After freelancing for 3 years, the most difficult part for me was getting paid for my work. Communicating job requirements was not always difficult. I even enj

After freelancing for 3 years, the most difficult part for me was getting paid for my work. Communicating job requirements was not always difficult. I even enjoyed the process and the challenge. But, I learned there was no way to charge for the work I did both accurately and ethically. This resulted in constantly taking one for the team and doing a ton of extra free work. That extra work also made transitions between jobs require scheduling days or weeks of just in case time. Checks arrived late about 9 out of times. 2 weeks late was the norm but up to 3 months late is what I learned to expect. There was apparently nothing I could do about this. I used a PO box to isolate issues with paper checks and communicated electronic payment info on all invoices. I didn’t like the varying levels of quality demanded and the terms of negotiating them. I really like doing great work, but almost more importantly, I needed to do great work for my portfolio. I would make sacrifices for projects that would help me get more work. So, I would take the job with an agreement to do that, and later be told “we decided we just need something quick. spend as little time as possible” due surprise money/time constraints. This led to work of significantly quality lower than what was already in my portfolio, unless I did more extra free work to make it good.