Freelance or job?
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Also, your projection that you will have 1.8X your monthly expenses in March is a projection -- in the real world of freelancing, you're going to have things like "client flaked on the project; two weeks which I had assumed sold are now empty", "client refuses to pay $10,000 invoice", "I had to pay $3,000 out of my pocket for professional liability insurance to secure the next gig", etc etc. And if you think that level of cash flow juggling is fun, wait until you have employees!
You should, as soon as reasonably practical, stop sourcing gigs from oDesk/elance/etc and start sourcing them from clients who pay professional wages for professional work.
I'm a generalist, should I find some sort of niche? Or should I raise my rates to attract better clients?
I'd imagine you would use your oDesk/elance gigs as a portfolio and get involved in whatever niche community you'd like to work with.
Use existing knowledge of some narrowly specific type of business to give you intimate knowledge of the unique concerns those people have, how they talk about it, and what boundary conditions are going to affect which solutions do and don't fit well (e.g. gourmet pizza joints near college campuses, or heritage language schools to steal a previous patio11 example).
If you don't have that sort of knowledge already, talk to people until you do. If you do have that sort of knowledge already, keep talking to people anyway because you still have plenty more to learn.
Use knowledge of this specific customer to find, approach, and pitch clients who are a good match for your target customer. If you don't know how to find them, you don't know them yet.
Then, pitch them:
"You can have me do X which will cause money to happen for you."
"I'm aware that you have concern_a and concern_b, which I will handle using specific_approach, whereas generic_person_235089 doesn't even have a clue about these important_issues."
LISTEN to what they say, then use it to refine your ability to select potential clients and to improve your future pitches. Easy, easy, easy hack: remember the words they use to describe things and use EXACTLY those words when pitching them.
Run 10 pitches, review, repeat with another 10 target customers. Make money.
Then, go read tptacek's guide to scaling your practice:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615
P.S. It's okay to be a generalist on the back end. It's not okay to be a generalist when you pitch. Address a clear, specific problem for a clear, specific target customer using clear, specific language which shows sensitivity to the issues as THEY see it and talk about it.
98% of people pitch by talking about things that are really their problems, not the client's problems. Actually, saying 2% of people clear that bar is probably being too generous. If you aren't sure, a good trick is to ONLY use language that you've heard come out of a customer's mouth.
Also, meetups are mainly good for random socialization and free beer. Sometimes networking, but often only incidentally. You need to get way more targeted than "tech people in my area who also want socialization and free beer." Scrounging at meetups is the last resort of people who don't know who their customer is yet.
Being able to find your customer is one of the first things you have to learn about them. And to start out, go about it like you would trying to find any other thing - just, be a lot more determined and creative about it than you would trying to find a local pizza joint to order from.
Say you want to land a heritage language school as a client. Where can you find these people? Where can you find their clients - who might be happy to talk to you at length about which schools in the area are best for people who are concerned about heritage language education?
* Get on Google, Google Maps, Yelp and search for heritage language schools my_city.
* Check forums and trade publications relevant to heritage language schools. If you don't know them, find out while you're learning the other stuff.
* Track down bloggers who write about heritage language education, see if they mention any specific schools / issues, research those. Connect with any users you find in e.g. comments, guest bloggers, etc.
* Guess that many people who are customers of heritage language schools are second or third generation immigrants. Where else can you find these people? Are there churches, community centers, or local shopping resources that also target them?
Find your customers - by way of their customers or competitors if necessary. All of the above probably have something useful to teach you about making your business succeed.
You also want people who will (1) be happy paying you real money if you can reliably produce value, and (2) be more or less content to let you be the expert as long as you're on the ball about producing value and communicating effectively.
You do NOT want cases where people will complain that $20/mo is too expensive, or that a $3 business app doesn't have enough features.
Once you pick an area or two that you have interest in, your first steps should be trying to track down and connect with people. Can you do that? If not, it's probably a bad domain for you. Then, customer development interviews. Learn about them before you work with them.
Existing domain experience from previous stuff you've done in your career is a good starting point. Never worked around real estate agents but have intimate knowledge of how to sell construction companies? That should tell you something about where to look first.
It's a matter of applying conditional probabilities, really. Want to work with barber shops but find that's too general? Okay, what about hipster barber shop owners in their early 30s with a master's degree in English Lit? Now it's suddenly way too specific. Somewhere between the two, you become the ONE person in the city who is right for THEM.
I couldn't comment on the tech market, but many companies may be unwilling to commit to this type of pricing out of irrational discomfort. I think Patio11 has advocated for longer period pricing (weekly, monthly) which might be a good medium between hourly billing and value-based. You're going to get better prices for yourself and your clients will be more comfortable with more familiar pricing.
Personally, I wouldn't attempt to freelance without already establishing a real network outside of work farms like Elance / oDesk. You can still work on side projects and present at conferences while working another full-time job. You can build your presence and authority and if you do a good job, you'll get the type of industry recognition you need to get inbound requests, before you even start advertising your services.
(I want to include the unsolicited caveat that none of this is easy. A less experienced version of myself might have/did read someone else's version of this comment and thought "I should be a software consultant! Thousands of dollars a week! Wow!" when the reality is that you still need people to sell to, you still need to be able to deliver on your promises, and you probably need to offer some level of support and maintenance for whatever you end up developing for your clients. I really enjoy this line of work, far more than a "real job", but it's much more stressful at times and so far--one year in--I'm making less money than I otherwise would be. It's true that the potential upside is greater, but I don't recommend getting into consulting for that reason unless you already have a significant personal network of prospective clients.)
Here is an example. A local lawyer in my community is always holding seminars at local libraries on things like taxes, writing a will, estate planning, etc. These are free informational seminars, so the libraries and village halls basically do the advertising for him. During the seminars, he gives an overview of the topic, and why you might want a lawyer to help with the trickier bits. Now, when some self-selected interested people decide they want a lawyer to help write their will, who is the first person you think they'll call? Maybe the nice helpful clearly-well-informed and capable guy who gives all that free advice at the library?
When you see a free online webinar for a technology topic, this is often what is going on. It's just formalized networking: meeting people interested in X, demonstrating you can provide services Y related to X, and making it known that you do Y for X all the time, and boy is it effective.
I agree 100% with everything patio11 had to say. There is real fear involved when you have these low periods. Just because you're overwhelmed with work now doesn't mean you will be four months from now. But you should definitely celebrate the fact that you've proved to yourself you can get clients to pay you!
I don't think your only options are to quit your job ASAP or wait for 6 months. Instead what I'd suggest is redirecting all your extra freelancing income to a savings account (bonus points if its an account opened up for your business). Save enough to make yourself feel comfortable with the idea of a contract potentially dropping out of nowhere and not being able to find work for three weeks.
Once you hit that amount in savings reevaluate. Are you still getting enough work? Are your past clients going to give you great word of mouth referrals (which is one way to switch off of Elance)?
The big thing is you don't want your emotions to control your business decisions. I actually wrote a whole blog post on 'How Savings Impact Freelancing' http://challengeacceptedhq.com/how-savings-impact-freelancin...
Good luck and congratulations!
Also it is quite possible to earn a professional wage on Elance. There are people willing to pay serious money to serious people on Elance.
But I believe that a freelance should always keep at least six months of living expenses worth of funds in liquid assets.
3 weeks without work can mean real cash issues, especially for those who are just starting out in freelancing. It may be nice to have a three week break but let's be honest, most would be terrified and be frantically hunting for work.
Hardly a feature.
>But I believe that a freelance should always keep at least six months of living expenses worth of funds in liquid assets.
But if you have a six month emergency fund, then it may be a feature I guess ;). Many do not though.
I also like to have one big (20 hours/week) project at a time, along with a bunch of smaller long-term relationships that bring in steady low-volume work. That means even if you're between big projects, you still have some work and some income. I don't think I've gone 3 weeks with truly zero work since I started freelancing.
Three weeks in a row with no work to do is like a dream.
In life, living check-to-check is always a bad thing. Everything becomes an emergency; you can't wait for a better deal when making purchases, you have to take any work that comes along, you end up borrowing money...
It is possible to earn a professional livable wage on Elance, however the professions for which freelancers are being employed via Elance are frequently menial / not complex software projects (and thus the wages are closer to $5-50/h as opposed to $100+). I am unable to find more than 11 jobs on Elance in IT that pay > $150/h. I receive about that many requests from companies by email weekly.
I don't believe Elance, as a platform, is conducive/setup to address involved problems which require rigorous testing & best practices to begin with. What Elance does well is aggregates supply and demand and provides a method of finding work.
I believe the best option is to build a network / partner with other agencies who have different skill sets and refer opportunities within your network. This is how we've been addressing the problem of continuous opportunities with Hackerlist. We partner with tons of independent consultancies with domain specific expertise and forward them work.
Also, freelancing picks up over time. Almost every client we've worked with has turned into a return customer (which we're really grateful for).
Besides throwing a dart and cold-calling where it lands, what other "how" is there to this?
My favorite thing about that project is how simple it was and how little time it took. For a shitty Java UI that improved his ability to do business, I got a couple hundred bucks and free haircuts for life.
After that, whenever I walked into a pizza place or burrito place or whatever, I asked the store owner if there's any way I can help them improve their efficiency or web presence. In my head it felt like I'd get a resounding "fuck off" from all of them, but in reality small business owners are wonderful people who love talking about how to improve their business. Small business owners who are hostile towards random people asking them stuff usually don't stay in business for very long.
By the end of college, there were three places I could go to get a free pizza, and I hadn't paid for a haircut in three years. By the way, one of those pizza store owners had a cousin who worked in a small private lending company. I set up a Python library for him to scrape data from this ancient silo of data and graph it - that was the first job that paid really well.
The key is to realize that being a good designer and engineer is like being a superhero in today's world. You do something that nobody else can - take advantage of it while it's still relatively rare.
I'm curious about what you are doing right now, I'd appreciate an update.
One other thing I should have mentioned is how consulting for small businesses gives you a unique perspective as to their needs and abilities, and makes you much more effective at meeting them if they are your target market. So if anything, do it for the insight, because most of them aren't going to pay you a lot of money.
Keep the job until you're billing at 3-4 times your salary, and routinely outpacing your paycheck with what you bring in on nights and weekends.
And stop calling yourself a freelancer. That'll double your bill rate in one step.
Takes a little time to adjust to the varying paces of diff corps (some real slow, some real fast). But yeah if mine were remote, I would be in heaven.
But there are so many enterprise Java-haters in the world now... won't sit well with them. Rubbed me the wrong way at first cuz I was coming from RoR & open source stuff to enterprise package software. When I realized that "front-end dev" meant not touching the codebase outside of HTML mocks & javascript POCs, I got really annoyed. But I took a little mental vacation, got more involved in solving implementation difficulties, then the project ended & because of the coding prowess I displayed I got moved to full-stack feature upgrade/maintanenance, and started a new project as a web service developer (never done it) based on managerial faith alone.
I think a lot of these job choices just have to do with delayed/immediate gratification. Corporate is delayed, comes in the form of eventual big $$ or leverage to get into a real interesting position elsewhere. Startup/freelance is open-source fast-paced immediate gratification but poses its own set of problems. In my experience the open source dev work I've done is more of a technical feat, but the discipline required for Java web services is making my mind sharp in a way that RoR wasn't. In a strange sense, there is less action but more discipline.
Before emigrating, it was somehow easy to find those kind of jobs through my network. But after moving to another country I haven't found those kind of jobs anymore. Any tips?
Those jobs come because your network does the business development networking for you. Build that again, and the jobs will come. It's hard to start out, when you're so worried about getting enough that you keep yourself busy. But take a coffee appt whenever you can, give free advice if it doesn't cost you more than the time you'd spend on lunch anyway. I can't tell you how many clients I've worked with because I was referred by somebody I helped out at a coworking spot over a water cooler conversation.
- The ones that can improve your knowledge / portfolio
- The ones that pay VERY well.
In this case you will increase your freelance experience and have enough time to decide what to do.
Based on the dates given, the calendar might also be somewhat responsible. The first couple weeks of the year are not very active in the hiring market.
On the other, hand you won't believe what happened next after this Elance profile used one simple trick! CLICK HERE! </ Sarcasm>
1) Don't quit your job unless you have 6 months worth of living costs in savings.
2) When you're about to quit (depending on your job), you can talk to your boss about "potential new prospects" and "exploring the next steps in your career" - if he is a sensible, long-term thinking and ego-less person, and you're a good, valuable worker, he would probably want to keep on good terms with you, and the doors of this company might stay open for you even if, after 6 months or so, your alternative career plan does not work out.
All of these things have happened to me and my emergency fund was there to catch me everytime.
And what if that job doesn't want you to start for 2 weeks? Or more because they're doing a full background check?
And say freelancing's going great, but then your first client isn't as great as you thought and starts quibbling over the bill? Or they take 4 months to pay you because finance never received the PO or finance never got a copy of the invoice or finance only begins processing the invoice when it gets chased (which is finance speak for "we're complete bastards who always pay much later than the agreed payment terms, ha ha ha, fuck you")?
It depends on your commitments. If you can move back in with Mum & Dad or can couch surf a bit, then 6 months is perhaps unnecessarily careful.
When you've got a mortgage and life baggage, probably not.
Could I go get a job and start getting paid in < 6 months. Likely, but it might not be good - just, survivable. Suddenly I'm back to check-to-check living, and that cushion slowly erodes. You're now 'check to check' vs "check plus saving".
I realize that for the vast majority of people in this country, and the world, having years (or even months) of living expenses saved up is not even fathomable. I've been there - I do get it. Once you start getting to the "1 month" of savings milestone, then 2 months, etc - you start to realize how little that actually is, and how precarious/fragile your state is. At least, that's how it is for me, and at least a few other people I know - your attitude towards money/savings/safety can change a lot quickly.
This all depends on your constitution, your age, obligations, family, etc, but "6 months" can go by far quicker than you'd anticipate. Also, the other notion of "6 months of expenses" generally doesn't take in to account extra job hunting expenses - travel or relocation, for starters. Or higher insurance costs if your employer was covering part of it before, etc.
When I decided to get into freelancing, five days after giving my employer notice I had a 12 months consulting contract lined up paying a lot more money for a lot less (but much more interesting) work. If I was worrying too much about financial runways, I'd probably still be at my old job, "playing it safe".
While you had great serendipity (congrats!), but not everyone can consider doing that if they've got obligations. In the US at least, the 'insurance tied to employers' is a massive problem, and inhibits most of the people I know from switching jobs too much, let alone quitting to freelance. Single people, young people without health issues or too much debt - sure.
Moreover, say you're over 30, have been working for a Perl shop for a while, and the market only has Rails and Node.JS offers, you'll need to learn, publish stuff on Github, and write a couple blog posts to be barely make it to the eyes of recruiters. Add to this that unless you were lucky enough not to work on CRUD apps all day, you will have to brush up a bit on algorithms and data structures, because everyone and his dog modeled their interview process on the one Google has. Now you can start to interview. I remind you that more and more companies also cargo cult the time Google takes to select candidates, because everyone wants the "top 1%", so you might want to prepare for a bunch of interviews.
Count a couple months for the whole thing, double this if you are not in (or can't move to) a hot spot or if you're over 40.
6 months is not unnecessarily careful, unless you're a rockstar (in which case 6 months of emergency funds represent about only 2 months of your salary), or very connected person, that's probably just what's needed.
I do know that not all companies work this way, but if we compare the average developer salaries to the amount of cash necessary to build a 6 months emergency fund, I believe this advice is sane to give to people in general.
You should be saving for your retirement anyway. You're going to need at least half a million dollars to be comfortable. Having 25k liquid on the day you quit a steady job is a pittance in comparison.
That is freelancing, more-or-less. It's one reason you can get so much more than being an employee - you cover taxes, insurance (including professional indemnity), pension plan, sickness, times "on the bench", etc. Doesn't suit everyone. I always live well within my means and keep as much money in the bank as possible. That will cover me for a few months if I lose my current big contract.
Like everyone else here, I would be interested in what you are doing right on Elance.
For you, I would keep 6 months of living expenses in a savings account that is difficult to get to (I keep mine in a local credit union and don't have a debit card for it so I have to physically go in to withdraw which helps curb impulsive purchasing).
Definitely go the contractor route - it is better pay. Also realize, though, that it's about more than just your programming skills. As a contractor people will pay you well to solve problems. Keep your skills fresh even if it means a little extra effort and some mistakes, you will be better off in the end (I am).
Maybe tell your employer that you are taking other projects and offer to stay on to do certain projects as a contractor, but at your freelance rate.
There are a ton of threads on Hacker News on freelancing. I suggest you do some heavy searching. There are some real gems.
Edit: The great thing about freelancing is that you can always fall back to regular employment. As your pool of contacts gets deeper, you begin to feel like you could never really be without work.
Yes. I had many jobs and now freelance. For me, freelance is a business. A job is a job. Your employer expects you to be working 9-5 (regular hours) and they can pretty much dictate when I have to have meetings and many other things.
As a freelancer, I decide when it's convenient for me to hav e a meeting for instance. My clients don't really have any power over me because they understand that we are both businesses.
> As a freelancer, I decide when it's convenient for me to hav e a meeting for instance. My clients don't really have any power over me because they understand that we are both businesses.
Right, that's expectations. You set expectations when you start, job or freelancing. If you work full time, you set that expectation. If it's part time, that's a different expectation. You might even work part time from home and part time from the office. Maybe all that matters is that you are getting projects done in a certain time-frame.
It also depends on the model you are working. In some cases I might be on a model where you have a daily or weekly rate. If I'm doing that, then my time belongs to the client for that period. If the client wants me to be in a meeting at X time, no problem.
I also generally give the client a period of time on which I will be working on the project and available to talk. Generally I try to adapt to what's good for the client rather than what's convenient for me. As a full time freelancer, there is no convenience for me. If I'm on my working hours, I'm usually available to someone.
There are times where I like to be working without distractions, but availability goes both ways. If I need to ask questions then I want an understanding of when I'm available and when the client is available.
Everyone who is employed full time should be treating themselves as a business. You should be marketing yourself, always. You should be building networks, always. You should strategize for the future, always.
I'm always tweaking and trying out different things though. Everyone has their own way. Mine certainly isn't the best. It's just another way. I'm still (and always) in training.
Next goal, recurring revenue!
I started small and all jobs were delivered before deadline and the execution is what set me apart from the rest of the competition. Work with less people and really deliver. Once you do that, existing clients will up their spend with you and refer you to other clients. Good work spreads fast.
Once you get a lot of clients, then it is time to hire someone. For me, I hired someone with little experience and trained them from the ground up. My ratio was roughly 10-12 clients per employee.
Small jobs are good when you are starting but they can also generate a lot of noise. Your time and expertise is very valuable. Price it accordingly.
If someone is trying to nickle and dime you walk away. That will most likely to be a customer who is never satisfied and will continually ask you to do things that was not in the scope of work for free or fight you when its time to pay up.
Good luck! :-)
There's also gun.io (actually, think they pivoted slightly), ooomf, hackerlist.net, 10x, etc.
Disclaimer: I am a founder @ Hackerlist.
Having run and advised consultancies for a while, and having been an employed engineer, I'm happy to discuss the tradeoffs of each in detail, assuming there's interest. In terms of getting clients, I do think it helps working with another organization to increase your intake, even (especially) if you run a small consultancy/agency.
Alternatively, happy to answer questions or help make intros around SF if people prefer personal interactions <m@hackerlist.net>
* Took advice from people already doing it
* Looked really hard at my living costs, savings, etc, and figured out that, probably, I could survive for 6 months or more without an income
* Made sure I had some work (a bit of repeat work, and some other projects) lined up.
* Spoke to as many other people as I could (I'm lucky, I have a solicitor and accounts in the family, as well as someone who started a company which now employee >5 people)
Talking to my wife about finances and stuff was a big deal, as she had just decided to go part-time in order to study. But we did the sums, and realised it would have to go really badly, and really we had enough of a cusion that I could find a paid position if it didn't work out.
Here I am, 18 months later, still paying the bills, still with enough money to live comfortably, and still working freelance. There are times when I'm scared stiff about money (I don't think this will go away) and other times when I'm working 10+hours 7 days a week, for a month or two at a time. I had a death in the family this month, which knocked me off schedule, and had more of an impact that I'd like to admit on my productivity, but I communicated with clients that, unfortunately, their projects were going to be pushed back, and it's been ok. Even when my second project was 2 months late, nobody complained. The client was paying a fixed-cost, so they essentially got two months free.
If you're going to do work fixed cost, do not be afraid to hold your ground when you quote for it. I sometimes even quote a little high because I know I'm really rubbish at doing estimates, and it hasn't got better in time. You know other people are going to be late with key information and decisions, and there will be somethings that you miss when you first quote, but keep communicating with your clients and alert them early when things don't go to plan, and most people will be fine - and the rest you probably don't want to work with anyway.
I'm very interested to know what is this change? I've just checked your elance profile, but I couldn't know what is it.
I made a similar jump two years ago and found oDesk/Elance/etc to be fairly sustainable source of income/jobs once you've demonstrable experience (either through their platform, your blog, github, referrals, etc). While not necessarily a rule I found the higher rate (should be proportional to your experience on oDesk, etc) tends to match up with the more fulfilling gigs and interesting clients using those platforms.
While I agree with Patrick that you should stop sourcing gigs from oDesk/elance/etc you should also establish yourself and feel fairly comfortable running a consulting/freelance business before taking on 'professional clients'.
So look at the ratio of time you spent without work so far, to the amount of work you have on the books now.
Build in a bit of a "factor of safety" (I work on the basis that I can keep myself billable about 60% of the time, but you might choose less or more).
If the rate your charging is sufficient that you can work only 60% of the time (or whatever you choose) and still make better money than your current job (or that the money isn't better but there is some other advantage like flexible living arrangements that may allow you a cost saving by being able to, for example, relocate to a cheaper location) then go for it.
Just factor the risk into your hourly rate, and see if it works out. Of course your "risk assessment" may be completely inaccurate, which I guess is the real risk ;)
Do you have a family, loans?
Do you have at least 6 months worth of living expenses?
Can you quickly find a job if things don't go as expected with your freelancing jobs?
You should consider these things first.
As an aside, if you're too busy, you may consider raising your freelance rates now as a way to generate more income w/ less work.
Eh, do.
> expenses (such as computers, phone, electricity, etc..)
A new computer every couple of years is negligible.
> taxes
Not sure why this would be any different. Were you not paying taxes when you were employed?
Most people don't realize how big of a chunk gets taken out. And as was mentioned, as a self employed individual you also pay the "employer's" piece of Social Security which is an extra 7.5%.
If you're incorporated there may be taxes related to that. I pay a yearly fee for the privilege of doing business in Connecticut.
I also must file a yearly annual report with the state; which comes with a processing fee.
I also pay property taxes on business property, such as computers and desks and chairs. My accountant has me list all of these.
Many people go into sticker shock when I tell them to put aside 40% of their income to pay taxes.
Few people asked what I changed that caused this sudden change in incoming leads.
I do not know what exactly worked - but here are few things I changed.
1. It may be the calendar - but my intuition says its not just that.
2. Made my profile more keyword specific instead of lots of text. Uploaded a picture. I also researched a lot on other successful Elance profiles. There were two categories there a) Sounds cool to other freelancers, developers - I switched from this to the one below: b) Well formatted, keyword rich (for humans too) and shows up better in search results and shows up important stuff in the shorter profile views.
3. Removed the hourly rate from my profile. I did not charge much lower later either. But I figured out that fighting for that $1 extra is not worth if I am going to lose a lead and spend more time looking for other work. I think 49 < 50 should be represented as 49 <<<<< 50 (These are not my actual hourly rates). This may have been a biggest problem in getting invites.
4. Changed my profile such that it is more focused to what I want to do and passionate about (data-science/machine learning) rather than what I am good at (web-development). This doesn't really seem to have any impact on the kind of work I get - I get both equally. This has more due to my personal choice - I did not want to do web-development at my day job and at freelancing (it kind of gets boring)
5. Updated my blog with one pending post I had created earlier but had been lazy to upload it.
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6. Reduced a lot of self-pitching in the proposals. I carefully choose whom I write proposal to. Client history, Previous hiring rate/cost, Client's project award ratio, understanding of technology, understanding of requirements, timeline suggested. I tend to focus on leads who seem to have a lesser understanding of technology but better clarity on requirements.
7. Chances of getting selected when somebody invites you are far greater than competing with 50 or 100 proposals. If you are invited - it seems that you are more likely to get work at your preferred rates.
8. Placing bids when the requirement is fresh and new (or has less proposals). Chances are that in case of lower proposals, client has received many proposals like "I can do in it $XXXX". A good proposal with relevant questions tends to stand out. If something has more than 12-15 proposals with rated freelancers - I back out unless I think I can make a very strong proposal or if this project is a "must-try". There may be tempting high value projects 3 days old with 80 proposals - chances are that the client has started discussing with somebody else in those 3 days. I used to spend a lot of time on such postings, and almost immediately discard those nowadays.
The most important part is that your expenses are covered, so you should have some $$ on your saving account to survive the next 12 month without earning a single $. Then i guess freelance could be an awesome option for your.
Your could also try, to acquire a long-term project as a freelancer for a better start.
And stop using Elance if you want to make real money...