I’m coming up to my 12-year celeversary on the 26th of October 2025, and to celebrate, I’ve gone back to work. Let me explain…
Becoming a celebrant
When I first became a celebrant back in 2013 I was lucky enough to have stable but extremely flexible contracting work as a professional transcript typist and meeting minute taker. I could work whatever hours I wanted as long as I worked at least 20 hours a week, which was perfect for building a new business around. I took a few full-time contracts – six months on reception at the Dandenong Drug Court, six weeks running a major internal marketing event around Australia for Coca-Cola – and a few part-time contracts running events for Guide Dogs Victoria. But the main work that paid my bills while I was building my celebrant business was the typing.
Full-time celebrancy
Skip forward to mid-2017, I suddenly realised I had so much celebrancy work that I didn’t have time to give any hours to the transcript company anymore. I kept a few minute-taking clients (I still have one of them with me today) but 95% of my income was derived from celebrancy, between weddings, funerals, and training. And I loved it.
I still love it. I love being a celebrant, I love marrying people, I love creating and performing authentic send-offs for loved ones, and I love passing all of my knowledge onto practising celebrants and the next generation of celebrants.
But.
Illness and money troubles
I’ve lived with multiple chronic health conditions for more than 35 years, and in 2023 things got much worse with the onset of rheumatoid arthritis and a bunch of other weird inflammatory symptoms the doctors have never really been able to explain. I talked on the podcast episode Email is the Worst about having to start using a walking stick and how weird I felt about that (although honestly nobody else cared as much as I thought they would), I spent a week in hospital, I saw a lot of doctors and I took a lot of medication. Suddenly those big weddings that brought me so much joy (and paid the bills) were just out of reach for my body. Legals only weddings were still manageable because they only require standing up for 10 minutes at a time. Funerals were still okay because I can hang on to the lectern. But hauling my PA equipment, standing up for an hour or more, even doing the marketing activities of wedding expos, all now completely unattainable.
By early 2024 my health was starting to improve but certainly not to the level it had been before. I was still limited in the type of work I could do, which in turn limited my income. And guess what? Living with chronic illness in Australia, even with our excellent health system, is EXPENSIVE. As an example, by the end of March 2024 I was more than $6000 out of pocket on medical expenses for the year – that’s after receiving Medicare and Medibank rebates. I was getting some funeral work and some wedding work, but not enough to live on AND pay for the medications and treatments that were keeping me mostly functional. I am also a single woman who lives alone, and that isn’t cheap either (on reflection I’ve realised I don’t know many full-time celebrants who are single without any other source of income). Money was tight, and I was spending a LOT of time worrying about how I was going to pay my rent and all the other things.
And you know what else? The hustle of working for yourself is HARD and TIRING. The hustle of being a celebrant never goes away – it’s not like being a hairdresser where you establish a bunch of clients who come back every six weeks. It’s new clients all the time, it’s constant hustle all the time, and that literally never gets any easier with changing marketing algorithms and a constantly evolving world.
An opportunity
In May 2024 I saw an ad in a local Facebook group from a local lawyer looking for a transcript typist for 10-15 hours a week. That’ll do, I thought! I have plenty of experience, it will help me pay some bills, and it will still be flexible enough for me to run my celebrancy business. I convinced myself that I was just doing it for a few months and soon enough I’d be back to full strength and back to being a full-time celebrant. I even mostly convinced myself that I WAS still a full-time celebrant, just doing a bit of admin work on the side to pay some bills.
The lawyer soon discovered that I have a brain and started asking me to do more and more. I started telling people I “consulted for a local law firm” – still a full-time celebrant, just with a consultancy side hustle. The knots we twist ourselves in, right?
Practice Manager
All of which brings me to July 2025, when the lawyer asked me to formally come on board as her Practice Manager. Now interestingly, when I first became a celebrant, practice management was another role I had been looking into – I have a lengthy background in executive-level administration support and office management, and practice management was the next natural step. I always thought it would be in the medical setting, but the legal setting has always been just as interesting to me (I do have a criminology degree, after all).
I got way in my head about this. I found the work interesting and it was lovely to use my brain in a different way. But what would it mean if I was no longer a full-time celebrant? Did that mean I’d failed as a celebrant? What would my students think? What would the CI members think? What would the wider celebrant community think? What would my clients think?
On the other hand, for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t struggling financially. I can live on my celebrant income, just, but every month is a struggle. Every month when I added up how much I’d earned the month before and transferred a third into my living expenses bank account, I looked at it and went yeah, that’s not enough. My life costs me about $5000 a month, and I was sometimes only transferring $2000 or $3000 for the month. I was digging into my savings and into my business account to make ends meet, and I worried about it all the time.
Now that I was working so much for the law firm, that worry had gone away. My celebrant income was bolstered by my fortnightly pay packet and I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to pay for all the things next month.
So I decided that financial comfort was more important than my internal concerns about what it all meant.
Comfort
So on 21 July 2025 I took up my role as Practice Manager at a local wills and estates law firm. The lawyer is still happy for me to work from home and to work whichever hours I want during the week. I don’t have to go into the office at any particular time or be available on any particular days, as long as the work gets done. So I’ve still got plenty of flexibility for taking on funerals and weddings and looking after my students and the CI members.
And guess what? So far, literally nobody cares. In fact, everyone I’ve told about my new job is THRILLED for me. We all know how weird the wedding industry is right now, and people keep saying to me, “if I had the opportunity to take on a flexible job that was interesting and paid the bills, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Encouragement
Why am I telling you all this? To encourage you that if you’re feeling the pinch but you’re in your head, it’s okay to say being self-employed isn’t enough. It’s okay not to be a full-time anything. It’s okay to have a bunch of jobs. It’s also okay to keep on being a celebrant and a parent and whatever else it is you do. It’s okay to do whatever you need to do to get by. I’ve done it, and I’m loving it. You can too.
