Work For Yourself With These 6 Steps

Working for yourself sounds like a dream, and while it’s not always what it’s cracked up to be, being self-employed trumps a typical nine-to-five job in a lot of different ways. There’s the freedom to schedule your own hours, the potential for working comfortably at home, and, for a lot of us at least, being self-employed means working in the field of your choosing. But working for yourself has its downsides too: paychecks aren’t always steady, working from home can get old fast, and navigating through the particulars of the tax code and health insurance marketplace can get daunting when you’re on your own.

Still, there are plenty of good reasons that more and more people are moving away from traditional work, and as of last April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted as many as 15 million Americans as self-employed, a number that accounts for somewhere around 10% of our country’s workforce. So how can you join the growing ranks? Read through our list of six steps required to work for yourself below.

1. Save Up An Emergency Fund

If there’s a primary fear surrounding self-employment, it’s the worry that you won’t be able to make enough money. It’s a reasonable worry and worth taking seriously. And since you can’t peer into the future reliably, there’s only one way to make sure you’ve got enough money in your bank account once you start working for yourself: save! We should all be saving money for retirement and big life milestones, but people often forget about one of the most important saving models: the emergency fund. Saving up for the unknown isn’t advice exclusive to the self-employed, but no other group are at such risk. As a rule of thumb, you should try to save up enough money to cover six months of expenses. (Literally, your emergency fund should be a potential substitute for your usual income.) If you’re planning on quitting your job to go out on your own, the six-month expense fund is actually on the low-end of the spectrum, so if nothing else, think way ahead and plan for financial hardship.

2. Start Slowly

Businesses take time to grow, and the same is true for self-employed workers. You’ll need months, if not years, to build up a client list and portfolio of work as an independent contractor. Starting slowly isn’t so much a piece of advice as it is a warning: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you can’t expect your-work-for-yourself career to jumpstart overnight. Before you quit your job to go the self-employed route take on some extra work on the side so you’re not starting from zero when you go out on your own.

3. Carve Out A Workspace

Working from home shouldn’t mean working from bed. And even though working in your pajamas is a nice little plus when you’re home alone, you shouldn’t get overly cozy. If you’re going to work for yourself, you need to stay just as, if not more, productive than your counterparts in an office. Not all of us can reserve a separate room as an office at home, but even a corner or dedicated desk for work can help set boundaries. Point is, you need to find a way to get into “work-mode” in the same place you’re usually in “relax-mode,” which is not as easy as it sounds.

4. Do Your (Tax) Homework

When you’re self-employed, all the little things can pile up, and one thing you can’t afford to disregard is your taxes. There’s no one-size-fits-all advice for staying on top of your taxes when you’re self-employed, so if nothing else: do your homework! Research what tax rate you owe, figure out whether or not you should be filing quarterly, etc. And most of all, don’t try to fly under the radar by not filing. There’s nothing worse or scarier than getting audited by the IRS, and if you’re working for yourself, you probably can’t afford that type of trouble.

5. Find Clients

Okay, this is obvious advice, but you need to be thinking strategically about how you’re going to build your client list. No matter what industry you’re in you should be actively searching for work as a contractor, and even once the ball is rolling, word of mouth isn’t always enough. Get your name and services out there soon and often.

6. Buy Health Insurance

Just like filing taxes for yourself, buying your own health insurance requires a little research. Thankfully, marketplace healthcare is actually pretty easy to navigate, so it just comes down to putting in the legwork to find the right plan for you (and your bank account). Most importantly: the penalty for not buying health insurance just isn’t worth it, especially given the possibility of a potential health scare.

Working for yourself can be stressful, but a little bit of prep goes a long way. If you use our list above as a quick checklist, you should be off to a good start.