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5 Financial Tips For Freelancers

Take a look at these five financial tips for Freelancers before you start your freelancing career and be prepared for anything.

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5 Financial Tips for Freelancers

Making a career change and moving into the freelancing sector is an exciting prospect. Let’s face it: who doesn’t like the sound of being one’s boss? Yet, with great power comes great responsibility; especially so in the financial department.

Take a look at these five financial tips before you start your freelancing career and be prepared for anything.

1. Learn How to Budget

Just because your income is erratic doesn’t mean your expenses should follow suit. In fact, as a freelancer, keeping your expenses in check is the only thing you can do (most of the time). Speaking of erratic income there is a handy tool which helps you calculate your monthly income.

Start by determining your break-even number — the number you need to shoot for to stay in the green each month. List all the essentials you need including food, utility bills, transportation fees, etc. and add them all up to get a total that you need to save up to (and surpass) every month.

5 Financial Tips for Freelancers

Preparing for tax season is yet another thing freelancers should do more of. Too often people get fooled by the amount of money they make only to find out that almost a third of that doesn’t even belong to them.

Separate your personal and business expenses (accounts) to get a better idea of what you’re up for and audit your taxes regularly. It pays to be prepared; quite literally.

2. Make Use of Contracts

The Internet — you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy; except for Mos Eisley, perhaps. By now, probably everyone and their grandmothers were scammed at least once over the Internet; freelancers face this issue almost daily.

The solution: draft a contract for every new job you do to protect yourself from being ripped off by unscrupulous clients. Of course, this does not means you should make potential clients sign contracts for every small gig you do online; use common sense.

Overall, making use of contracts is not only good for your financial well-being but also for your reputation. By insisting on signing contracts before certain jobs, you’ll give off a sense of professionalism and clients will take you more seriously as a result; understand them, they too have been victims of scams in the past.

Protip: for some larger jobs, always include a deposit. That way you won’t have to live primarily off of air until the project’s end; 20% to 50% is the industry standard in most niches.

Make Use of Contracts

3. Know Your Limits

When you’re a freelancer, it’s easy to get carried away by present successes. Yet, the sporadic nature of the job can often leave you in great debt without any real source of income.

What’s more, missing any outstanding payments can impact your credit history beyond repair. The moral of the story — known your limits!

To get a good idea of where you stand, be sure to check your credit score, regularly; especially so when you’re thinking of applying for a loan.

Keeping an eye on this will make it easier for you to apply for mortgage and car loans later in your life, so do try to stay on the safe side.

4. Set up an Emergency Stash

Flexibility means having the freedom to organize yourself, not being free to do whatever and whenever you want (all of the time); that’s called anarchy.

Usually, the best way of protecting oneself (financially) is by setting some money aside in the form of an emergency fund. When you’re a freelancer, you learn the true meaning of a dry season on your skin (too many a time).

Apart from the obvious financial benefits, another thing a stashed cache does for you is — it provides you with an ease of mind. With some funds safely tucked away, you won’t feel as pressured as you would otherwise during these few dry months.

So, start chipping off some funds from each paycheck from now on and put them into a savings account, just to be on the safe side; use an automatic billing system if necessary to keep the payments flowing.

5. Save up for Retirement

The story of the ant and the grasshopper — my favorite. You might be enjoying your high-life now, but, in a few years, you’ll regret not putting away more money for your retirement fund. Of course, by that time it will already be too late… start today!

Since you’re self-employed, you need to sponsor your retirement plan. Depending on your country, there are a few options at your disposal, including:

  • SEP IRA — lower taxes than a traditional IRA.
  • Solo 401(k) — a simplified version of the regular 401(k) plan; made for the self-employed.
  • SIMPLE IRA — employer contributions are tax-deductible in the form of business expenses.
  • Self-managed super funds — a superannuation fund you manage on your own.

Whichever one of these you pick, remember to always contribute to your plan, and contribute often.

Tracey Clayton is a working mom of three girls. She's passionate about marketing and everything tech related. Her motto is: "Live the life you love, love the life you live."

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Business

5 Mistakes To Avoid If You Are Going To Self-publish Your Book

To help you address any potential questions you may have, we’ve put together a list of 5 mistakes to avoid if you’re going to self-publish your book.

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5 Mistakes To Avoid If You Are Going To Self-publish Your Book

Self-publishing your book essentially means being your own editor, designer, proofreader, and marketer, not to mention the fact that you also have to write your book. There are many tasks and it will be the first time you face any of them.

For many first-time authors, this process can seem a little overwhelming. After all, how can you be sure you’re on the right track to making your book a success? To help you address any potential questions you may have, we’ve put together a list of 5 mistakes to avoid if you’re going to self-publish your book.

1. “What matters is the inside”

Well, you’re not wrong. Content is king, and it will be what determines the long-term success of your book. However, we often see that authors who make this their mantra end up severely neglecting the more superficial but vitally important elements such as book writing service, formatting, and well-written descriptions. The irony is that if you don’t put effort into the outside of your book, people will never see the inside. It’s really a bit like going on a date, what’s important is the inside, but you have to fix the outside so that people are curious about the important things.

You may not have all the necessary skills in your pipeline, but it is definitely possible to self-publish a professional-quality book (both in terms of content and exterior) without necessarily having any experience. We’ll tell you more throughout this article, and of course, you can always browse our Help Center and blog for more tips, tricks, and guides for self-publishing your book.

2. Ignore criticism and/or comments

One of the best things about self-publishing your book is that you have the freedom to write about topics that tend not to have been explored in mainstream literature. Many publishers do not dare to touch on these topics for fear of not getting a return on investment or because they are niche genres with few but very passionate fans. This can sometimes lead authors to be a little overprotective of their ideas and dismiss any criticism or comments, constructive or otherwise, usually to the detriment of the final product.

Don’t get us wrong here: we’re not saying you should sell out or compromise your creative identity. If you’re not happy with the book, there’s no point in writing it in the first place. However, self-publishing also means self-publishing (for the most part), and that requires a certain objective perspective. That’s why we always recommend that at least two people you trust to read and comment on your work before publishing it.

This is especially true if you want to sell your books once you’ve published them. Getting a couple of people to read and review your book before publication can help eliminate some of the errors you may have missed, plot holes, or undesirable story elements.

3. “My target audience is everyone”

We hear this a lot. There seems to be some widespread misunderstanding about the topic of the target audience, what it is for, and why it is important.

First, let’s eliminate the most common misconception: having a target audience does not mean that said audience is the only one who will buy your book. If you define your target audience as young adults between the ages of 15 and 20, it doesn’t mean you’re actively discouraging people outside that age range from buying your book.

All it means is that you are adapting your writing, your themes, and the aesthetics of your book to make it more appealing to your chosen demographic. It is to ensure thematic focus and aesthetic coherence in your work. This is important because it gives your book its identity.

Mistakes you should avoid if you are going to self-publish your book

4. Thinking that you don’t need marketing to self-publish your book

Marketing is usually one of the topics that authors who are going to self-publish their book have the most problems with. After all, most writers don’t want to become authors for the love of marketing. However, it is one of the essential components to the success of a self-published author.

Unfortunately, we often see writers who only make a token effort to promote their books, or worse, ignore it completely and think that interested readers will find it. While that may be the case for some of them, the vast majority of your potential readers won’t be able to find your book amid all the noise on the Internet these days. Plus, even if interested readers found your book on their own, do you really want to waste the opportunity to sell hundreds of copies with a well-designed marketing campaign?

If you don’t know anything about book marketing, we suggest you check out our guide on how to promote your book. We also have an article on our blog memoir ghostwriting services dedicated to book marketing on social media that you might also be interested in.

Don’t waste time and start promoting your book before its publication! Do some research on your target audience and choose communication channels accordingly. There are several different approaches you can take depending on the context, but the three articles mentioned above will help you get off on the right foot.

5. Assume that people don’t like your book

Sometimes, even if you have put all your soul and love into self-publishing your book, the sales of your works may not go as fast as you expected. Many writers mistakenly interpret this slow start as an indication that their book is a failure, universally hated by everyone, and then give up on writing.

It’s a shame when this happens because most of the time it takes very little to see almost instant improvements in sales numbers. So don’t give up! We are here to tell you that this is perfectly normal and that you should not feel defeated by it. Your book, in all likelihood, is not the problem here. Instead, the problem is often that people simply don’t know your book exists. If you read the previous points we covered in this article, you should already have a pretty good idea of ​​what may have happened and what you can do to fix it.

Usually, the answer is that you need to spend more time and effort on marketing. However, it might be worth asking more people to give you feedback on your book, both in terms of the content and the cover, to see if there is anything you can change to make it more appealing to a wider audience. However, it’s not going to happen overnight, so don’t be discouraged by a slow start. Keep up the good work and spread the word!

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