Are You Sure You Want to Be Self-Employed?

If you don't mind doing without or paying premium prices for health insurance; or you long for days or weeks or even months without a paycheck; then self-employment is for you!

I have tried both pathes and without question I can advise that being an employee is superior to being self employed. As a matter of fact, the only time I would recommend self-employment to anyone would be if they were a professional, prolific and profitable writer, actor or have founded and sit as CEO and President of a very, very profitable Fortune 500 company.Why? Well, it's really quite simple.

Let's say you are self-employed. You might be a small business owner, or a for contract hire. In these instances you will have to:

1) Provide your own health insurance. That's correct, you guessed it, you may not actually be able to afford good quality health insurance.

2) Be good with book-keeping or hire a book keeper. Now if you do that you will be responsible for their salary, working conditions and deal with their vacation time, family life, and so forth. It can get complicated as I'm sure you might guess.

3) Be able to live without a salary on occasion. You will have up times and down times. With that in mind, realize that you will have time periods where you may not have the ability to draw a salary, for yourself! Those down times can last a very brief time, or if you are say in the retail business, you can have a few dry months each year. I

4) Carve out time for vacation with the possibility that you could have to shut down in order to get away for a few days.

Now let's compare this with being employed.

1) In many cases when you are an employee you will receive a benefit package. It might not be free, but it will surely cost less than if you had to provide health benefits for your family entirely by yourself.

2) This benefit package will almost surely contain vacation time. In some cases that time will increase each year! If you don't receive paid vacation time each year, I suggest looking for other employment.

3) Unless the business you work for tanks, or has other financial problems, you may even receive an increase in pay each year. Chances are very good that during the down times in profit for that business you work for you won't be asked to stay home unless of course they are doing extremely poorly in which case you have the freedom to seek out alternative employment. Something that you won't have the freedom to do should you own the business.

Those are the first pros that come to my mind as far as being an employee, but I'm guessing there are quite a few others!