EMPLOYEES: To file your taxes, collect your W-2s and any statements you might have regarding investments and mortgage interest paid. Enter them all in TurboTax. Print and submit. Done!

FREELANCERS: Obsessively collect receipts and track your mileage driven. If you take the generally better deduction for actual vehicle expenses, keep all your fuel, insurance and maintenance receipts as well. Track your self-employed health insurance payments as well (for which you may well get no deduction, anyway). File them all away, then in January begin adding up all those scraps of paper, segregating expenses according to the type. Measure the part of your home dedicated to your office in order to calculate the home office deduction to which you are entitled. Gather up all those 1099s, hound clients who should have sent you one but didn’t (or did but it was incorrect), and account for payments not 1099′d. Spend at least half your time spent doing your tax forms, just filling out and double-checking the Schedule C. Print out about 20some pages when you are all done… and after all that, don’t forget to sign! Oh and by the way, if it turns out you owe significantly more in income taxes than you paid in estimated payments… either pay up by February 1st or be subject to a penalty!

EMPLOYEES: You can apply for a mortgage with a year or two of 1040′s and your W-2 attached.
FREELANCERS (PRE-HOUSING BUBBLE): Most mortgage lenders treat you as if you are an unemployed bum (my own ‘friendly’ credit union, where I’d kept my accounts for 15 years, pretty much gave me that treatment). The few who will even look at your application will demand three years’ worth of financial statements done by a certified accountant, along with the corresponding 1040 paperwork.
FREELANCERS (DURING THE HOUSING BUBBLE): Everyone got a loan, even unemployed bums.
FREELANCERS (POST-HOUSING BUBBLE): Unless you have enough cash on hand to make a substantial down payment, you are considered as credit-worthy as an unemployed bum, even if you have the paperwork in order to prove otherwise.

I’ve been freelance (sort of by accident) for 20 years, almost since I completed my BA degree in broadcast production. Random thoughts:

*freelancing is not for undisciplined people, especially those with a home office. Though, the fear of not being able to pay your bills is certainly plenty of motivation to get up early and leave the TV off.
*for all the hurdles of freelancing, the rewards are tremendous. Usually the client-vendor relationship is a much more ‘adult’ and equal relationship than boss-employee. Not always, but usually.
*I can work how I please. I often have NPR or RAI (italian television) on in the background for white noise; I can easily tune in and tune out depending on the task at hand. It doesn’t distract me at all from my work (if it did, I’d just turn it off).
*freelancing is definitely not for people who can’t cope with the lack of co-worker contact. Sitting at your desk without anyone telling you what to do, without co-workers to collaborate with, can be *very* lonely and *very* intimidating. I would submit that only kids are better-adapted to freelancing than others.
*freelancing is definitely for people who are very intelligent and don’t like dealing with typical workplace stupidity, including co-workers and bosses who fear and loathe they perceive as being more competent than they are and will seek to sabotage you and keep you down.
*freelancing is definitely for people who love what they do. I get up early and work late and don’t mind at all. Life is too short to spend so much of it doing work that you hate! (I even work on weekends, but SSSSHHH don’t tell my clients; I don’t want them to get the idea that they can call me on holidays, nights and weekends unless it’s a true emergency)

I was not naturally born to the freelance career lifestyle, except for my independent streak. I was, and sometimes still am, an anxious person. What I can say is that freelancing has taught me a lot about life and myself, including how to cope with anxiety and how to perceive that things aren’t necessarily how they seem in a particular moment. It’s made me sharp (in the good way) at networking and building my career and interpersonal skills. The down side of being an employee is that these days there is hardly any such thing as ‘job security’. I think all employees would be wise to always be looking for the next opportunity. You never know when you will be RIF’d, no matter how good you are at what you do. Having to learn all over again how to look for work really sucks.

Finally, I’d like to conclude by returning to what I said at the beginning – I’ve been freelancing nearly my entire career, since 1990 when working from home was a completely foreign idea to most 9-to-5′ers. I wish I had a buck for every time some slave of The Man told me, – explicitly or implicitly – to ‘get a job’, as if I sat around here eating bon-bons and watching “Oprah” all day long. My own father pretty much told me that over and over for years. As if clients just send me the four- and five-figure checks that pay my bills, because they like my winning personality.

Today, I am certain a lot of those thoughtless cretins who over the years told me to ‘get a job’ have become personally familiar with how insecure their secure employment actually is. These days, working from a home office is no longer the strange and incomprehensible way of making a living that it seemed to many when I started doing it all those years ago.

Meanwhile, I long ago got over their scorn. All I had to do was remind myself (and, sometimes, the offending cretin) that I lived a lifestyle they would envy. You see, for most of the past 20 years I’ve managed to make a decent (sometimes, VERY decent) income and take off during the slow summer months for weeks at a time and go travelling abroad. Meanwhile, they are chained to their desks whether they like it or not, whether there is work to do or not.

I wouldn’t trade my career for working for The Man. No way. I’d be miserable.

I’ve been around long enough that nobody is going to hand you a 100k job right out of school.

The reality is that nobody is going to hand you ANY job right out of school. You have to compete with hundreds of other candidates for every single position until you get your first 2,000+ hours. I know a CFII who has been waiting for 9 months to get a job as a CFI. Until gets his foot in that door, he’ll never build the time he needs to get an entry level job. There are too few jobs and too many low-time pilots.

Is it possible to make a living flying? I would like to make in the range of 50K in a few years.

A living? Maybe. $50K in a few years? No.

I really want to know where people are getting the idea that they can make a lot of money as helicopter pilots. While it’s true that some very experienced (think 10,000+ hours) and very specialized (think long line, logging, firefighting) pilots can indeed make a good living, the vast majority don’t and can’t.

Sorry to be a realist, but I see what’s going on in the job market. It breaks my heart to see guys going into deep debt to chase a dream that they don’t fully understand.

Why not take flying lessons on the side to see if you LIKE flying before you get yourself into debt? Then find yourself some REAL pilots — not the wannabes and head cases on the forums — and talk to them about what they went through to get where they are. Check the job listings and see how much experience is required. Then think about how you might get that experience — how long it will take, how many guys are competing for the same jobs, climbing up the ladder with you. Do your homework thoroughly before taking the dive.

However, here is my delema… I really want to fly for a living and love to fly. I currently have a good job at a local fire department. I work a 24/48 schedule. My training will be with in my opinion a good school Silverhawk Aviation out of Caldwell Idaho. But Firefighting is not my cup of tea. Ive worked in aviation sine I was 14. I know you have to take you knocks to make it up the ladder and hard work and dedication to you field is key to success. But I am very disheartened to hear the doom and gloom of the helicopter job field. I’ve been around long enough that nobody is going to hand you a 100k job right out of school. I currently have a great family and great support for what I want to do. Yet, this whole thread/blog/posting has really made me think twice if I want to do this. I mean fall into 65,000 debt and then never be able to dig out. I havent started my training yet and consider just dropping the whole thing.

However I know I will never be happy if I dont fly… But I have a family to consider. I guess my question is now that the silver state troubles are couple years old and the economy is in a recovery (ever so slight). Is it possible to make a living flying? I would like to make in the range of 50K in a few years. Ill never make that in the fire department. So is this a bad idea.. It’s taken me 10yrs to get to the point I can do this I’ve worked hard at everything I do. I dont want to do this if (I hate to say it) the pay really sucks.. I know it’s shallow but flying is awesome but if it dont pay the bills Im not putting my family through the heart ache.

Unemployment — especially when it’s available for 2 years — is a major benefit to being on someone’s payroll.

Disability is available to freelancers, but only if you purchase disability insurance in advance. I looked into it when my only work was as a writer and they wouldn’t sell it to me, claiming that since I worked at home I could still work when I was “disabled” and no one would know. (What a crock!) I could probably get it now as a pilot — if I paid the premiums.

It basically boils down to this: If we don’t work, we don’t get any financial support (other than welfare or food stamps if we’re very needy).This was actually one of the main points I wanted to make.

Thanks!

Although perhaps somewhat loaded with sentiments, there are some additional points;

If unemployed, a worker receives unemployment benefits. A Freelancer has to dig into savings

If injured on the job, a worker can receive disability compensation, even for the rest of his projected remaining working life. A freelancer receives none for work related injuries

finally – just had to mention it -

Some receive minimal but livable subsidies if they don’t work at all (rent allowances, food stamps etc.etc.) Freelancers still have to carry obligations such as payments for equipment they needed to buy or lease as well as an assortment of fees and insurances

More like

—a newbie— How do u du spritz???
—a moron— Learn ASM
Moderators friend: Get a life dude.
Robotic forum MOd: I am locking this useless and pointless topic: *locks*

The problem isn’t forums going bad but it’s being stagnated and the users are not aware of it so all your getting is recycled garbage much like modern TV or the Liberal BBC which spits out Global Warming propagenda to scare you but that’s another subject.

Stagnation means somthing being blocked or not flowing properly:

Here is dictionary.com’s explanation and I added the word forums just for fun:

verb (used without object)
1. to cease to run or flow, as water, air or internet chat rooms/ forums, etc.
2. to be or become stale or foul from standing, as a pool of water.
3. to stop developing, growing, progressing, or advancing: My mind is stagnating from too much TV.
4. to be or become sluggish and dull: When the leading lady left, the show started to stagnate.

I also believe that the reason why you and I both have “bad luck” isn’t really about luck but rather we have low vibration patterns which the laws of attraction simply bring what we are attached too.

I can’t tell you what to do but I’ll do what I hAVE to do to bring higher level vibrations and maybe then forums will change.

It can actually only take a few people with extraordinary high vibrations to do mass sweeping changes across the earth in areas they work in the best.

I’ll try to find an article for you another day as I am feeling pretty stagnated right now to really care to do much searching:

The whole tech editing process is pretty strange to me. Most of my books are not tech edited. I’m responsible for getting it right. After all, I write on one computer while performing the steps on another right beside it. It’s very difficult to get it wrong. In most cases, comments are usually to correct me on menu command names — for example, “choose Report > Sales” when it should be “choose Reports > Sales.” That stuff is usually caught in the copy editing or proofreading stage.

But I do agree with one thing: cost cutting measures are sure to weed out the professionals and scrape the bottom of the barrel for inexperienced people willing to work for next to nothing. That applies to writers, editors, proofreaders, and production people. Who suffers? The professionals who find themselves with less work to do and the readers, who are reading an inferior product.