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Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?

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Re: Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?

#91

Post by pyotrgalois »

ninuninu wrote: post #88

$20/hour on ISP. in latin america. this is stupidly cheap, sportsbook companies pay more but will try to screw with you. i dont know how you guys earn more. maybe im on the wrong stupid country

indeed. we are on the wrong country :P.

Re: Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?

#92

Post by kevingadd »

gotrecruit wrote: post #83
kevingadd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100x. I had four solid long-term contracts lined up as of a few months ago, scheduled so that I could make adequate progress on them without overloading myself, with the overlap set up so that I'd be protected if any one of them fell through. So far, two of them have fallen through (in the non-paying fashion) and one of them is in the process of actively falling apart. I ended up sinking a ton of energy into try…

have you ever considered the reason your deals/clients fall through because you're not dedicating enough time and energy to each one? i've had significant experience working with freelance developers and it's very obvious which ones are working with multiple clients and which one is working with only 1 or 2.

In none of these cases did the client ask for more time/energy and not get it; I gave more time and energy than would have been necessary with a properly run project. Just bad clients, bad contracts. They happen, and my point is that it would have been hopelessly irresponsible for me to invest all my hopes in just one or two.

To give you an idea of what I mean, the one that's in the process of falling apart took over six months of negotiation, periodic prodding, and concessions to get them to actually provide me fully signed documents so I could start work. The whole time they were telling me how excited they were about the project and how important it was to them. Clients like this all seem to exist somewhere on a spectrum, and you have to figure out whether they're just a 'less profitable' client because you'll have to put more work in (and set your hourly rate accordingly), or whether they're a fundamentally problematic client that will just never work out. This client turned out to be the latter, even if I am billing hours now.

I suspect once you've been freelancing long enough you can just say no to any client that seems like they could be a problem. For me, it's been a little over two years and the influx of work is not remotely enough to justify that (even if I get way more offers than I used to, and they're better offers)

Re: Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?

#94

Post by adidash »

gexla wrote: post #56
troels wrote: post #24

Without taking location into consideration, this is probably not going to be a very useful poll, I suspect.

Location is more important for typical employment as opposed to freelancing. As a freelancer, you should be able to break out of that "location" ceiling by working remotely. The stronger your brand (well know dev shops have no problem getting international work) and network, the less important your location is to the client. Also, depending on the situation, you could always fly in to work on site. However, it is eas…

I think he was referring to the cost of living aspect. 80K/yr is in the top bracket in many Asian countries but average to decent in US or in many European countries.

Re: Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?

#95

Post by mistercow »

DanBC wrote: post #43
jonahx wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is imposter syndrome?

"I'm not good enough to be doing this; other people doing this know what they're doing whereas I'm just winging it; I'm going to be found out as a fraud soon".

Also: "I can't charge more than this because the people who make more than this are obviously more competent."

Re: Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?

#96

Post by mgkimsal »

kybernetyk wrote: post #27
jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beware of having only a single long term contract, please diversify. If your contract ever falls through you need instant back-up, not after the 3 months or so that it will take to get your order pipeline filled. You need several customers in parallel to be stable as a freelancer, not one big one.

Very important! Though I'm not a freelancer myself I know a guy who was making fairly good money off one client. He knew he should diversify but it was always "I'll look next month for other clients because I'm too busy right now". Some time ago that said client stopped giving work to him. Now he jobs part time at the gas station to make rent and gets only small contracts because he couldn't build a client network wh…

And seemingly didn't save enough either. "fairly good money" means different things to different people, but keep your living expenses as low as possible. If, for example, your living expenses require a minimum of, say, $8k/month, you probably are going to struggle starting freelancing without $50k in the bank already (and sadly, few people actually have this amount of ready cash available to start make such a move).
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