Realize that you are going into business for yourself. Bread will only arrive on your table and the mortgage will only get paid through your blood, sweat, and t

Realize that you are going into business for yourself. Bread will only arrive on your table and the mortgage will only get paid through your blood, sweat, and tears (not speaking figuratively at all here). You have to hunt down that prospect, turn them into a customer. You do the work, you do the billing, you nag them until they pay the invoice, and gee wiz, you may have accounts payable before you have accounts receivable. 1) Health insurance: assuming you are in the US, you buy it - try ehealthinsurance.com, your state's health exchange, etc. 2) You figure out what your customers can afford relative to what your competitors are charging 3) As much as you can get, from any source you can find. Build a sales pipeline, you are in business for yourself now. 4) There's no time for social interaction, you are self-employed. Any time you aren't doing the work, you need to be doing sales, bookkeeping, marketing, updating your website, writing new work proposals, and half-a-dozen other things. Your only social interaction will be with customer and prospective customers. I'm only partially kidding. I'm assuming the 20 hours/week that you are doing now is in addition to a full time gig. If that's the case, keep your day job. Keep doing these moonlighting gigs (and saving the money from them!) and use them as a test to help you figure out things like a) what to charge b) what it takes to win new business c) how much work you can handle. When you have enough work built up that it is overtaking your day job, then you'll know it is time to quit and go full time on consulting. Good luck!