It's starting to feel like getting rich is overrated when it requires so much of your life to make it happen. Hearing from someone who ended up with similar freedoms (working for yourself is no small one!) would be cool.
One thing that really made the decision easier for me when I left my job to do my own thing was that I could have been in many different situations around the world where I would not have even HAD the opportunity to do my own thing - and by NOT doing it I felt it was disrespectful to all those who would take the chance if given the opportunity to be in my place.
If you’re savvy, good at networking and self motivated, you can make money which is comparable to most full time jobs. Just gotta be careful about the taxes and make sure you save for the lean times.
(Thank you!)
I'm in the US, and use a payroll service to pay myself a regular salary. The payroll service deducts and pays appropriate taxes and paperwork. I then also make estimated quarterly tax payments as well, to deal with any estimated overage I may earn/owe. I then pay a tax professional to reconcile everything at the start of the tax season.
Meet with a tax professional. Meet with 2 or 3. Find someone you're comfortable with who has clients like you. Or... find people like you and get referrals as to who they use.
I am not rich compared to my peers but I wouldn't ever trade my life for any of their lives. I couldn't handle having to ask for leave. I get by with less and travel more (which is something very, very important to me). A lot of the best things in life like being outdoors, hanging out with friends and family, are effectively free.
That said, if I were having to buy into the housing market now rather than 15+ years ago, the mortgage stress might be completely different, and doing it without a regular pay cheque could be a serious challenge.
I make more than many salaried programmers I know, less than quite a few. I work 4 hrs/day, 5 days/wk on average, so by hourly income I do about as well as my friends at Google and Apple.
My freelance practice mainly involves taking over web applications that the original developer didn't finish or abandoned, leaving the customer holding the bag. There's plenty of this kind of work, lots of development relationships go sour, but the software is salvageable. Fixing a few problems without complaining that I have to rewrite it from scratch in Rust gives me long-term clients who trust me, and my 40 years of expertise in multiple business domains gives me consulting work.
That's my niche now that I'm too old to get hired at a cool company, and too cranky to submit myself to a bullshit interview.
Most of the time I work with PHP, MySQL, some WordPress, Zendesk, Shopify, Hubspot. I get some Go, Ruby, Python, other stuff once in a while. I can learn pretty much any "stack" because I have done web dev since web development started (ASP, ColdFusion, Perl back then). I also do a lot of system admin on AWS, Google Cloud, etc.