Just like every other freelancer, we can all quite easily remember what it’s like to start out. Often we have been forced to make a competitive bid against other freelancers to secure work or to insure that we will be able to secure work in the future. The fact of the matter is that often we outthink ourselves by attempting to charge a low price for our time and work in hopes to be appealing as a freelance choice for potential clients.
One reason that many of us have been willing to accept lower pay than we feel that our work is worth is due to the widespread competition within the global freelance market. Sometimes clients assume that all work is equal regardless of who is doing it. They can get high quality work done for very low prices because they see low freelance project bids made by people in those developing countries.
Many freelancers at some point or another may ask themselves something along the lines of, “Can I do better than this?” or “Is my best work worth more than this?” Feeling that you’re underpaid or that your time hasn’t been well spent on a project may force freelancers to over-extend themselves and do entirely too much work for too little.
If you’re not able to save money to pay your taxes, to upgrade your equipment that you use for work, to meet your obligations every month or entirely too often you just barely scrape by, you may have good reason to conclude that you aren’t being paid well enough.
One method to determine the quality of your pay is to add up the number of hours you work in an average week and then divide that number into the amount of money that you make each week to get your average earnings per hour. If that amount per hour is less than the minimum wage in your part of the world, you are probably not being paid enough. Your income should be equal to any other professional in your field.
Being paid too little will force you to work more and more hours per week. While on one hand you might work long hours because you enjoy the work, the bottom line is if you are working these long hours because you can’t get by without the money from the hours you put in you are not charging a high enough rate.
How long have you been charging the same rate? If you have been working for years, getting paid the same amount of money, you know there’s a problem. It’s expected within the typical job market to get raises and bonuses as you progress in experience and time on the job. Freelancing should not be any different. As you grow in experience and hone your trade you need to consider charging more for what you do. Financial security is all well and good, but working for less than what you deserve is something that you will, in any case, need to find time to change.
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