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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

The dollar conversion is very important. I used to work with some people who made $800/day as independent consultants. Some full time employees making north of $100K were livid, and complained about being exploited. The complexities of, "Withhold taxes, pay both sides of social security, pay your own 401K and health care, pay for your own training, and don't even think of multiplying the daily rate times 260" just didn't sink in.

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But $800/day is still significantly more than $100k/yr even after taking those things into account. For me both those numbers were higher but it came to a 45% increase if I only took 6 weeks vacation.

It was a little more than 100K, but I'm being purposefully vague on the exact #s.

But let's do some back of the envelope math: $800 day * 250 days (10 holidays) * 75% (3/4 billable) = 150K - 10K ? Social Security - 5K No more 401K match - 10K Health Insurance (Multiply for a family) - 5K Training - 5K Other benefits (leave, sick days, life insurance, etc) ------ 115K

Some of these numbers may be off, and I've missed some things, but this is roughly in line with the original post.

Wait a minute. When you said $800/day I assumed you must be talking contracting [1]. Freelancing would be more like $300/HOUR, not $800/day. That would be an utterly insane rate for consulting.

[1] Consulting would be more like 9/10 billable or even more. Some contractors take the absolute minimum required time off since they're paid by the day (I've heard of guys who haven't had a consistent week off for years), which would put them at 11+/10 relatively.

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