This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 62-year-old freelancer Melissa Harlow. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
Before I freelanced, I was the manager of the home caregiver department at our local trauma center and medical center.
It was probably the best job I’ve ever had.
I was at my job for about a year. Most of my career was in nonprofit.
My husband and I had planned to travel for a couple of years. I knew that I was going to have to quit my job.
We made a bunch of micro goals — selling our belongings by this date, paying off all of our debt by this date, having a boat by this date, and finishing our sailing lessons by this date. We bought the boat in early 2015, and I resigned in December 2015.
Sailing across the Pacific
On January 14, 2016, at 11 p.m., we went off to the dark abyss in our boat.
We went from San Diego across the Pacific Ocean, just the two of us. It took 24 days, and we landed in the islands of French Polynesia. We sailed all around the islands, and then we sailed to Hawaii, and then back to California.
My husband was in the Coast Guard, and he’s also a surfer. For him, water was just a comforting thing. I wasn’t a surfer. I had a fear of water. I knew nothing about sailing.
I would say that sailing isn’t what it looks like in the movies. It was epic and dangerous, but I would not say romantic and fun, at least for me. It was more like, OK, I said I was going to do this and now I’m going to do this, and dang it, I’m going to learn how to do it.
Melissa Harlow
We sold the boat, and with that same pot of money, we bought an RV and traveled around the country and up through Canada and Alaska for a year.
We actually heard on a podcast while we were traveling about a gal who did voice-overs in her RV as she traveled around with her husband. I was thinking maybe that’s something I could do when we get back, because I felt myself changing.
I knew I was a different person, and I couldn’t go back to the corporate world.
Switching to freelance life
When we got back, I literally had no job. We had nowhere to live. We had one car between the two of us. And so that was a sobering thing for me. I’d always been very independent and a career woman.
We tried to sell boats for a little while. Neither one of us was into it. In the background, I was creating a business plan for my voice-over work.
Finally, I just said, I’m going to pull the trigger and I’m going to do this. I set up a profile on Fiverr and some other platforms. It was months before I heard anything. After that first order, that’s when it really started happening.
Freelancing allows me to give real time to my parents, not just “I’ll be there when I can.” My husband and I go off-grid a lot. We backpack, we go camping, we go to exotic places, we go to tropical places.
I don’t wish I had made this career change earlier. I wasn’t ready.
My self-taught voice-over work has attracted NASA and other organizations
I knew nothing about voice-over work. I didn’t even know what a voice waveform looked like. I had to learn everything. I had nowhere to really record. I had to learn what kind of microphone to talk into and all the different aspects of sound engineering.
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I just dove in and self-taught everything. 2018 was when I took freelancing seriously.
I average about $30,000 to $35,000 a year on Fiverr. Overall, I have made $200,000 on the platform. I could push it even more if I wanted to, but I need to be available for my parents and my children. This is why I want to live this lifestyle.
Our lives are very minimal. We don’t need a lot. I knew it would take time to build up freelancing, and that was OK. We didn’t have any debts or anything that we had to worry about.
My degree is in psychology, and so it’s important for me just to help people. Maybe that’s why I’m OK with making 35 grand a year, because I like the orders I get from the mom and pop people that come to me that need a professional voice-over.
Orders come to me on Fiverr. I work really hard to make my profile professional and put samples on there. I’ve not paid a professional to do any of my demos, and yet I have still attracted Airbus, NASA, places like this.
It’d be amazing to do voice-over work for Google or Amazon, or a big national commercial. I don’t really get starstruck because, to me, a $40 job is as important as a $1,000 job.
My previous job, which was the best job I had, the tools were there. I’ve had to make voice-over work the best job of my life. I’ve also founded Volunteer Voice Over, which pairs volunteer voice actors like me with nonprofits who need help. That has kept me grounded and feeling like I’m doing something good for society. I want to leave a legacy.
The two things together are just literally perfect. It keeps me busy. It keeps me learning. All the things that that perfect job that I had when I quit are now here, but I’ve made all this myself.
Anyone saying, “I want to quit my job. I want to do what she’s doing,” you have to have no fear. You have to be able to say, “I’m going to do it, get out of my comfort zone, stop spending money on stupid stuff, and put it on the calendar.”
Have you made a career change? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected].