On 5/11/11 11:55 PM, Velda Christensen wrote: > Alright, you can take this with a grain of salt since it comes from a > designer's perspective, but here you go: > > Doing 1099 work at near-W2 rates just creates headaches - you've got > extra taxes and other expenses to cover, not to mention the cost of > holidays and buying your own insurance, unpaid time you spend keeping > books, etc. And while it's easy enough to charge a lot less when > you're only moonlighting, you never know when 1099 work might become > your full time gig.
+1 - Make sure you get a great tax guy that can help with this. It will save you tons of time and headache and make sure you invest; that will help you out a ton. > So my recommendation (based on the recommendations of several good > friends) is to use a calculator like http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/ > to figure out how much you'd need to charge per hour if you were > freelancing full time. And then just charge that rate. Another > helpful hint from my friends is to keep timestamps as you work, with > separate logs for paid and unpaid work so you can get a feel for your > ratio of paid to unpaid time. I just use a tool like this one to > process my logs... http://monsterguitars.com/hours/ . For mac users, there is a great app called Billings that does a great job tracking all your clients, projects (paid and personal), time tracking, invoicing, invoice creating and a ton of other items. For the cost, it is a fantastic tool and the mobile integration is great. -- thebigdog _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
