One of the hardest parts of starting your business or freelancing is trying to figure out what you should charge. Years ago after accepting pennies on the dollar for work, I decided I wanted to get really serious about freelancing. I wanted to dive in headfirst and never look back. But I didn’t know what to charge.

So, I did what any real professional would do and I Google’d it. There were countless blogs and articles that attempted to break pricing down and give me a good idea about what I should charge. It was all too much for me to process until I just decided to charge what I felt was good and increase steadily each month.

Pricing is a tough area for some of us, especially those of us who are passionate about the work. Many of us wouldn’t mind doing work for free just because we like it so much, but then, that’s irresponsible. So again, we’re left with the age old question, “What should I charge”?

YourRate.co

That’s where YourRate.co comes in. It’s a no-nonsense calculator that tells you how much you should charge. They ask 3 simple questions: how much do you want to make per month? How many hours a week do you want to work? And how many weeks do you want off a year? After inputting the info, you’ll get a figure that gives you your hourly rate.

The key to YourRate’s approach? It’s not about what the market will bare, it’s about what you’re worth.

Pro: It’s simple. It was created solely to figure out how much a freelancer should make an hour.

Cons: It doesn’t include expenses. And this is really minor, but be aware that you want to factor that type of thing into your desired income per month. It’s no biggie to include on your own, but it’s definitely something you’ll want to think about. However, the calculator does double your rate for some expenses such as taxes.

Here’s a picture of my ideals. I’m dreaming, but obviously you need to make sure these are figures you’re comfortable with and go from there. You also may want to see how this fits for you if you don’t do hourly and only do flat rates (like myself). The idea of this website is obviously to get you to value yourself more and charge more for what you desire. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of charging what ‘the guy down the street’ charges; you’re not the guy down the street, if you’re not meeting your goals what are you doing?

Are you undercharging? How do you calculate your rate? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, money image via Shutterstock.

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If you haven’t figured out Obamacare yet… join the club.

There’s a lot we need to learn about our new health care system.

But there is SOMETHING we all do know… Obamacare offers Universal Healthcare, RIGHT?

Er…wrong.

Not for the estimated 11.7 million undocumented workers in the US.   And this could be a big problem for all of us.

When these illegal immigrants have health issues they make expensive visits to hospital emergency rooms where average costs for common illness can be staggering.

So… who’s going to pay their bills? Well, taxpayer money has been subsidizing emergency care for undocumented workers for a while.

There’s a government program the Washington Post calls “emergency Medicaid.” Hospitals are reimbursed for treating Medicaid defined low-income illegal immigrants in the ER (only life or death situations and pregnancy care are covered).

Here lies the rub… one of Obamacare’s key benefits was to decrease the cost of national healthcare. 

The hope was newly insured Americans would avoid the expensive ER as they receive increased access to primary care physicians (healthcare term for your everyday ‘doc). 

But with so many undocumented workers in the system, health costs for the country could remain stubbornly high.

Would it be cheaper just to let illegal immigrants pay have health insurance like everybody else? 

Maybe… but this gets into the messy politics of immigration reform that is currently bottled up in dysfunctional Washington.

So… have we made Obamacare any clearer for you?

Have you ever quit a job?

In this tight economy most of us are holding onto what we can get… even if we are feeling exploited by our bosses.

              Not Marina Shifrin.

She had enough with her job but did not write a “letter of resignation”…

She told her former employer about her departure via this interpretive dance—for the whole world to see.

               And of course, most companies would accept a simple letter and let it at that. Her employer, Next Media Animation, based in Taiwan, took things a little further than that.

               Regardless of how the relationship ended, both parties seem to now be moving on just handsomely. Ms. Shifrin has a potential new gig with Queen Latifah’s talk show, while NMA now has a creative new hiring tool.

               And of course, both sides elicited laughs and cheers.

               Sure, there’s something to be said for traditional professionalism when it comes to resigning from a job. But maybe jazzing it up isn’t a bad option either.

We’re really excited to announce our latest Treehouse project, Using PHP with MySQL. We hope you enjoy it!

In this project, we’ll extend the Shirts 4 Mike project that we developed in Build a Simple PHP Application and Enhancing a Simple PHP Application to use the popular database system, MySQL. We’ll use a MySQL database to store information for the shirts on our site. We’ll query the database using PHP and talk about the ways you can mitigate security risks such as SQL injection.

Start Using PHP with MySQL

The post Introducing Using PHP with MySQL appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Every so often, we’ll chat with an alum about what they do and how they go there. Today we’re talking with novelist Mary Volkman – whose pen name is Margo Christie – about writing and living a colorful life. Volkman’s debut novel These Days won second prize in Amazon’s 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award contest.

Name: Mary Volkman, aka Margo Christie
Grad Year and Major: 1992, English
Job Title: Writer
Employer: Self-employed
Your Website: www.margochristienovelist.com

Q: Tell us a little about how you wound up at UMBC. What’s your background?

A: You could call me a hard-luck story. A refugee from a broken home, I dropped out of high school at age 16. But you could also call me persistent. I’ve always been creative, so upon quitting high school I immediately enrolled in classes at Catonsville Community College [now known as the Community College of Baltimore County, or CCBC], first in the fine arts and theater programs, then in general studies. From there, the transition to UMBC was a natural one. While at CCC I discovered I wanted to write, so I inquired into UMBC’s English program. As someone who was footing the bill for college, UMBC was a good choice. The curriculum was a good fit and it was affordable. The staff consistently guided me toward available grants, and the rest I was able to afford myself.

Q: How did you wind up writing novels? What inspires you, and what do you ultimately hope to see come from it? Tell us about your recent successes.

A: I’ve been creative all my life. In my teens I painted. In my twenties I made jewelry and studied theater. In my thirties I made stained glass and wrote stories. I’ve lived a hard and colorful life, so I always knew there was a novel in me. I think it was my contemporary interest in real-life stories, especially those with some “grit” to them, which got me going. My book, These Days, is about a starstruck teenage stripteaser who’s enamored with the good old days of burlesque and makes the best of her circumstances by reviving them. Though it’s fiction, it’s closely related to my own experience stripping on Baltimore’s “Block” in the late 70s. Like I said, I’m a refugee from a broken home. I come by “grit” legitimately!

My writing, from my short stories to These Days, focuses on “creative-but-fallen characters who long for redemption.” I believe all human experience is worthy of consideration. In writing about stigmatized people like strippers, my hope is that readers who’ve experienced any sort of societal marginalization will come away from my work with a sense of fellow feeling, with a sense of “I’m worthy of consideration, after all.”

I promote These Days through burlesque performances. Recently, I did a reading/performance with a stand-up comedy show in Denver. It was frightening! Comedy audiences can be brutal, and I always had in mind that my work would make people cry or commiserate, not laugh. Yet I managed to make them laugh! And I got my message – that of celebrating the beauty of all humanity – across without alienating anyone. I believe the open-minded environment of a higher-education institution like UMBC helped in this regard.

As These Days is set in Baltimore, I’ve had some success in reaching out to the Baltimore literary community for help in promoting it. I have a reading scheduled on Saturday, October 19, as well as an interview with Aaron Henkin of Baltimore Public Radio WYPR’s “The Signal” program. Details about both of these events can be obtained via my website. Additionally, I received a call from the owner of The Ivy Bookshop, expressing interest in carrying These Days in their store. Interest in my book has really picked up as a result of reaching out to people.

Q: Is there a particular class or professor who really inspired you at UMBC?

A: Tom Nugent, who I had for Creative Writing. He was witty and fun but no-nonsense when it came to teaching the craft of writing. I was writing life-inspired stuff even then, and he helped me eliminate flowery “over-writing” and get down to the nitty-gritty. He was what I’d describe as an “immersion” writer in that he immersed himself in whatever environment he wanted to write about. I read that, while working for The Baltimore Sun, he lived for a week at the crumbling, flea-bag Congress Hotel in order to write about the marginalized, lonely folks who called it home. He came to UMBC with a wealth of experience. We were very fortunate to have him around.

Q: What is your favorite UMBC memory?

A: Wow! There are many. I loved hanging around the cafeteria exchanging ideas with fellow students. As a writer, I’m a student of life. I loved hearing people’s stories, especially the ones that differed markedly from mine. I gravitated toward foreign-born and gay students, as well as creative, counter-cultured ones like myself. The more exotic their stories, the better I liked being around them! Like I said, UMBC was a very open-minded place.

Political science professor Roy Meyers was featured in The Wall Street Journal last week in two articles examining the cost of the government shutdown as it enters its second week.

In one article, Meyers describes how the cost of the shutdown can be difficult to predict. “How long it will last is now unknown,” he said. “And even if one knew with certainty the length of the shutdown, it would be very difficult to calculate accurately the budgetary cost.”

In the second article (subscription required), Meyers shared insight on the cost of the shutdown if back pay isn’t awarded to federal workers: “the reduced ability of the government to recruit a high-quality workforce,” he said.