7 Freelancing Challenges No One Talks About That Will Make You Think Twice About It

From missing career advancement opportunities to not getting paid, the struggle can become pretty severe.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

I’ve been freelancing for about a year now, alongside my full-time job. While my income allows me to quit the latter and take the plunge, several aspects of freelancing have kept me from doing it.

Today, I’d like to talk about precisely them. The seven things that no one tells you about freelancing, and why you might want to do a bit of it before taking a leap into a full-time freelance career.

1. You might make more money, but it comes at a cost.

The higher per hour rate is typically what you will spend for things like tools and additional costs (e.g. taxes, insurance, accounting), so don’t be fooled that you are actually making a ton more. At least not at the start.

You must factor in the time you will spend running your business. This includes time earning money from your business, as well as time spent on administrative tasks such as bookkeeping, marketing, and account management.

When starting your own freelancing hustle, you need to make sure you are making a profit. To do this, you need to calculate your business’s overhead costs. Overhead costs are the expenses that are necessary for your business to operate but do not produce any revenue. These costs can include things like rent, utilities, and office supplies. To calculate any business’s overhead costs, you will need to know what are your:

• Fixed Costs: These are costs that do not change, regardless of how much or how little your business produces. Fixed costs can include items like rent, utilities, and laptop insurance premiums. It can also be the tools that you use on a daily basis (e.g. a subscription to Grammarly, a software payment each month, subscriptions to services)
• Variable Costs: These costs vary depending on how much you work and how you organize it. For me, once I had to hire help for just one month, which meant I had a consultancy fee for this month — an additional expenditure.