On May 11, 2011 11:55 PM, "Velda Christensen" <[email protected]> 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. > > 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.
I strongly recommend this advice. I recommend charging at least double if not triple your current w-2 salary, converted to an hourly rate. (There's 2080 hours/yr if you're salaried (40 hrs/wk)). Or, bill out on retainer, charging something like half up front and the remainder on completion. 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'm just starting to use Freshbooks, personally, but I understand they have a time tracker you can use to document your work. I just use a tool like this one to > process my logs... http://monsterguitars.com/hours/ . > > One of my friends wrote this article on the topic (again, for > designers, but the same ideas should apply...) > http://creativelatitude.com/neils_newbies/neils_newbies_0206.html > > Hope that helps. _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
