For many a person, there is something to be said in being their own person, that is therefore not employed by some other person or corporation, but works instead for their own self. While that does sound pretty darn good on the surface, and perhaps helps assuage a given person’s ego, there are an awful lot of good reasons why it behooves most people to desire to be an employee of a good company or organization, as opposed to working on their own, instead.
The very first thing to recognize about working is that most people have a strong desire to work in a profession that provides them with security, a good wage, career advancement, as well as a good benefit package. In fact, many a company offers to their employees, that good wage, with a fair amount of security, avenues for advancement, and benefit packages which may well include 401K matching, healthcare benefits, dental benefits, vacation time, sick leave, personal time off, stock options, and various other perks and benefits, based upon one’s length of employment with the company as well as profits and growth so being made by that company.
In consideration, of the bills and other financial obligations that we are obligated to address, along with family duties to attend to, it certainly makes sense for many a person to desire to secure the type of employment that will best be able to fulfill those obligations on a consistent and reliable basis. This thus means that for most people, being an employee of a good company is the correct avenue to take. Yet, even when people know this, we live in a society, in which more and more people aren’t being offered full time employment at jobs that they would normally expect such to be offered at, but are being encouraged instead to be an independent contractor to them, or a gig worker, or a consultant, or things along those lines, by these very same entities that normally would be the place where an individual would go to get hired as a full time employee. The fact that this is the case, should be the very first sign, that being a so-called “independent contractor” with the conditions appearing to be dictated by that which would normally represent one’s employer, is probably going to be a situation, in which one entity is going to come out way better than the other.
The fact of the matter is that when someone is an independent contractor, that these individuals are thus typically responsible for their own healthcare, their own sick leave and vacation time, their own holiday pay, as well as being responsible for both the employee and employer self-employment tax. Additionally, it is common for the independent contractor to have no firm guarantees of how long their work duties will continue with whomever that they are working with; which thus signifies that it is up to that independent contractor to secure more work, if necessary, by their own initiative. In short, while it might feel good to be an independent contractor because it seems to mean that therefore you are your own boss – being one’s own boss isn’t all that, when at the end of the day, the risk to return, leaves something to be desired.