After a year of freelancing I can say that the whole status of course has advantages and disadvantages. If anyone is considering becoming a freelancer, here is my experience.
Things I loved
I loved my work in high season -for me that was February, March and April. A lot of work, diversity, cool projects, great coworkers. I missed a feeling of belonging to a team and hanging out in an office (yes, I could do coworking, but it didn’t make sense at the time since I wasn’t in the office much). In the summer I worked on a project for 4 months and it felt good since I knew that I will be able to pay the bills.
Overall freelancing was an okay experience, having “normirani s.p.” (relevant for Slovenia) is extremely easy. You send the bill, no accounting needed, once a month you pay your social taxes and it takes 5 min of your time. It was also great to have a walk on Roznik hill during the day and enjoy the sun in the morning. I loved the flexiblity and feeling of freedom - no need to be somewhere 8 hours per day, every day, in the same place with the same people. I also went to Portugal, where we surfed + worked abroad, so it was really cool to change the office for 10 days and I didn’t have to use my vacation days. I also traveled a lot and attended many educational events - for sure more than 20 days in a year, I think I came closer to 40 days abroad.
Things that sucked
Slovenian freelancing system does not have any security at all. If you get sick, you still need to pay your social taxes and nobody cares about that. In January, I was sick for 3 weeks so you can imagine that I spent more for taxes than I earned. In the summer I went on vacations and obviously, you are not paid in that time. It’s pretty hard to go somewhere for a month - you can lose the clients and you still have to pay taxes (amount with subvention for the first two years in Slovenia is 240 EUR + tax (depends on your income, around 80 eur a month, so all together around 300 - 400 EUR.
I would survive the issue with sick leave and holidays, if my clients would pay the bills on time. They didn’t because in Slovenia we don’t have any security about that as well - the only thing you can do is to go to court and it can take a very long time that you actually get the money or you can hire a company that deals with this and you pay them around 25 % of your bill, which is quite a lot. I worked a lot with ngos, that finance from state sources and I had to wait 2,3 months to get paid and I had to write 10 pages of a report for everything I did - so annoying. I also wrote some articles - horrible experience, I wrote the article in February and got paid in May. And in the end the most bitter experience of all came - when I finished my 4 month project in August, my client didn’t pay my last bill for 2 months. I was so angry and it was draining my energy - with every email reminder about the unpaid bill I felt like crap.
Would I repeat it?
At the moment I am employed for a full time. It’s great because I love the work I do,I have great coworkers and really cool bosses with very modern mentality. They also honestly care about people and make you feel valued, respected and welcome. Of course it’s much less flexible but I’m fine with that for now. And in 10 years? I think I see myself somewhere in between - I want to be a part of the team but at the same time I’d love more freedom and flexibility.
