Freelancer

What is a Freelancer?

Introduction

Within the media industry, there are many freelancers who specialise in either video or audio editing, journalism, web design and many more.

A freelancer is someone who is self employed and uses their own expertise in a specific field of work to clients who hire them.

They usually have their own flexible work schedule as they don't work with a company with the money they earn belonging entirely to themselves. A freelancer can work with multiple clients at once for various specific jobs that the clients request.

There are three types of freelancing you can go for.

These being:

Sole Trader - You are self-employed and work as an individual.
Partnership - You are self-employed but you work with one or more people.
Limited Company - You and the company are separate and at least have one shareholder and one director.

Sole Trader Pros & Cons

Pros: You make all the decisions and get to keep all your profits post tax.

Cons: You are solely responsible for making decisions that could be profitable or a loss.

Partnership Pros & Cons

Pros: Responsibility is shared between you and your work partner and can work together to come up with ideas that the both of you may agree on.

Cons: Post tax profits are spilt between workers and you'll need to trust one another and work well together.

Limited Company Pros & Cons

Pros: If the company is in financial difficulty, you are not personally responsible for it.

Cons: There are a lot more rules and legal responsibilities when making a limited company.

Overall freelancing

Pros and cons

There are a few cons to freelancing as you'll mostly might have to seek out work as well as not making a lot of profit from it to begin with. as a freelancer is self employed and not part of a company, they cannot apply for holiday and cannot get sick pay as they're there own boss, also with the fact that you'll have to pay taxes and subscriptions for your work.

Resources