Unpredictable Income: How to Get Off the Rollercoaster
If you’re a creative professional, you know the drill: one month you’re juggling projects like a circus performer, and the next month… you’re refreshing your inbox a little too often.
Unpredictable income isn’t just frustrating. It is stressful and feels like a rollercoaster. It makes it hard to plan, hard to save, and sometimes even hard to sleep. But here’s the good news: with a little structure and preparation, you can smooth out the ride.
Why it happens
Quite often, creative work runs in cycles: client delays, project-based billing, seasonal trends. Unlike a traditional paycheck, your cash flow has peaks and valleys. That’s normal. What matters is how you manage it.
One simple shift: Pay yourself a salary
Think of yourself as both employer and employee. Each time money comes in, set aside a percentage into a “buffer” account. From that buffer, you pay yourself a consistent monthly amount, just like a steady paycheck.
In good months: extra income tops off the buffer.
In slow months: the buffer fills the gap.
It takes discipline, but it reduces the stress of not knowing what you’ll have next month.
Other tools that help
Keep your business and your personal accounts separately.
Use a system like “Profit First” to automate allocations (expenses, taxes, savings, personal pay).
Build a true emergency fund to cover 3 months of expenses. This way a gap doesn’t become a crisis.
The big takeaway
You don’t need to eliminate unpredictability (you can’t). What you can do is design a system that turns the feast-and-famine cycle into a manageable rhythm. That’s what planning is all about - creating clarity in the middle of uncertainty.
👉 Want to see how this fits into the bigger picture? This is one of the 10 challenges I tackle with clients in the FAR Financial Clarity System™.
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Igor Aronov, the publisher of this content, is a registered investment adviser representative and owner of FAR Financial Inc.