If you’re a freelancer already, you know about the benefits of the job: not only does it allow you to build your schedule yourself, freelancing also allows you a lot of flexibility to travel, engage in new hobbies, and teach yourself new skills. However, as beneficial as freelancing is for many people, it’s also a career path that comes with a few more inherent risks than other career paths – ones that became evident during the pandemic and will continue to be relevant for years to come.
This is why it’s important to diversify your income streams.
Here are a few reasons why it’s important to diversify your income streams if you’re a freelancer.
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1. Protect against global issues.
While the pandemic is relatively behind us, it was an eye-opening look into the trials that freelancers and part-time workers can come to face. Most other careers have a way of supporting their workers, but with freelancers being their own boss, this support is non-existent – and if the client payments you depend on are irregular or delayed, it’s even harder when a global problem hits your career.
Ideally, you’ll have savings, but if you don’t, another way of making sure you’ll be fine is diversifying your income streams.
2. Protect against loss of demand.
Some jobs will come in and out of popularity; we’ve seen it with photographers, bloggers, short-form copywriters, and other freelance careers. While these jobs don’t fully go away, it might be difficult to find work if you specialise in one or two niche options for work. As a result, it’s far better to consider branching out into as many fields as possible so that you protect yourself against your career path becoming less in demand and possibly affecting your savings.
3. Loss of a big client
Through no fault of your own, sometimes you’ll lose a particularly important client and your earnings will dip. With freelance work so particular about clients, it’s likely that finding another big ticket client will take you some time, so it’s a lot better if you have other career streams to fall into just until you can make up the difference. While it’s not necessarily the case, if you can’t find a similar client, at least you can rest assured that you’ll be insulated from the loss of income with one of your other revenue streams.
4. Extended period of illness
Sometimes things work out differently than you expect, and you might need to take an extended period of rest away from your normal work, whatever that work might be. Therefore, it might be easier to consider having income streams with a longer pay-off cycle, so that in the event that you need to take a break, you are protected from having to dip into your savings.
With freelance work becoming a much bigger part of the working world, and clients worldwide willing to pay good money for on-demand work, getting into freelancing has never been more exciting – however, remember that, as with every other career, freelance work isn’t protected from issues that are affecting the working world globally, and so you should always make sure to protect yourself against a loss of income.
