Credit: Chi King on Flickr

Freelancing with a day job can do more than ‘just’ bring in a little side cash. While that does help, there are more advantages to consider. Freelancing is a way to distribute risk. Especially in uncertain economic times, it’s good to seek alternative forms of income than full-time employment. Having a single source of income leaves you vulnerable.

How secure are you at your current job? If you’re still in the 9-5 trenches, and vulnerable to layoffs, then developing a freelance side business is a fallback plan to consider. Let’s look at some factors that make freelancing ideal in today’s economic climate.

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Last year, I was in the middle of a project with a graphic designer. She came to a meeting with the client and I completely distraught – she looked as if someone had died. She cried as she explained that her computer had died over the weekend, taking with it her work on this project and six years worth of other projects. She had a computer repair service working on retrieving all her data: they had charged her almost $2,000 and couldn’t guarantee that they would be able to restore anything.

$2,000 is pretty steep for retrieving data, admittedly, but my colleague was effectively at the mercy of any one who could even offer to get her data back for her in time for her project deadlines.

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During my first year of freelancing, I relied on one client for my bread and butter. When that client gave me a week’s notice that they no longer needed my services, I felt like I was up a certain creek. Over the years, I’ve had the problems with relying on just one or two clients hammered in. If there’s even a minimal problem with the one client taking up all of a freelancer’s time, that freelancer might not be making rent next month.

But there are ways to move from relying on one or two clients — just like there are ways to move from a full-time job — that can wind up making your freelance business more successful in the long run.

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I am a big fan of the digital nomad lifestyle. Being able to take your laptop and do your work from anywhere has a lot of appeal for me. But living the nomad life is rarely as simple as just picking up your notebook bag and heading out the door. There are a lot of factors to consider. My biggest fear is leaving important files behind sitting on my desktop while I’m a thousand miles away with a client deadline looming large.

For that reason I was excited when FreelanceSwitch gave me the assignment to review NomaDesk, a virtual workplace for digital nomads.

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Photo by seier+seier+seier.

Buying your first home can seem intimidating and scary, especially when the news is full of talk of mortgage crisis, and especially when you’re a freelancer without a steady paycheck to rely on. In fact, it can seem downright impossible.

The first time I was looking into buying a home, it was with my boyfriend: a nice, steady, engineer-type with a full-time job. I was freelancing lots of small gigs that added up to a nice income but didn’t look very reliable on paper. But we figured that with his undeniably reliable paycheck, a bank could be persuaded to give the two of us a mortgage.

Well, instead of buying our first place together, we broke up, and to me it looked like my hope of owning a home was gone, too. Sure, I was making money, and more every year, but like many freelancers, my income was erratic. I never had any idea what I would be earning more than eight weeks out. To make things worse, I had credit card debt and had been late a few times on bill payments. Plus, I’d never heard of a freelancer buying her own place without also hearing that her spouse had a steady job, or that the freelancer’s career was bringing in six figures.

Neither of those descriptions fit me, and wouldn’t anytime soon.

So, while I was digging into pints of ice cream mourning a broken relationship, I was also mourning the broken dream of homeownership. As far as I could tell, I was either going to have to wait for a (corporate) knight in shining armor, or save my pennies for about 20 years. Yeah, good luck to me. Continue Reading