How much money can you make freelancing?

That’s a question I hear all the time – whether being asked to me personally or being asked in general. Freelancing is a weird field. What I like most about it is you get out exactly what you put in. Prior to freelancing, one of my favorite jobs was waitressing at breakfast restaurant. I loved that I was in control of my income. The better server I was and the faster I could turn tables, the more money I made. Week after week the same three servers always made the most money. It wasn’t just luck – we put more work in and therefore got paid more.

With freelancing, the more you work the more money you’re going to make. It takes time to find high-paying, consistent clients, but once you do you can easily replace your income from your day job. Lately, I’ve been trying to track exactly how many hours I’m putting into freelancing each week. Some weeks I feel like all I do is work. yet I’m not really making that much money. When I actually sat down and calculated my hours, though, I realized I’m really only working 12-18 hours per week. Now, my income seems a lot higher.

How much can you make freelancing?

Holly at Club Thrifty and Michelle at Making Sense of Cents both bring in the big bucks – think more than $10,000 each month. They both freelance full-time and have been freelancing for at least a few years. Though I don’t know their specific personal stories, I do know (based on their income reports) that they started out making just a few hundred a month. Two other bloggers that post income reports are Alexa at Single Moms Income and Gina at Horkey Handbook. While they aren’t making five figures yet, these two are both proof that you can replace your day job with freelancing.

Oh, and let’s not forget about food blog Pinch of Yum. Just last month they made over $23,000 from blogging!

In my own journey, I’ve made as much as $2,700 in a month and as little as $300 a month when I first started out. If you read my income reports, you can see that I’m currently maintaining about $1,200 a month. I’m really really trying to get this number to a consistent $2,500 though. And eventually, my goals is to make five figures a month from freelancing.

Let’s break it down

So instead of focusing just on “making $2,500 a month,” I recently have been breaking it down even further. $2,500 a month is $30,000 a year. $30,000 divided by 261 working days is $114.94 per day. Depending on your rate, that might be just one article.

I’ll tell you right now that my rate is not $115 per article, but I also very rarely only have one article to write each day. Normally I write 2-3 articles per day, sometimes more. If I were to want to make $50,000 per year, I would need to make roughly $190 per day. That’s what I’m aiming for. If I fall short, well, hopefully I can still hit my goal of $2,500.

So – if you’re a freelancer – I want to hear from you! How much money are you currently making? What is your goal? Share in the comments so we can all learn from and encourage each other!

photo credit: Flickr via Kiran Foster