If you’re considering starting your own company and becoming a freelancer, it’s likely that you crave a sense of freedom in your work and that you want to have more control over the way that you earn a living. Freelancing can have many advantages over working as an employee, and you may even find that you are able to increase your income substantially.
However, you will also need to take a more proactive role when it comes to the legal side of being self-employed. The following are 3 tips that all aspiring freelancers should be aware of when they first start out.
Be on Top of Your Tax Obligations
No matter how much you earn as a freelancer, you’ll probably need to pay more than you think in taxes. You’ll need to pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes in full, even before they start to think about income tax.
Get Things in Writing
Before entering any type of business relationship as a freelancer, it’s important that you get everything in writing. This will give you peace of mind as well as the leverage to be able to hold a person accountable for what they previously promised.
Enforce Your Intellectual Property Rights
When you are self-employed, you own your ideas. Therefore, you must enforce this and make sure that you spell this out before working with a client so that they do not take advantage of your intellectual property.
If you are thinking about setting up your own business as a freelancer, it’s time to get a clear idea of all the laws that will affect you and how being self-employed differs from being an employee of another company.