Once you have established a good reputation as a freelancer, it is inevitable that you will at one point start considering your options. When this happens, it is always tempting to quit your full-time job and to focus entirely on your freelancing gigs. This temptation is easy to understand since freelancing does offer some exceptional advantages that are hard to resist. With the ability to provide more money, to allow for flexible working times, and the fact that you are your own boss, there is no denying how great a full-time freelancing career sounds.
However, switching to a full-time career always requires carefully weighing your options and analyzing all the potential pitfalls that you could eventually face. While it is true that freelancing offers some extraordinary benefits, it does not come with drawbacks. An understanding of these along with knowing exactly where you stand in the freelancing world will help determining if you can actually start freelancing on a full-time basis.
Obviously, the revenue you can make through your freelancing career alone is the most important thing you should consider. A full-time job guarantees that you receive your salary at the end of the month and is as safe as it gets in terms of money. As long as you do your job at the office, you know that you will be paid at the end of the month.
However, full-time freelancing has no such guarantees. While you may be able to make more money that you need for a particular month, it could happen that you go a whole month without having any work. Consequently, before you embrace a full-time career, you must be confident that you will always manage to get enough jobs such that the money you earn for a month will be at least the same as your monthly expenses.
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Another very crucial consideration is to think through the fact that once you are a full-time freelancer, your work hours are essentially blurred. While you can set up fixed working hours, you may often find yourself working at two in the morning to finish a project within the planned deadlines. However good you may be at your work and however carefully you may have planned a certain project, full-time freelancing carries an unpredictability that you should always account for.
More importantly, whenever you start thinking about a full-time freelancing career, you should also immediately think about where you want to be in five or 10 years. Freelancers often find it very hard to return to a nine-to-five job if they have been freelancing for even only a couple of years and can find it difficult to adapt. While you may be going into full-time freelancing with the idea of doing so until your retirement, keep in mind that this may always be possible. As such, you should understand that the jump from one working to style to another is never as easy as it sounds.
This was a guest post by Ashvin.Ashvin writes on behalf of Access Formation which provides Surete Portuaire coaching in Reunion. Access Formation is now also providing a Formation CQP ASA training in Reunion.
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