Good Question.

And on the face of it, this is an easy one to answer: Have sufficient clients paying you a sufficient rate to give you what you want to earn.

So if you want to replace a €30,000 a year job, and if your expenses amount to €5,000 per year, you will need to charge enough clients enough money to generate €35,000 in income.  If you are willing to work, say, 20 hours per week seeing clients, for 45 weeks of the year, you would need to charge them €39 per hour (35,000/ 20/45 = 38.89). However, if you only want to work 10 hours a week seeing clients, then you’ll need to charge them €78 per hour (35000 / 10 / 45).

That’s the simple answer. The more complicated piece is of course, that you won’t have the same number of clients every week, because people are sick, or away, or winding down, or on shift work, or have just got other commitments. So in order to have 20 PAYING clients each week, you probably need to have 22-25 ongoing clients at any time, or more, if they don’t come weekly.

Your income is a product of two factors, the number of hours and the price per hour (most people charge on an hourly basis, if you charge on a different basis, obviously this statement doesn’t hold true.) To increase your income, you have to vary one or both of those factors, so you’ll need to get paid for more hours, or charge a higher fee per hour, or both.

However, there are other issues that we haven’t taken into account here, such as the perks attached to being a salaried employee, these include pension entitlements, sick pay, holiday pay, and maternity pay. Self-employed therapists have to fund all of these themselves. If you want to contribute to a pension plan, that amount needs to be added to the overall total you started with above, and so on.

And then, when you receive the money from clients, some portion of it needs to be put aside for those times when you are not earning, such as holidays or sick leave. This sounds complicated but really it’s not. It can be simply worked out, a system put in place, and then you’re up and running. So you know that each week you need to put €x into a savings account to cover those eventualities.

If this is a question that you’re struggling with, I can help you! Contact me here for a free 20 minute consultation or browse my services here.

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