Alright, you can take this with a grain of salt since it comes from a designer's perspective, but here you go:
Doing 1099 work at near-W2 rates just creates headaches - you've got extra taxes and other expenses to cover, not to mention the cost of holidays and buying your own insurance, unpaid time you spend keeping books, etc. And while it's easy enough to charge a lot less when you're only moonlighting, you never know when 1099 work might become your full time gig. So my recommendation (based on the recommendations of several good friends) is to use a calculator like http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/ to figure out how much you'd need to charge per hour if you were freelancing full time. And then just charge that rate. Another helpful hint from my friends is to keep timestamps as you work, with separate logs for paid and unpaid work so you can get a feel for your ratio of paid to unpaid time. I just use a tool like this one to process my logs... http://monsterguitars.com/hours/ . One of my friends wrote this article on the topic (again, for designers, but the same ideas should apply...) http://creativelatitude.com/neils_newbies/neils_newbies_0206.html Hope that helps. V _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
