The Hidden Costs of Being a Freelancer

Working as a freelancer is a great way to work a flexible job that fits in with you, your family, and your lifestyle. Having the freedom to decide your own hours, and how much you work, is a huge reason many people go into freelancing. That being said, there are some negatives to switching from a regular nine to five position to working freelance jobs.

Getting Started: 

One of the major downsides and barriers to working in freelance is the difficulty of getting started. When you first start, you will most likely have little to no connections or examples of the work you do.

This can make it very difficult to find work. You will have to put in a lot of time to find jobs, and the jobs you do find will most likely pay a lot less than you are hoping.

The important thing to do when first starting is do lots of research and try to form connections. Work as many jobs as you can, even if you are not making much money at first, as that will give you experience and connections to clients, as well as give you work you can use as examples in the future.

Irregular income: 

Another one of the negative aspects of working in freelance is having an irregular income. Unlike a nine to five, your income won’t be the same each month. You may have good months and bad months in terms of income. 

This can make it more difficult to create a budget and know how much money you will have to spare and save each month. On the other hand, however, you do have the opportunity to work more hours if you want to make more money, which you wouldn’t be able to do with a standard nine to five job.

Everything Rests on You: 

When you are working freelance, you are mostly in charge of everything, which can be a lot of work. This will vary depending on the type of work you do, but you will have to be in charge of your clients, finances, sales, etc.

 You will also be the only one motivating yourself, for the most part. You will have no boss telling you what to do. Although this has positive aspects for sure, you will have to work hard to stay on track, and stay motivated to work so you can make enough money. 

You may also get stuck in a cycle where you are working too much, or finding it hard to relax. This can happen to a lot of freelancers, as most freelancers work from home and may have irregular hours. 

It can feel like you should always be working, as you will not have set hours as you would in a nine to five job. For this reason, it is important to have a lot of self discipline, so you can stay on track while not overworking yourself.

Getting Scammed: 

A sad reality to working in freelance is that there will be clients who will try to scam you. Some clients will just never end up paying you. Although there is no way to eliminate this possibility completely, you can help reduce this by trying to do your work through a safe website with creditable clients. 

Do your research to find a good platform to display your work. Most websites will also have a way that freelancers can review clients after working with them, so make sure to look into each client before accepting to do work with them. 

Another way clients may scam you that you have to watch out for, is they may try and give you more work than you both agreed on. Or they may try and convince you that a project is less work than it actually is. 

And if you do not do all the work, then the client may give you a bad review. Since keeping a good review is important to find more jobs and clients, you may end up in a lot of situations where you are forced to do the work even though you are not getting paid enough for the amount of work you are doing.