We are back us some exciting information about safety in freelancing. In this week’s freelance guide, we are going to discuss how you can minimize the risk of possible Scams you can face being a freelancer. The benefits of freelancing are many: better work-life balance, the ability to choose your work hours and clients and unlimited income potential. However, being a freelancer you require careful planning and preparation.
Biggest fear:
Spending sleepless nights on a project, ignoring your family to fulfill the demands of the client but the biggest fear of every freelancer can hunt you. SCAM!! Upon completing a full project you don’t receive any money... who to ask no one is there to answer. Putting an end to this Freelancing Group is working with local and international clients and freelances, as a middle man to provide security for both clients and freelancers. Anyone can benefit from their Admis by keeping them informed about the project while with someone for the first time, and all this without any cost. As clients will post any job they have to pay it a full fee to the Admin, upon completing a satisfactory job the freelancer will receive his fee if, failed it will get back to the client. In case if you are familiar with the person you are working with you can deal without the middle man. If you are dealing with the client outside the Freelancing platform or without middle man always ask for a copy of CNIC to deal with legal purposes ( if any).
Lost balance
Today's clients expect 24/7 service. You may receive client calls late at night, on weekends and while you are on vacation. As a freelancer, you must ensure that you can only provide your services during some specific hours, especially if you serve clients in other time zones. You need to draw a line between your personal and professional life otherwise you may lose balance; as a result, you may lose valued clients or your beloved family.
Being Ethical
You may be good at what you do, but one of the top qualities that most clients look for in a freelancer is integrity. Good ethical practices lead to a reputation for integrity. Bad ethical practices do not. Never Work with a company with questionable products. Never complain publically about any client or other freelancers. Most importantly meet the decided deadline, if you are unable to do so under any circumstances inform your client before time.
No Scams
In order to minimize scams always be prepared. Always ask for a Copy of clients CNIC not matter from which country they belong to. Always set the deadline and terms of working in written and keep them as evidence. If you got scammed anyhow report to” National Response Centre for Cyber Crimes “as soon as possible. Also, use the power of social media to spread the word so that other freelancers stay safe.
Tax laws
The tax rate for self-employed individuals is 0% for the first PKR 400,000 of income – which translates to about PKR 33,000 per month. The way these brackets work is that the first PKR 400,000 is not taxed even if you make more. You pay the tax rate on each bracket on the amount that exceeds the limit of the previous bracket, not your entire income. The maximum tax rate of 25% applied to any income greater than PKR 2,500,000, which is about PKR 200,000 a month. In case you make that much in a year, you would pay PKR 347,500 plus 25% of the amount that you make in excess of PKR 2,500,000
Don’t forget about computer safety
It is not just about how you can use the Internet. There are many great ways to be careful online and to be sure not too much of your information gets exposed. But this is all useless if a hacker can just break into your computer, steal your files, and log your Internet sessions and conversations in real-time. So you need to make sure you keep yourself generally safe when using your computer. This means having a firewall in place, a quality anti-virus program installed, and maybe even a toolbar plug-in to watch out for malicious downloads, installs, and etc. Further, you might want to stick with Google Chrome for browsing as it is generally the safest browser around.
If you plan to keep a log of all your accounts, messages, and/or transactions, likely for accounting purposes, then invest in an external hard drive. You can transfer the files to the hard drive and delete them from your computer afterward.
An alternative to this would be copying everything over to cloud storage, but if your computer is compromised there’s a good chance your cloud storage could be too. It is necessary to create a secure environment
for yourself so you can truly concentrate on your work. Make sure that you have
your term and condition written well to avoid any misunderstanding. Till next week take care of yourself and be
safe.
