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By Sara Anglin - State Farm Insurance Agent
Freelancers Don't Get Sick Days. Here's What Fills That Gap. You wake up with the kind of back pain that means you're not sitting at a desk today, or ma...
You wake up with the kind of back pain that means you're not sitting at a desk today, or maybe tomorrow either. If you worked at a company down on West End, you'd send an email and let the PTO absorb it. But you don't work there. You work for yourself, and the invoice you were going to send Friday doesn't send itself. That's the quiet math of freelancing in Nashville: the income stops when you do.
Most people who go independent think about this in terms of a slow week. A client pushes a project, a gig falls through, you dip into savings and catch up next month. That's manageable. What's harder to plan for is the version where you physically can't work for weeks or months, not because you're unmotivated but because your body or your schedule won't allow it. A knee surgery. A difficult pregnancy with bed rest. A car accident on I-40 that keeps you off your feet. The work is still there. You just can't get to it.
A W-2 employee has layers most freelancers don't see until they leave. Paid sick leave. Short-term disability that kicks in after a week or two. Sometimes long-term disability that carries them for years. All of that quietly sits in the background, and none of it comes with you when you start freelancing.
So when we talk about "filling the gap," we're talking about replacing a real system, not just topping off an emergency fund. Savings help with a bad week. They rarely stretch to cover three months of no income plus your rent in East Nashville plus your regular expenses plus whatever medical costs came with the reason you stopped working. That's the stretch that catches people off guard.
Disability insurance exists to replace a portion of your income when illness or injury keeps you from working. Not all of it, usually somewhere in the range of 60 percent of your income, which is the piece that surprises people, but enough to keep the lights on and the mortgage current while you recover. For a freelancer, it functions like the sick-day and short-term-disability safety net a company would have handed you, except you're the one setting it up.
There are two flavors here and they solve different problems.
Short-term disability covers a shorter window, often a few weeks to a few months, and typically starts paying soon after you're unable to work. This is the one that maps most closely to what a "sick day" is trying to do. You threw out your back, you had a procedure, you're out for six weeks. Short-term coverage bridges that.
Long-term disability is the one that matters when something serious changes your ability to work for a year, several years, or the rest of your career. It's less about the flu and more about the events that reshape your income entirely. For a self-employed person whose whole livelihood runs through their own hands, hours, and health, that's not a small consideration.
A lot of freelancers benefit from thinking about both, because they answer different questions. One keeps a rough month from becoming a rough season. The other keeps a serious event from becoming a permanent financial problem.
This is where self-employment gets its own set of rules. If you're a graphic designer, a photographer shooting weddings around Franklin, a contractor, or a consultant, your income probably isn't a clean, identical number every two weeks. It's lumpy. Good months and lean months.
That variability changes how a policy gets built. Coverage amounts for the self-employed usually look at your net income over time, not a single paycheck, because a single paycheck doesn't exist. Part of my job when we sit down is helping you land on a benefit amount that reflects what you actually earn, not an inflated number you can't support and not a lowball figure that wouldn't cover your real bills. Bring your tax returns or a sense of your average monthly income and we work backward from there.
If you want a plain-language grounding in how disability benefits work in general, the Social Security Administration's overview of disability benefits is a decent starting point, though it's worth knowing that qualifying for those government benefits is a high bar and slow. Private disability coverage is designed to be faster and broader than what you'd get through that route, which is exactly why so many independent workers carry it rather than assuming Social Security will catch them.
A common question is whether disability insurance and life insurance overlap. They don't, really. Life insurance protects the people who depend on you if you're gone. Disability insurance protects you and your household while you're still here but can't earn. Plenty of freelancers carry both, because they cover two very different bad days.
Another one: does this only matter for people doing physical work? No. A software developer's hands and focus are just as much their income as a carpenter's back is. Illness, mental health conditions, and recovery from surgery affect desk workers too. If the work stops when you stop, disability coverage is relevant to you regardless of what the work is.
And people wonder if it's worth it when they're healthy and young. That's actually the moment it tends to make the most sense, because coverage is generally more affordable and easier to qualify for before anything's on your record. You're insuring your future ability to earn, and that ability is at its longest and most valuable early on.
If you're freelancing in Nashville and the "no sick days" reality has been sitting in the back of your mind, that's the conversation I want to have with you. We look at what you actually earn, what your fixed costs are, and how long you'd want coverage to last. Then we build a Personal Price Plan around that, so the number makes sense for your budget and your real income, not a generic template.
You don't get to call in sick to your own business. But you can set up the thing that answers when your body does the calling for you. Come talk it through, and let's make sure the gap is covered before you ever need it to be.