Update

Full Time Employee at Day, Part Time Freelancer at Night - Is That Possible?

Posted: 06 Jun 2009 02:33 AM PDT

MJ Ces of PinoyCopywriter had taken time to write an interesting comment on this previous post Before You Go on Freelancing, Ask Yourself. All his points are true for any part time freelancer with a day job. I want to add my own personal notes and experiences when I had been in the same similar situation.

Part time freelancing requires long hours. This is true. When I was working in my first job as an instructor I was doing part time coding for another company. I had sleepless nights and tired work days. I could not easily concentrate at work because I worry about so many things.
It's exhausting. As I was doing that huge gig, I had several sleepless nights just to finish the work. It was a huge gig that I luckily had but it had taken toll over my body. I did not perform well at work and it was difficult for me to learn new things. What's worse is that my work often required me to work long hours in the office.
You can hit big time with just one deal. When I got the money paid out to me, I used that money to buy a new computer. I was not good at handling finances way back then, so the rest of that money was spend on useless luxuries that I wanted.
There are dry seasons. Even as a full time freelancer I had experienced dry seasons too at one point. I did not waste that time idle. I tried learning all the tricks of the freelance trade. I upgraded my skills. I had invested my earnings back to upgrade my computer, repair my old monitor and get a DSL connection. I explored other avenues of earning – that was the time when I turned to blogging and learned that it was possible to earn from them for quite sometime.

MJ Ces thinks that full time work gives him steady income and qualify for loans in getting big ticket items such as a house and a wedding - this is surely the employee mindset that I had mentioned. Entrepreneurs think differently: they are able to delay gratification and they work and decide well with all the available resources at hand. Many successful entrepreneurs started out with nothing in their hands.

As I had mentioned a freelancer should have an entrepreneurial mindset, and any startup business have this kind of problem to overcome at the beginning. Once that the business had been established, the income becomes steady already.

This is actually what's happening to me right now. I have a steady stream of clients and I keep on getting endless invitations for work in unexpected places. My financial problems are starting to clear up. In no time I will be earning multiple times than the average worker with the same skill set – active and passive income combined from freelancing and blogging.

I never had to worry about lack of sleep, because I can just get enough winks anytime.

To top all that, my previous work was related to electronics engineering and I still have my license for that. My chances at getting another full time job with that experience is much more difficult because of the global financial crisis.

All that started with having a computer that had started to show blue screen of death errors, a monitor that kept on showing rainbow colors at random, a dial up connection at home as well as outdated IT skills that I had which was good to use a decade ago.