People will lie to you about what you have to do to get paid more. They may claim you are not good enough to try to con both you as an individual and labor as a group into working for less. They can't hide from the invisible hand. Look out for phrases like "next year", "next quarter", "maybe", "if", or "try". These are synonyms for no and never. Those people are wasting your time, and no they aren't entitled to your time.
Whatever you think someone is capable of paying it's usually more, but that is not the same as them being willing to pay. You need to learn the levers. You may need to maneuver into position years in advance. What you are doing now leads to what happens next which leads to what happens after. You need to create as much of your own luck as you can. Your time is valuable and irreplaceable so put in the effort to make sure you are using it as best you can.
There is a middle ground being making a lot of money and doing unpleasant work and that middle ground is a lot of money and the more money you make the better the work tends to be with one exception being the startup greenfield project experience.
One way to make a lot of money is as an owner/founder of something. Risk adjusted it's not all it's cracked up to be IMO. It's also the most work to start. It's a lifestyle choice as much as anything.
Also, donating money becomes natural when you get a lot of it. You become more generous, which I thought would be the complete opposite. I guess if you weren’t born rich, you’d most likely give back by becoming rich.
If you try and be the best person you can, keep learning, and work on yourself, it will unlock more for you and you'll be happier than going down the road of thoughts like "well if I make $X00,000, what do I need to do to be making X+1 or X+1.5."
Only when you say no to a better paying offer you can affirm that you learned the lesson.
Comfortable, maybe. But there's a depression that hits many people after their 'liquidity event' etc. For some it can remove their raison d'être.
That is, a decent accountant will charge you money to make sure your taxes are in order, that you're not claiming anything you're not entitled to, and that your tax return is submitted on time.
I know so many people stressed out at the end of the tax year - whereas I electronically submit all my receipts & invoices, and let someone else tell me how much to pay in tax.
I always thought I'd rather save the money & spend the time doing that. Turns out it is cheaper in the long run to pay someone who has skills that you don't.
Another thing I once learned - it's OK to charge a "go away" rate. If I don't want a client's business, I'll ask for double what I usually charge.
They either get to find a "bargain" elsewhere, or I get to reevaluate my day rate!
Finally, almost no one will have an honest conversation with you about money. Not industry peers, friends, or family. It is a touchy subject for many. Make sure it isn't within your family.
I don't understand this sentiment, mind explaining?
The more people pay you the better they treat you, cheapskates are the worst customers.
Dealing with this now and if I had two pieces of advice to give to entrepreneurs, they would be:
Work in the field in which you want to build
Keep working while you build
Also applies to people. Your hireability and salary are both mostly related to how well you market yourself. Marketing is everything.
That running your own business takes a lot of energy & involvement and is not the route to make money easy.
That every raise / significant amount of money, inspires for about 3 months, then it is the new normal.
That there will be people around you who do less and get paid more.
That budget is addictive and it hurts to shrink it.
That people who work for you or live with you, will not doubt that the money flow is eternal and guarantied and take 0 measures to prepare for the day you can not provide.
That it takes hard work & dedication to improve your income, and is freakishly easy to sustain.
That there is one moment in time to do financial negotiations and that is before the contract is signed, after that you will have to move to improve.
That when "the man" is hurting, employees instantly become assets that are let go in the blink of an eye.
My initial projection to out perform my parents financial improvement compared to their parents took rather drastic risks and I guesstimate my kids will have a hard time to sustain that improvement.
Money does not make you happy, the lack of it makes you creative. What hurts is having less then last year.
Income, costs & (net) results varies greatly per geographic area.
One man's fortune, is the other man's pocket money.
The outcome is that you should not expect that working more will equal to becoming rich.
1 : http://www.drinchev.com/blog/germany-freelancing-and-taxes/
Either charge your full rate or zero.
If you bill by units of time, you will like under-exploit the information and skill asymmetry between yourself and the client, and leave a lot of money on the table.
You should instead price as a meaningful fraction of the value you're creating. You may not know that number, but the client will more or less signal it to you in negotiations if you're canny. Something that's relatively easy for you to do (that might take a month, for example) could generate millions in revenue for the client. You're entitled to a large chunk of that.
It's in fact this approach that can make consulting extremely lucrative: someone has already gone through the work of acquiring leverage by building a business and you're coming in with the rocket fuel. You arguably should never take a contract where this isn't clearly the case, since committing to a project has an opportunity cost in your own time.
There’s a huge difference between someone able to build what a business needs and someone who understands the business’s needs and can work hand-in-hand with them to explore their needs and optimize to that. It’s very much worth the difference in cost to the business.
Working salary is a step up, if you set reasonable goals and keep your commitments in check. You can work 20-30 hours and make the same money as if you were working 40-60, as long as you have the skills to generate enough value in that time and negotiate a truly results-based position.
Working for yourself and contracting to others is like salaried with more flexibility. That can cut both ways - you can overcommit and work yourself to death for a pittance if you aren’t careful.
The real magic seems to happen when you’re no longer trading your skills and time for money. That’s typically through dividends of some sort. That could be stock dividends, patent licensing, franchising, a subscription app... whatever. I’ve not been able to make this happen for myself yet but I feel like I have a good understanding of how to do it when my kids are a bit older and I am willing to invest my time to make it happen.
But after a decade and a half in the industry, my personal experience has been that trading hours for cash has been far less stressful, and more lucrative for me, and I've even been more appreciated, than the salaried work I did for so long.
Perhaps it goes something like this:
Simple hourly wage work / unskilled or apprentice-type work --> Salaried skilled work --> hourly skilled work as consulting services --> project-based (results-oriented) skilled work as described below.
see: Millionaire Next Door