One of the greatest stressors faced by freelancers is money anxiety. Given the erratic essence of freelancing, including its periods of celebration and drought, it is not shocking that money worries are widespread.
Many recent studies have found that the greatest cause of stress for freelancers is money. For instance, showed that money stress was more of a challenge for individuals than relationship stress and job stress.
Respondents were substantially stressed by money in another 2018 study. Interestingly, as the top stress factor, money edges out fitness, work, and relationships.
And so if you’re a freelancer with uncertainty about earnings, you’re probably not alone in your concerns. But if you’re financially struggling and concerned about the future, this is a little consolation. Marketing gurus always hold up freelancing as a way to earn a 6-figure paycheck, on your own terms, but the truth may be something totally different, at least for the first few years.
Ways to decrease your worry around freelance money
So what are among the ways you can decrease your anxiety about money? If you’re fresh out of school or a professional freelance pro, when you develop your freelance business, here are just 7 able to learn your money fear.
Establish retainer arrangements with customers
The creation of a variety of client retainer arrangements is a perfect way to avoid the feast and famine cycle typical to freelancers. For freelancers who want the protection of a daily employee-style salary but still working for the same customers for the long term, retainers are perfect.
A retainer contract means that you get a stable monthly salary, thereby improving your cash flow and easing uncertainty about money. Due to consumer project experience, you will now be able to work quicker and as a result improve the workflow. For any more business jobs or spare time, this suggests more billable hours opened up.
Raising the costs
There aren’t two ways around it. You ought to increase your freelance costs to be a good freelancer with less money issues. It is possible that you will be able to charge more than you currently do regardless of your industry and facilities, especially if you are a freelancer newbie.
However once you build your brand and marketing to fit, merely boosting your prices will met with pushback from your prospective customers. When it comes to costing extra, how prospects view you is important and it’s not all to do with how talented you are.
Less experienced freelancers who are infused with self-confidence and moxie promotions will also get higher fees than their peers who are less positive but more qualified. Perception is all about it.
Build a business kit
Another way to increase your costs and to make your offerings known as bargaining is by designing service bundles. This is where you are improving your freelance services and delivering a range of assignments or expertise as an all-in-one approach. This business model can be scaled up based on the amount of products you add.
Support bundles make life easy for both you and your customers. The prospective buyer sees it in detail and knows just what they’re going to get for the amount they’re going to pay. For you as a freelancer, there’s less explanation about any new customer, and the bundles are easier to order faster.
Diversify the sales sources
Freelancing will earn you a lot of money when you’re doing correctly. There’s every excuse for a successful freelance job to ease money insecurities tremendously. That said, freelance is very time-based. It doesn’t even matter. You don’t get your hour back after you work for an hour. And if you’re not working because of injury or mechanical issues, then you don’t make a living.
That’s why diversification your earnings into various sources is a smart way to ease your worry about money, particularly in the future.
Create a priority save
A large pot of savings is important for entrepreneurial well-being. Freelance work, particularly in the early years, can certainly be up and down when it comes to scheduling and profits. One month, you might have been working for a variety of well-paid clients, then a couple months back, waving your thumbs and asking what the next plan is coming from.
Savings not only help you to manage short-term peaks and valleys, but are also important to your long-term financial stability, including health and retirement.
Using the best web services available
New technology is the most important friend to freelancers, and this is especially true of cloud-based applications. You no longer need to retain all the data on your computer in real records and folders. With free cloud billing, accounting, and project management applications, you can render the admin and workflow easier.
For instance using best Google chrome extensions for bloggers, you can send invoices, monitor all revenue and expenditures, synchronize the data through various channels, handle multiple customer ventures, track your payment dates, and more. All is registered in one location and automatically, which in itself decreases the amount of anxieties correlated with money and time.
Getting rid of anxiety around money for good
Money anxiety is normal, and it’s bad. Yet it’s absolutely avoidable with good preparation, intelligent research, good financial habits, and a desire to excel in your profession as a freelancer.