5 Money Saving Tips for Freelancers

Source: http://workawesome.com/goals/money-saving-tips/

So, at last you have decided to dive deep into the freelance world and have already started to feel the freedom of working under yourself and further on your own schedules. Sounds thrilling! Doesn’t it? Your dream of working while seated in the local café or bookshop and drinking coffee comes true.
However, this honeymoon phase might fade out soon, and you find might yourself gazing miserably at your bank account. With these hot money saving tips, you should be alright.
Financial stress, however, is not necessarily an essential condition of freelancing. Nevertheless, financial sickness can come from freelancing if not done with proper care. You have to make a few compromises and planning if you want to step ahead and become financially fit as a freelancer.

1. Cut back on your workplace expenses
These days many freelancers work at either coffee shops or bookstores. Here you pay anything from $5 to $10 just for drinks, snacks and WiFi. To save some bucks of yours, work in a library and always pack your own snacks.
Never pay for WiFi. From OpenWiFiSpots.com you can simply get a list of free WiFi spots in your area and choose any place of your convenience. For instance, from July 1, Starbucks has started offering free, one-click, unlimited WiFi to all of its company-owned stores in the United States.

2. Revise your Cell Plan
In the beginning days of your self-employment, you might find it difficult to manage your phone bills. You could even incur huge mobile bills without knowing that there are many cheaper plans to undertake.
You won’t believe that with just $20 you could double your minute allowance. BillShrink is a very good site to compare your cell phone plans, and here you can easily compare several plans, and choose one of your choice. You can even stick to your landline for just $20 a month. Besides saving some bucks, it will also provide you emergency help if you misplace or lose your cell phone.

3. Check out Free Office Equipment
If you need a chair, new desk, shelves, or drawers, you can go to freecycle.org to cheek whether anyone is donating any free stuff within your neighbourhood. It’s certainly a unique way to save and recycle.
You can also visit Craigslist to find free stuff within the ‘For Sale’ and ‘Free’ subcategory. Make sure you are buying office equipments, which you absolutely need. Get your stuffs on sale or free from online stores. You can also buy from friends or from relatives. Believe me, newer and attractive things are not necessarily better.
From websites like Freecycle, eBay, Craigslist and Amazon you can easily get high discount on office equipments. Further, your local thrift stores could also prove to be helpful to save your money.

4. Invest in Multifunction Equipment
Instead buying single-tasking equipments, buy the one which has multiple functions. For example, you can buy a three-in-one printer, scanner and fax machine just for $80. In addition, this will occupy a very small place in your office. If you are a hyper-faxer, you can go for a membership with eFax. Through eFax, you will be able to receive and send faxes via email. If you do so, you don’t have to buy a fax machine and print tons of papers, at the end saves you much.

5. Save on your Taxes
For freelancers, taxes are simply equal to nightmares. However, it’s really easy to deal with them. Below are the ways:
TurboTax: You can use TurboTax’s online Business Edition to measure your taxes. The annual subscription cost is just $75. It very simply and gradually shows your expenses and write-offs. Through it, you could even save up to $3500 yearly.
Bookkeeping: Many people prefer to pay someone else for bookkeeping. However, it is very simple to do it on your own, once you discover a good system.
There is an application called Billings which takes care of everything in your business on your behalf. You will be able to write up invoices and estimates, keep track of business expenses, client payments and deposits. Further, by using this application, you will be able to keep track of your 1099’s and do your taxes with ease.