The Pro's and Con's of being self-employed as a paid carer

Being self-employed and working for yourself can seem like a great option. You know that you'll be the best boss in the world, right? When you're the boss you get:

• The freedom to choose exactly how many hours you work a week
• Control over how your business develops
• Control the finances and keep the profits

However, there is a little more to it than that. To work for yourself as a self-employed carer, you need to have discipline and you need to be a good at all the elements of the business, such as finance, marketing, record keeping (although we can give you lots of tips on these bits).

The pro’s of being self-employed

Many of us feel as though we're entrepreneurs and would love to have the satisfaction of running our own business, so fulfilling this ambition should in no way be overlooked as a benefit.[ADS]

1. You can arrange the work to fit in with your life, rather than arranging your life to fit around work. Obviously, it depends on what your clients expect. However, as long as you sit and work out when you are prepared to work and when you aren't, you can look for clients to fit into your timetable (as much as you fitting into theirs).
2. You can choose what you want to do and don't want to do. Some people are happy providing personal care, while others would rather provide support and domestic help.
3. You could even choose to exploit some of your interests and look for clients who want for your particular skill set - are you good at gardening, do you have an interest in visiting art galleries, are you handy around the house and happy to help out with odd jobs? Make sure you've identified what you are prepared to do, and what you would really like to do, and then look for clients that fit.
4. You get to interview your clients when they interview you so you'll can make sure that you're working with clients that you want to work with. When they are interviewing you, there are certain things that you need to be checking out too.

Consider the following elements:

• • Do you think they will pay?
  • How do they want to work with you?
  • What's the environment like that you'll be working in?

If you're not comfortable with any of these things, as a self-employed carer you can choose not to accept the work.

The cons of being self-employed

You need to go into this with your eye’s wide open, there are drawback to working for yourself / being a self-employed carer.

1. 1. When you plan to work for yourself, you have to find your own clients. There's no provider in the background looking for them for you. If you don't have clients your won't business will not survive – and you’ll have no income.
   2. You have to make sure that your clients pay you - it doesn't matter how nice someone is, or how difficult they may be finding things, you need to be able to ask them to pay their bill to you, otherwise you won't be able to pay your bills. You need to set clear terms of when you expect to be paid and you need to be prompt with your invoicing and chasing up if someone doesn't pay. To help you with this task, you could take a look at our Timesheet and Invoicing tool  and our self-employed carers contract.
   3. You need to set aside time for all the paperwork and be disciplined. So, if you're working with your clients for 20 hours per week, you need to set aside another four or five hours to do paperwork, accounts, invoicing, looking for new clients, meeting with potential clients and so on.

Remember you won't be able to charge anyone for this, so you'll need to make sure your hourly rate includes the costs of these un-chargable hours.

1. 1. If you don't work, you don't get paid! So again, your hourly rate need to take into account the fact that you will want to have a holiday and bank holidays during the year. Realistically, you're only going to be able to work 46.5 weeks of the year. If you were employed, by the service user, you would be paid for this holiday, but working for yourself you won't.

You may want to point out to potential clients that your hourly rate takes into account the fact that they won't be paying you for holidays as they may well query why they’re paying a higher hourly rate than they would if someone was employed. For guidance on what to charge, refer to this handy guide on making your care business pay.

1. 1. There's no-one there to bounce ideas off. One of the best things about working in an organisation is usually someone else is available to ask for an opinion. This is a major drawback when you are working for yourself unless you get a good network around you.

One of the things that we hope will be launched on the You're the Boss website soon is a forum in which you can ask people's views and share experiences.  We want to create a community of Paid Carers who support each other and give each other the benefit of their knowledge.

1. 1. There's no-one there to stand up for you if things get tricky. We don't like to say it, but not all service users are wonderful employers or wonderful people. When things go wrong in the relationship between you and the service user, and you work for a provider, you expect the provider to send someone in to help resolve the problem. If things go wrong here, you're a little more restricted as to where you can go. There is always ACAS who can help if you’re employed by the service users, but it's not quite the same as going to your line manager.
   2. Finally, there may come a time when a client you are working for either needs to move into residential care or sadly pass away. If this happens, your contract with them is ended and you don't have the right to redundancy pay (find out more about what happens when a client dies) as you would if you were employed, so you need to take this into consideration.

So if having read this you think that working for yourself as a paid carer is the way forward then you'll need to get planning.  Have a look at some of our articles which tell you specifically about the different steps and considerations you'll need to take.      Two of the key considerations are - whether you're considered self-employed or employed by HMRC and whether you'll need to register with CQC.In working for yourself you get the satisfaction of knowing that whatever you achieve is down to your hard work; unfortunately, there's rarely anyone else there to say 'well done' !