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Comment by dclaysmith | Hacker News Reader

I recently stepped down from my fulltime position of 6 years. I picked up a job fairly quickly and have work lined up through the end of the year. I would recommend:

* Go to (and speak at) meetups involving technologies you work with. It's a great way to showcase your skills.

* Be charitable with your time. Be willing to meet people for coffee and provide free advice. These sort of meetings often directly or indirectly turn into work.

* Leave your company in good terms--they might use you as a contractor after you leave.

I would definitely recommend saving up 4-6 months of living expenses before quitting. It gives you some flexibility in setting your rate and selecting jobs.

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@dclaysmith:

"Be charitable with your time. Be willing to meet people for coffee and provide free advice. These sort of meetings often directly or indirectly turn into work."

This is so true.

In 'Smarter Selling' by Keith Dugdale & David Lambert, which is mostly aimed at sales people, I took away one nugget (I'm paraphrasing here):

"Don't position yourself on just trying to sell something to the customer, because, they might be pressured and they'll eventually buy it. But they'll wait until the end of the contract and then go to somebody else.

Instead position yourself as somebody who is helping them and give them a real solution. The relationships that you build that way will take longer, but they will be the ones that will last a long time, where the client will keep coming back to you."

When I thought about it, I was doing this anyway, this just made it obvious.

Saving 4-6 mths might seem like a dreamland only visited by flying pigs for many. I would say that you spend at least two months in control of your money.

- have a spreadsheet of income and outgoings and update it weekly ( really just download stmts from the bank works here). But go through it each time and see if you can cut something

- pay back your debt - know where it is, which is highest interest etx

- sell stuff - declutger a lot

After two months you will feel in control and it will be a habit

Saving 4-6 mths might seem like a dreamland only visited by flying pigs for many.

Maybe that's a sign that contracting is not for those people.

Even if you're lucky, and you land a stable, long-term gig within say a month of leaving your previous job and actually get paid according to your 30 day terms, you're still looking at living off savings for a couple of months. If that client, however honest and well-intentioned, turns out to be financially insecure and fails two weeks after your first invoice goes in, you're probably just another unsecured creditor who may not get much if anything out of them, and you start the cycle again. Or you might have longer periods for your payment terms, particularly with the more lucrative larger clients. Or you might take a couple of months to find your first gig if you don't have much of a track record or network yet. Or...

If you don't have enough financial security to survive for a few months with no additional income, you should have no doubt that dropping a regular job to go freelance is a big risk. Of course sometimes risks pay off, and if you do land a well-paid gig quickly then once you've got an invoice or two under your belt you can probably build that missing safety net quickly too. But sometimes risks end in disaster, and if you've got kids to feed or a mortgage to pay or other important financial commitments then you'd be brave/foolish to make the jump without ensuring you have a plan B.

I'm a contractor from the UK and I tend to get paid weekly. This is common.

So am I. My Ltd company invoices monthly and I get paid quarterly. I guess it all depends how you set it up.

Weekly payments are certainly possible, but I challenge your claim that they are common, at least in software development. It's just a personal anecdote, but I have literally never seen it in my entire career, not in my own contract work, not when any client or employer I worked with brought on someone else, not even in a job ad on any serious contracting forum. Unless you're doing either a lot of very short-term or fixed-price jobs, I would think the overheads of sorting out invoices and tax records so often would make it too much hassle for a lot of contractors anyway, but maybe if you're used to it and have all the tools and shortcuts in place it's possible for some people.

Edit: Also, I'm talking about working directly with clients here. What goes on with agencies or other intermediaries involved might be a different question.

I tend to work with agents. It turns out a bit more expensive for the clients, but I'm garunteed to get paid, and it's often how I find out about the jobs.

Do you find direct clients from avenues other than word of mouth?

Fair enough, that probably explains our very different experiences then. As you suggested, we generally do find clients via networking and referrals one way or another.

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