Over the last few years, more and more people are starting to realise that there are plenty of benefits to freelancing as an alternative to standard employment. You have far more control over your work hours, you don’t have to spend all of your time with a manager breathing down your neck, and, if you want to, you can spend all day working in your pyjamas. However, there’s one more benefit to freelancing that a lot of people tend to forget about and that’s the financial benefit of it. Most people assume that freelancing involves sacrificing a portion of your income in exchange for all of the other perks but that doesn’t need to be the case at all. Here are a few of the ways that working as a freelancer can actually be a hugely beneficial on a financial level.

Tax write offs

Paying tax is just a part of life, and most of us are pretty willing to pay them in exchange for all of the public services that we use every day. However, people tend to forget that many of the things that we purchase every day have a degree of tax added onto them. One of the best things about working as a freelancer is that, if you can appropriately justify that they are completely necessary for the work that you do, there are many things that you can claim that back on. This includes everything from fuel if you drive to speak to clients, a portion of your internet and phone bill if you use online devices during your work and anything else that you use as part of your career on a day-to-day basis. Sure, the tax that you claim back is going to be a pretty small amount compared the to the total cost, but it’s certainly better than nothing!

More value for your time

For most people, the amount that you get paid is pretty much exclusively based on the number of hours you work. If you’re an employee, no matter what you do throughout the day, you work for eight hours, and you get paid for those eight hours. However, when you’re a freelancer things are just a little bit different. As a freelancer, you’re often paid based on the job that you’re doing. Even if you’re paid per day, that the content of that day is often up to you rather than up to the client. This means that, if you can get the same amount of work done in four hours that someone else could do in eight, then you still get paid the same amount. Essentially, you’re paid for the work that you do, rather than the time you spend doing it. Not only does this mean that your time is going to be more valuable, but you also might be able to take on more work and increase the amount of money that you have coming in.

Freedom to live anywhere

The freedom to live anywhere is often held up as one of the very best things about being a freelancer, especially one who works from home. Thanks to the internet it’s now possible to connect with clients quickly and easily no matter where you are in the world. However, there’s a pretty significant financial benefit that a lot of people tend to forget about. If you want to work for large and interesting companies as an employee, then you likely have to live in a major city. One of the most common things about major cities is that they can be very expensive to live in. However, as a freelancer, you no longer have that pressure and can afford to live in places where house prices are much lower. This extends to an international level as well. Just check out some of the house prices on http://rumahdijual.com/jakarta-timur/apartemen-murah to see just how cheap your options can be when you can look for properties anywhere. Of course, you do have to think about things like time differences but working as a freelancer means that you don’t have to work to a specific timetable either, so that’s often easy enough to work around.   

Huge potential for growth

One of the biggest challenges, when you try to start down any career path is understanding what potential for growth there is in it. Questions about progression and development are among the most common from candidates in job interviews. However, as a freelancer, every single thing that you do has an impact on the growth and progression of your career. Every time you take on a new job, you’re adding to your portfolio, and you’ll have more and more to show for your hard work. Rather than giving years of your life to a single company and then being unable to get any further than the position you started in, a freelancer can start right at the bottom of the pile and progress to a position where they’re practically fighting of potential clients with a stick. Being able to go from asking for work to being the subject of a bidding war simply isn’t something that most employees can possibly achieve whereas it’s often a very realistic goal for a lot of freelancers in any industry.

You pay your own wages

The issue of employers paying their staff a fair living wage is an incredibly hot topic right now that is being debated by everyone from businesses to politicians to everyday people. However, when you’re a freelancer you not only have the power to set your own rates when it comes to how much clients pay you but you also have the power to decide what your wage is. Two common mistakes that freelancers make is that they either treat every penny as if it’s pure profit or they hoard everything away for their business and never give themselves any more than what they absolutely need to survive. The key is to make sure that you strike a decent balance between these two things. If you’re happy with the state of your career and you don’t feel as though you need to invest all that much in it then you’re in the position to pay more over to yourself as a wage than if you’re still trying to build and grow your career and you need to spend money in order to make that happen. Of course, there are still things like taxes that you need to put money aside for, but outside of that, you have a great deal more freedom to decide what you actually take home at the end of each month that you would if you were just working as an employee at someone else’s company.

Of course, there’s one thing that many people struggle with which often makes it much harder to make a decent amount of money freelancing, and it’s that they, all too often, don’t think carefully about what they’re doing with their money. If you’re working as a freelancer, then there’s a good chance that you’re going to need to invest at least some of your money back into yourself and your business. Not only that but you need to be responsible for calculating and paying your own taxes, as well as setting aside the money for it. These kinds of added responsibilities that many employees simply don’t have to deal with can often trip up a lot of inexperienced freelancers and lead them to lose out on money unnecessarily.

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