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.
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).
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...