Being a self employed studio artist as my full-time job is a pretty awesome thing. I feel very blessed to have been able to make this my life! However, there are some challenges involved. One that I learned early on was that my income is just going to be highly variable. Some months hardly any work sells. I think my worst month I had a grand total of $10 in income! Thankfully this is offset by months of monster levels of income way beyond what I ever made when working a normal wage type job. Over the course of a full year things seems to average out and remain fairly constant year to year. However, due to this wide income variability I would be a financial and nervous wreck if I tried living paycheck to paycheck. I’ve found I really have to have a significant stash of liquid funds to ride out the low points with stress free ease.
Continue reading “How I get 1000% to 3000% more interest with my emergency fund savings”Month: December 2019
Autumnberry: A delicious fruit you may have never heard about
All the right elements seemed to combine this year to make it a bumper crop year around me for autumnberries. (These are sometimes also known as autumn-olive, with the scientific name of Elaeagnus umbellata.) It’s probably not a fruit you’re going to see in grocery stores. In fact, you may have never heard of it before, despite the fact that it’s said to be the most common wild fruit across large regions of North America. I only learned about it a few years ago and went hunting to try and find a bush. Eventually I found some along an old railroad line converted into a hiking/biking trail where I find a lot of wild foods. After positively identifying it in the field I was chagrined to discover a hearty sized specimen growing at the end of my driveway! Doh! It was growing right under my nose for years, with me walking by it everyday as I went to check the mail. I find this is so often how it is with wild edible foods. Until we become educated about them they remain a seemingly invisible part of the landscape. Put another way, the more I learn about wild edibles the more vibrant the natural world around me becomes!
Continue reading “Autumnberry: A delicious fruit you may have never heard about”