Never Ever Force Yourself To Work At Unrealistic Client-Stated Budgets

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On freelance sites like Elance as well as others, I have very often noticed that even when clients state budgets which are completely ridiculous to say the least, freelancers actually go ahead and bid on such jobs, at the budget quoted by these clients.

This is in spite of the fact that heart of hearts, the freelancers know very well that the budget they are quoting is in no way commensurate to the time and effort that they would be expending on the said task.

As a hypothetical example, let us consider a job which seeks 5 different iterations for a corporate logo that a new business in town is seeking for itself. Now, this business has specified a budget of $100 at $20 for each iteration of the logo - this may seem audacious, ridiculous and laughable to you but fact of the matter is that such job postings also see a lot of bids being placed from freelance contractors, including ones from developed markets like the US or the UK!

Another instance would be a job posting which seeks out say 20 articles of 500 words each, and intends to pay a total of $50, which works out to a sub-slave wage $2.50 per article (if you think this is as bad as things can get, believe me you aren't seen nothing yet, since there are contractors actually bidding by the droves on "artical jobs" (article spelt that way on purpose) which pay a $ or less for each article as well!!

A lot of this undercutting and bargain basement pricing - as quoted by clients, is in fact the doing of contractors themselves. Essentially, somewhere they have come to this (outright false) misconception that the only way they can really win jobs is by quoting totally unrealistic bids which are farfetched from reality, from real world prices, which we pay for items around us.

These are thoughts which I have shared in the video below, which can also be seen on my freelancing specific YouTube channel.

Through this article, I wish to raise awareness about the fact that you NEED NOT & SHOULD NOT bid unrealistically, only to win jobs on freelance sites. Even as an Indian in the Writing & Translation category on Elance, who has to face a multitude of challenges along the way in trying to win jobs, especially but not limited to all kinds of biases against Indian and South Asian freelance writers about their presumed lack of nativity to the English language - which of course is yet another classic instance of complete misconception as I highlighted in this blog post, I have never resorted to this sort of despicable underbidding.

Remember that each dollar gets me 50 units of my local currency (Indian Rupee) - at least at currently prevailing exchange rates, and yet, since I pay hefty sums for every little thing I purchase here (after all things are not on face value parity terms here whereby I would pay a Rupee for what you would a Dollar in the US). Rather, it is very likely that I would pay 50 Rupees (or maybe even more; a classic instance being the price of petrol - or gasoline as it is referred to in the US, which is priced higher in India than in the US) for the same item which you would pay a solitary $.

So my point is, when an Indian freelancer, even with such highly favorable exchange rates, finds it totally despicable to be bidding very low on freelance sites, what compels you as a freelancer from say the US or the UK to be bidding so low?? What will those measly pennies really get you?? Don't you want to live in such a way that you have easy access to all the good things in life?

Think about these things, the next time you look to bid unrealistically low - amounts which you know are totally unrealistic and in no way commensurate to the time and effort you will be investing on the job at hand.

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