I’ve always been drawn to personal finance, but uncertainty is what scares me about it, not the numbers themselves. For someone without that experience, it can feel less like a privilege and more like a minefield. I’m a student, and taxes were the part of “doing this myself” that scared me most. Freelance and self-employment tax isn’t something anyone really teaches you, you’re just expected to know what percentage to set aside from every payment so you’re not blindsided in April. So I built The Quarterly to walk through it the way a bookkeeper would, one line at a time: revenue, expenses, self-employment tax, income tax, down to an actual percentage to save and your due dates for the year. My process evolved a lot along the way. I started out just trying to replicate the IRS math, but the more I built, the more I realized the real problem wasn’t the formula, it was that nobody explains it clearly before you owe the money. I designed the whole thing and built it with Claude for the coding, learning the tax logic as I went. This is for anyone like me who wants a straight answer instead of Googling for an hour and still not trusting the number.

The Quarterly — Freelancer Tax Ledger

Know what to set aside for taxes, every payment

Know what to set aside for taxes, every payment