This is a post from a member of the Freelancers Union community. If you’re interested in sharing your expertise, your story, or some advice you think will help a fellow freelancer out, feel free to send your blog post to us here.

Are you charging enough for your time?

As a freelancer, it’s a risky undertaking when setting your hourly rates. You don’t want to undervalue your services, but at the same time, you don’t want to scare away potential customers with exorbitant fees. However, as a full-time employee, your salary also takes into consideration several large costs like health care, licensing, taxes, and other business essentials that you’ll otherwise cover yourself, when you run your own business.

Are you taking into account how many hours you spend each week on non-billable activities? How about factoring in how much your hourly rate should be adjusted to compensate for the amount of vacation time you plan on taking each year? These are all serious considerations that can lead to disastrous results if you’re not planning ahead.

If you're thinking of leaving your 9-5 to pursue a career as a full-time freelancer, I recommend getting as much traction as possible with your freelancing business, before quitting your day job, so that your transition is seamless.

Our friends at CreativeLive have created this useful graphic to help you figure out exactly how to calculate your freelance hourly rate.

Click here to view the original post on CreativeLive.

Ryan Robinson serves as the Channel Marketing Lead: Money & Life at CreativeLive, and is also a writer at ryrob.com, where he teaches entrepreneurs how to start a business while working full-time.