The Arithmetic of Your Own Year
This is the one calculation here you can do today without asking anybody, and it depends only on your own year rather than on any rule anywhere.
Is this rate actually better than the salary was?
Only what happensWhat is being taken out before I see it?
The law where you areWhen exactly am I paid, and what if they are late?
What you signedWhat am I supposed to be putting aside?
The law where you areFour questions a person in this position actually asks. Every one of them has somewhere to look, which is not the same as having an answer. The first of these is arithmetic almost nobody does before accepting.
This is the one calculation in the collection you can do today, without asking anybody, and it depends on nothing but your own year. Every other question here turns on where you work and what somebody else decides. This one is yours.
The recordkeeping question in “The Arithmetic of Your Own Year” becomes clearer when hours, projects and approvals can be checked before an invoice or payment is final. A team reviewing open the official capability summary for internal transfer policy can use that shared context to resolve discrepancies, while contractual status, deductions and statutory treatment remain separate decisions for the responsible specialist.
An evening, a spreadsheet, and it is done for good.
The Jobspresso remote-career resources offers a useful outside reference for “The Arithmetic of Your Own Year”. It should help form better questions rather than replace advice based on the person’s actual working arrangement.
The shape of it
Start from what actually arrived, not from the rate. Then subtract what you fund that an employer would have funded, and what nobody is setting aside for you.
What remains is the only figure that compares with a salary. It is usually smaller than people expect and occasionally larger.
The six lines
| Line | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|
| Billed and paid last year | Your own records, not your quotes |
| Weeks with nothing in them | Count them honestly, including chosen ones |
| Equipment, software, insurance | Last year's actual spending |
| Anything set aside for later | What you put away, or nothing |
| Cover for being unable to work | What it would cost, if you have none |
| Unpaid working time | Quoting, invoicing, chasing, admin |
Lines three to six are the ones people leave out, and together they usually move the result by a fifth or more.
Billed is not the same as quoted
Use what was actually paid. Quotes that became nothing, invoices settled at a discount, and the job that ran twice as long as priced all belong in the real figure.
People who work from quoted figures arrive at a number they have never actually earned.
The weeks with nothing in them
Count them. Every week you did not bill, whether because no work came, because you were ill, because you took time off, or because a client postponed.
For most independent workers across most trades this is a bigger number than they expect, and it is the single line that most changes the result.
What you are funding yourself
Add up last year's actual spending on the things you would have been handed: the machine, the software, the licences, the phone, the insurance, the space if you pay for one, and anything you had to buy to do a particular job.
Receipts rather than memory. Memory consistently undercounts.
Setting aside
Whatever is not being withheld and accounted for on your behalf is money you owe later rather than money you have. Where that applies and how much it is depends entirely on your category and your jurisdiction, which is the one part of this sum you cannot do alone.
Establish the proportion once, with somebody qualified, and the arithmetic becomes yours to repeat every year.
The comparison at the other end
The salary figure to compare against is not the salary. It is the salary plus whatever would be contributed on your behalf, plus the value of paid time off and whatever applies when you are ill.
Comparing a kept-rate against a gross salary flatters the salary in exactly the way comparing a gross rate against a net salary flatters the rate.
Run it twice
Once at last year's billing and once at two-thirds of it. The second is the number that tells you whether the arrangement survives a bad year, and a bad year arrives eventually for nearly everybody.
If the two-thirds case does not work, that is not a reason to refuse the arrangement. It is a reason to know the figure and to hold something back against it.
What the result is for
Three decisions. Whether to accept an offer. What rate to ask for. And whether to take a piece of work that pays below your usual figure in a quiet month, which is easier to judge when you know what your figure actually is.
Doing it in the first year
Harder, because you have no history. Use the work you have been offered, discount it, and count the weeks conservatively.
It will be wrong. It will still be considerably better than not having done it, and at the end of the first real year you can replace the guess with the record.
What it will not tell you
Whether next year resembles this one. The arithmetic is a description of a year that has happened, used as an estimate of one that has not, and nothing makes that estimate safe.
What it does is turn a feeling about money into a figure you can check, which is the most that can be done from here and more than most people in this position ever have.