Financial Foundation For Freelancers

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I have been working from home for more than a year now (I resigned from my BPO job last Oct 2015 and then I started working from home since then).

It’s true that working from home as a virtual assistant can be rewarding especially financially and in the time I spend for my family and myself. I don’t have a schedule anymore and I am now working at home and my kids are just a room away.

Now that I am getting settled in working from home, I have seen that I have to take care of my financial foundation too. I still have credit card debts to zero out. Then I also need to save money for my two son’s college education. My eldest is now entering Grade 7 and it’s just some time before he goes to college.

So it’s time for me to step on the gas towards a solid financial foundation.

What brought this on?

My father in law, 2 weeks ago, had been confined inside the Philippine Heart Center because he tested positive for a test for Troponin. I’m not good at medical terms so I really cannot explain what that is. What I understood is that, it means that he had a heart attack without us knowing it.

My father in law needed to have an angiogram. He also needed to be confined in the Heart Center. The angiogram costs 40k and the room rate is 2.5k per day. Then there is the doctor’s professional fee plus the cost of the medicines and other things.

Before you get admitted at the Philippine Heart Center, you also need to pay a deposit of 20k. Holy cow right? What if you do not have that money for the deposit? Then you need can stay at the emergency room, where the charity ward is and wait for an empty bed. Yes, an empty bed.

My father in law was in the emergency room for almost 24 hours and he was sitting in a chair the whole time because there are no beds available. Nobody wanted to be admitted because they’ll need to pay for it if they got out of the emergency room.

There was also a shortage of rooms in the Heart Center so when one came up, we took it right away. Good thing that my husband has a credit card. He swiped it to pay for the deposit so our father in law was admitted and he was able to rest in a bed.

That got me thinking about long term health care.

You see, my father in law had HMO coverage before under my brother in law who is working in a BPO company. However, he does not have it now because he is already over 60 years old. After that age, they won’t cover you anymore. That’s the sad part.

As a freelancer, we need to think about things like this happening. It made me nervous actually. I do not have HMO coverage anymore because I’m out of the BPO industry. Then I still am working on zeroing out my credit card debts.

We need to build a solid financial foundation.

Like building a house, we must build our financial foundation from the ground up.

Here’s the solid financial foundation plan that I learned from IMG.

​I’ll be discussing the rungs of the ladder one by one in my succeeding posts. 🙂

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