Stephen Pickios sent me the following…
I wonder if you could write about your personal philosophy being a freelance writer towards finances, and retirement? I'm not trying to get you to reveal your personal financial status, but as a professional whose work and attitude I greatly respect, I've often wondered how a freelancer such as yourself handles things like healthcare expenses and savings when they don't work a "typical" corporate job with a guaranteed income and may not have had access to corporate sponsored health insurance.
I should point out that I've zero experience with writing for the entertainment industry or knowledge of how the Writer's Guild or SAG-AFTRA organizations work and whether they offered benefits like insurance or a 401k (which could make the answer to this extremely short, and extremely boring).
It's fairly simple. My health insurance came for a long time through the Writers Guild and since I hit that certain age, it has come from Medicare plus supplemental insurance from the Writers Guild. I have a private pension plan linked to investments plus I have a Writers Guild pension and Social Security. I handle savings the way anyone handles savings.
By the way: I have been a professional writer for 54 and a half years and in all but a few of those years, I wrote along with other things, comic books. I still write comic books. And in all that time, not one penny of one medical bill was ever paid with the financial assistance of a comic book company.
At the risk of stating the obvious: The trick to being a freelancer is to keep making enough money to maintain your current lifestyle and build up some sort of savings that will get you through those times when you (a) don't have the necessary income or (b) have some unexpected major expense or (c) both. I have somehow managed this for the 54.5 years.
I'm not wise enough to have done this alone. I had a couple of good agents along the way and I've had some good business managers as well as a couple who were not-so-good. I also learned, the need to be very realistic about money. No matter how likely or firm that next project may seem, don't spend the money (even in your imagination) until you actually have the money.
It's real easy to decide you want to buy something you can put on your credit card and think, "By the time I have to pay this off, I'll have the dough." No matter how sound that premise may seem, don't count on it. I've sometimes waited months for checks that were supposed to arrive next week.
And when you have a steady flow of income from one source, don't assume it will be steady forever. You should never be getting all your pay from one place even if that one place is a big, seemingly invincible company. Preferably, you should never get it from one kind of writing (see above remarks about health insurance and comic book companies).
You need to accept that by choosing to be a freelance writer, you're choosing to put yourself at the mercy of a capricious and often maddeningly unpredictable system. Look at all the Big Stars who draw in megabucks one day and wind up a few months later in bankruptcy court right next to Rudy Giuliani.
You may feel certain that that screenplay you're about to finish will sell immediately for six, maybe even seven figures. I know guys who felt that way about scripts they wrote decades ago and which have yet to net a nibble…and those may be great scripts, I don't know. It's a strange, not-always-logical business so you need to be very realistic about your income and your outgo.
And it helps to keep writing things that buyers want to buy. I have taken "retirement" to begin collecting pensions but I have not stopped trying to write things that buyers want to buy.
