Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
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Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
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Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#2Very nice look at making the move. I freelance on the side now, but I might look to do this in a couple of years if things go (or don't go) well with my next move.
Health insurance wise, we're you able to get coverage for yourself, or are you participating in a COBRA plan from your previous employer? To be honest, health insurance is probably the one thing that would keep me employed in regular salaried position. The fear of having a medical emergency and it wiping out my savings is a scary and totally realistic possibility.
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#3Would love to hear the follow up after a couple of years. I did freelancing for six years & the benefits and drawbacks both become a lot more starkly drawn -- & somewhat different -- over time.
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#4I'm almost at the end of my second month freelancing (post to come soon) and find this inspiring.
My biggest struggle at the moment is what to aim for, yes working three days a week and getting similar money to what I was earning full time is great. Yet at the same time I'm not sure if this is enough for me personally. In fact when I start talking to my friends in full time jobs I kinda feel guilty!
Maybe I need some more hobbies, but at the moment the draw of earning more money by working harder is far too appealing. It seems I just can't say no to money.
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#5Would love to hear the follow up after a couple of years. I did freelancing for six years & the benefits and drawbacks both become a lot more starkly drawn -- & somewhat different -- over time.
What were those starkly drawn benefits and drawbacks you discovered in your six years of freelancing?
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#6How does freelancing relate to consulting?
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#7Very nice look at making the move. I freelance on the side now, but I might look to do this in a couple of years if things go (or don't go) well with my next move. Health insurance wise, we're you able to get coverage for yourself, or are you participating in a COBRA plan from your previous employer? To be honest, health insurance is probably the one thing that would keep me employed in regular salaried position. The…
There are a couple of options for health insurance. If you have a spouse who has health insurance through their job, you can join their health insurance plan. If you want to go solo, I've had good success with using ehealthinsurance.com.
When I was laid off from a job a few years ago, I compared the COBRA price to ehealth, and I found COBRA to be priced about 4 times higher than if I chose a similar plan from ehealth. And, with the same brand insurer.
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#8This guy knows what he's talking about.
He omitted the part about not having to put on pants to go to work, though. That's worth $25k/year to me, easy.
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#9A well written introspective piece. I left my job a few months before you did (Aug '11) and have a similar experience.
Here are some of the things that I've learned -
a) Set your working hours. Try to follow them, but not religiously. Having a batch of hours as free time is much better than being occupied throughout the day even for a 4 hour gig.
b) Get a small long term (ongoing) project. Few hours every month. Use the income from this project to pay the bills and perform other chores.
c) Any conversation with a random (or known) person about your profession can turn into a lead. You need to be in sales mode more than before.
Re: Freelancing: A 6-Month Retrospective
#10I've always wanted to turn to freelancing, mostly because my girlfriend has visa issues and it would allow me to go live with her full time and take better care of my family, but my biggest drawback and what stopped me was that I didn't know how to start getting decent projects.
I'm a webdev, I mostly feel confident to start with PHP where I have lots of experience and worked on websites with millions uniques and things like that; and am able to setup/debug most part of the stack, but every single time I find that either I can't find any good opportunities, or people want to see "previous experience" and they don't consider what I did at my jobs as counting because it's not websites I did from top to bottom.
When I ask on various websites, people tell me to compete on the various freelancing sites but it feels like so much bullshit with all those 20$ offers getting the upper hands even if it's obvious it will fail ...
Does anybody on HN have any idea on how I can help myself in that area ? I have absolutely no design skill so I can't just do dummy websites by myself, or they would look terrible.
(for the sake of the question, please just assume I know how to do my job well and my problem is mostly image/marketing myself)