Let me explain :)
I quit my job and started freelancing full-time when I was 24 because I found a $50 / hour PHP gig on Craigslist and did the stupid math of "40 hours per week x 50 weeks per year x $50 / hr = $100k / year!!"
Ugh, so naive.
Those first few years were rough and I almost quit many times. Everything was so much harder than I knew, from finding clients, to getting the work done, to getting paid, etc.
BUT I stuck with it and gradually figured it out. I started spending time on "business development". I stopped charging hourly. I started investing in my own skills to move into higher margin areas. I focused on a particular client niche instead of doing everything under the sun. I built better sales and marketing channels. I got more disciplined with my time. Etc, etc.
To date I've billed over $2 million to clients for mobile dev, web dev, product management, technical writing, and online marketing (by decreasing order of where I've made the most), and I know this sounds like I'm bragging, but I have zero concern these days about being able to make at least $250k per year from freelance and consulting. I haven't figured out a lot of things in life, but I've figured out this.
I've also spent the last few years writing, speaking, coaching, and otherwise helping other freelancers get started and grow their businesses, first friends and family, now a pretty sizable online audience, so I have a pretty good view of how freelancers succeed and how they fail.
More than anything else, the quality I see that helps freelancers succeed is being willing to spend regular time hustling for clients. You don't have to be a sales and marketing wizard, or be an extrovert, or spend half your time on it. But you need to spend time every day / week / month on it, and never stop, always be thinking about who your customer is, where you find them, and how to close them.
The freelancers I see fail almost invariably have no reliable marketing channel other than referrals (or Upwork, which is the fast-track to commodity rates). And referrals are awesome, some of the best work I get, but they're passive AND they work a lot better if you can seed your ecosystem with other sources of leads.
If you can build a pipeline of qualified client leads, everything else is easy. You can make a lot of mistakes with a client or a potential client if you have another lead coming right behind that one. And that wipes away most of the concerns in this article.
Through solo 401ks, my wife and I have saved more than half a million for retirement. We have a healthy emergency fund. We have insurance. We take plenty of vacation, etc, etc.
No one in this article would have any of the problems they're talking about if they made twice as much. And I can guarantee you that almost none of them spend hardly any time trying to find and close clients. They either wait for clients to come to them, or they use Upwork, which is almost as bad.
The problem here isn't irregular income, it's just not enough income.
OK, enough rambling...I'm happy to help anyone in the HN community with some free 1:1 advice if you want to email me: hi@ryanwaggoner.com