In order to build a successful, sustainable freelance career, you are going to have to charge clients lots of money.

If you’re new to freelance, these amounts might sound weird coming out of your mouth.

If you’ve been freelancing a long time, you already know this. And yet it’s easy to let our guard down and agree to a little less than we usually charge.

We’ll help you adopt the right mindset about money so you are consistently charging enough to make more than you need.

The reason freelancers have to charge an insane amount of money is because we are running a company.

We have to pay ourselves a salary. But we also have to provide our lone employee (that’s ourselves again) with health insurance, retirement, paid vacation, sick leave, and a holiday bonus.

We also have to provide an office, a computer, buy any equipment or software we need, build our website, and pick up the bill if we’re taking a prospective client out to dinner.

And whereas full-time employees have their taxes and insurance taken out of their paychecks, freelancers have to pay our own taxes.

We’ll help you figure out what you need to make to live well, pay your taxes, save for retirement and have money leftover.

They say death and taxes are the only certainties in life.

But when you’re a freelancer who works in the creative industry, negotiating your rate when you take on a new client is the third certainty.

Occasionally a client will tell you what they want to pay, but more often they’ll ask you how much you charge. And in order to answer that you’ll have to explain how you charge.

And depending on the job and how you work, one method might be far more beneficial to you than another.

So it’s extremely important to understand the different ways to charge and the pros and cons of each.

We’ll break down what you can charge based on

• Your Reputation
• Your Experience
• Your Role
• Where You Work
• Who You Work For

And we’ll share 6 tactics for getting what you want from clients when you sit down at the negotiation table, whether that’s a literal table, your home office desk where you’re volleying emails back or forth, or a Zoom call with your prospective client.