While anyone can pull a number out of the air, it’s important to take the time to figure out the rate that is going to maximize your success as a freelancer.

Because many people feel lost when they try to tackle this decision without any direction, below are five questions that you need to ask yourself. Answering all five of these questions will ensure that you take a focused approach to making this decision:

What are Your Business Expenses?

While being a freelancer may allow you to create a lifestyle that you feel is more fulfilling, it’s important to remember that being a freelancer is still a business. Therefore, when it comes to calculating what your rate should be, it’s important to take all of your business expenses into consideration.

Obviously, it’s easy to identify business expenses like office rent, supplies and computer equipment. However, it’s important to remember your less obvious business expenses as well, such as professional association fees and health insurance.

The easiest way to get the best estimate of your total business expenses is to list and add up what they are all going to cost you over the course of a year.

What are Your Personal Costs?

Since you are no longer going to have a boss giving you a paycheck every two weeks, you need to know how much money you need to cover your personal costs. In addition to large costs like your mortgage and car payments, you also need to take account the smaller things that you spend money on, including food and entertainment.

Because Cialis it can be somewhat difficult to estimate your smaller personal costs, it may be easiest to look at your recent financial records. Even if you don’t currently keep your own records, if you use a credit or debit card, you should be able to look online at your detailed statements from the last couple of months. Having this information at your fingertips will make the task of calculating your personal costs over the course of a year much easier.

How Many Hours Do You Really Want to Work?

When you kick off your freelancing career, it’s easy to channel your excitement about your independence into working sixty or seventy hours a week. However, it’s important to put this initial excitement aside and objectively look at how realistic it is that you are going to continue working sixty to seventy hours a week over the course of the year. In most cases, this simply isn’t realistic, and attempting to maintain this schedule over a long period of time will lead to you burning out.

In addition to getting a realistic idea of how many hours a week you’re going to work, it’s also important to know how many of these hours can actually go towards billable work. As a freelancer, there are responsibilities such as bookkeeping that you need to do, but won’t be able to bill a client for completing.

As you are calculating how many hours you are going to work each work over the course of a year, don’t forget to also take into account time off for vacations, sickness and personal days.

How Do You Want to Charge – Hourly or Per Project?

Once you have taken the time to figure out your totals for the first three items on this list, it’s time to decide whether you are going to make that amount of money by setting an hourly rate to bill your clients, or if you are going to charge your clients per project.

Both of these options have their pros and cons. When it comes to billing by the hour, the biggest advantage for freelancers is that when you put in extra time to complete a project, you get paid for it. However, the downside to billing by the hour is that it may lead to some heated discussions between you and your client if you end up billing for more time than they felt was needed to complete the project.

If you choose to bill per project, a big advantage is that your client will know upfront exactly how much you are going to charge them, which means that you don’t have to worry about any arguments down the road about the cost of the project. On the other hand, a disadvantage of charging per project is that if you end up spending a lot more time completing a project than you initially expected, you can’t bill your client for the extra hours you worked.

Ultimately, you have to look at your specific freelancing business, goals and needs, and decide which option fits best. Also, keep in mind there’s no reason why you can’t bill some clients by the hour, as well as charging other clients on a per project basis.

How Much Value Do You Provide viagra buy uk Your Clients?

While this may be the most challenging question to answer, it is a very important one. The reason that it’s important to ask yourself how much value you provide to your clients Tadalis SX is because it can play a major role when you need to justify the rates that you are charging.

Since an important part of being a freelancer is being confident enough to stand by your rates, it’s important to be able to justify why you’re worth what you charge clients. By really thinking about how much value you provide to your clients, you will be able to confidently explain to all of your clients that by paying you X amount of money, they will be able to add X amount to their bottom line.

Author Bio: Matt Bronniman is CEO of Globalnite.com, a “Business to Business” dating website, we put businesses in touch with real people worldwide who can complete your advertised tasks

Category: Career
Keywords: freelancing tips, freelance advice, contracting advice, contracting tips, globalnite