Connie and Jaime

I am sick of working at my 9-5 job. I don’t feel like I get the respect, or the wage, that I deserve. I’ve come across the virtual assistance industry and I think it’s perfect for me because I would love to be home with my kids. I see that I can make over $30 per hour being a VA. Is that true? If I charge $30 per hour and work 8 hours a day, it seems that I would be making a lot of money.

Underpaid in the USA

It is true that some virtual assistants charge $30 per hour and others charge much, much more. What is unrealistic is to think that you’ll be able to work a solid 8 billable hours in a day by yourself if you have young children. Sure, in theory you could start working at 8am and finish at 4pm, but those 8 hours are not going to be purely billable hours, not if you are taking breaks to eat, be with your children, answer the phone, check the mail, or respond to email. You can’t bill for those things.

Before you start counting your money, make a simple schedule. We suggest this in Laying the Foundation for Your Virtual Business. Take inventory of all your time, from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed. Account for every hour. You will see that between meal times, sleeping, playing with the kids, showering and everything in between, you have less time to work than you think you do. 

Another thing to think about is that if you have more than one or two clients, you will be doing quite a bit of switching back and forth between client projects, taking time to respond to emails, probably doing some online networking, and so on and so forth.

It is probably more likely that you will be able to get 4-5 hours of billable time a day, and that is dependent upon the ages of your children. If you’re billing for more time than that, you will likely need to enlist the help of other VAs so you will have time to work on your own business development.

Oh, and before you quit your job, you should make sure that you have some money set aside because getting clients takes time, and for most it does not happen overnight! Good luck!

I echo Jaime's response, but want to add a couple of things. You will also need to factor in scheduled time off, like vacations, or unscheduled time off, like you or your children becoming ill. What will you do when your kids school is out for breaks or the summer? You have to plan for the unexpected as well.

Also remember that what you gross is not what you keep. While $30 per hour at 2080 hours per year looks good on paper at over $60K per year, you have self-employment taxes to pay and business expenses that you need to factor in.