own blog (this one) for about eighteen months when I got my first paid freelance assignment. It came from a financial services company that found a piece I had written about debt payoff and wanted me to write a similar one for their content marketing team.

The pay was $400 for an 1,800-word article. The work took me roughly nine hours from research to final edit. That works out to about $44 an hour, which was solid for a first paid piece but, importantly, well below the rate I would later command once I had a portfolio.

I want to be specific about how I got that first assignment, because it's the part that most articles handwave. The company reached out because they had read my own writing. The thing that produced the inbound was the existence of public, free writing I had done on my own time. There was no cold pitching. There was no "send personalized emails to 100 brands." The writing itself was the marketing.

This is the part of freelance writing that almost no advice captures correctly. Your first clients almost always come because your writing already exists somewhere they can read it. You can replace this with cold pitching if you have to, but the inbound version is enormously more efficient — and it requires you to write, in public, on your own time, before anyone is paying you for it.

My First Year — Numbers

In my first calendar year of freelance writing, I completed seventeen assignments for nine different clients. Here is the breakdown:

• Two financial services companies (the original inbound, plus one referral from them). Total revenue: $4,200. Six articles at an average of $700 each, ranging from $400 to $950.
• One ed-tech company that wanted a series of pieces about money for teachers. Total revenue: $2,800. Four articles.
• A small accounting firm that needed monthly blog content. Total revenue: $1,500. Five articles at $300 each.
• Three one-off marketing assignments for various small businesses. Total revenue: $900.

Grand total: $9,400.

Total hours invested: approximately 195. That works out to $48 an hour, blended. The accounting firm work was lower-paid per hour. The financial services work was higher.

What I Refused to Do

This is the part I think saves people the most time, and almost nobody talks about it.

I turned down approximately twenty additional projects across that year. The reasons:

Cryptocurrency promotional content. Six requests. I am willing to write about crypto in a sober, balanced way. I was not willing to write hype pieces for token sales, exchanges I did not trust, or "investment opportunities" that I suspected were closer to gambling. The pay was sometimes high — one offer was $1,200 for a 1,500-word piece — but the reputational and AdSense risks were not worth it.

MLM-adjacent personal finance content. Three requests. The companies wanted articles that softly suggested their multilevel marketing opportunity was a legitimate income source. I do not believe this and I was not going to write it for any price.

Generic SEO content farms. Eight requests. These were assignments at $40-60 per 1,000 words, intended for content mills churning out search-engine bait. The economics didn't work even if I had wanted to do the work — at that rate, an article that took me four hours paid less than minimum wage.

One unusual situation: a company wanted me to ghostwrite a "personal" finance blog under a different name. The pay was excellent. I turned it down because the misrepresentation of authorship bothered me, even though it is, technically, an accepted practice in the freelance world.

I want to be honest that turning down work feels different when you're starting out. Each of those refusals had a cost. I am not telling you to refuse work casually. I am telling you that what you refuse shapes what you become.

The Rates I Settled On

By the end of year one, I had landed on a roughly consistent pricing structure that I still use:

• General personal finance article, 1,500-2,000 words: $500-800.
• Specialized financial topic with original research: $1,000-1,500.
• Short marketing piece, 500-800 words: $250-400.
• Recurring monthly retainer for ongoing content: $1,200-2,000 a month.

I do not write under $300 for anything anymore, even short pieces. The overhead of the relationship — the email back-and-forth, the brief, the edits, the invoicing — doesn't change based on the length, so very short pieces become inefficient.

I also stopped charging by the word about six months in. Per-word pricing rewards padding and punishes efficient writing. I now charge per project, with a rough word count target attached, and the price is the price regardless of whether I deliver 1,400 or 1,700 words.

The Time Honest Look

Across 195 hours of work, here is how the time actually broke down:

• Research and planning: about 40 hours. This is the part beginners undercharge for.
• First draft: about 75 hours. Roughly two hours per 1,000 words.
• Editing and revision: about 35 hours. Two to three rounds per piece.
• Client communication: about 25 hours. Emails, calls, invoicing, project management.
• Administrative: about 20 hours. Contracts, taxes, tracking, miscellaneous.

The thing most freelance writing articles get wrong is treating "writing time" as the whole time. In my experience, the writing itself is roughly 38% of the total. The rest is the surrounding work that nobody charges directly for, but which has to come out of the project rate.

What I'd Tell Anyone Considering This

I would tell you four things.

One: You need to be writing in public for at least six months before this becomes viable. Not necessarily as a "blog" — it can be Twitter threads, LinkedIn posts, Medium articles, anything that lets prospective clients find your voice and verify you can string sentences together. The writing-for-free phase is real and it cannot be skipped without making everything harder.

Two: $50 an hour blended is realistic for year one. Six-figure outcomes happen, but they happen to a small minority. Plan for $30-50 an hour and adjust upward as you build a portfolio. If you need more than that immediately, this is not the side hustle for you.

Three: Decide what you will not write before you have a chance to be tempted by the money. Crypto, MLM, content farms, ghostwritten "personal" experiences. Make the decisions in the cold light of Sunday afternoon, not at 11 PM when a $1,200 offer is sitting in your inbox.

Four: The income compounds in year two and year three. Existing clients refer you. Your portfolio gives you negotiating leverage. The hourly rate goes up. The hours required per dollar go down. Year one is the worst year for income-per-hour. The work gets meaningfully better-paid as you go.

The $9,400 I made last year is a real second income that is, at this point, mostly paying for itself in maintenance — about three hours a week on average. The year before that I made $3,800. The year before that, zero. The compounding is real.

It is not a six-figure beach in Thailand. It is a slow, real, second income that I built in evenings, and it has changed my financial trajectory more than any other single thing I have tried since I started teaching.

The honest version of this story does not go viral. But the honest version is the one that actually works.