I was freelancer for a few year (11) mostly in east EU and UK.
My advices:
Have a very good contract what covers every aspect of your work
Have contact for lawyer
Have contact for accountant
Try to remain mentally fresh
Learn yourself
Learn to manage your time and keep the important no-work-time and quality-times
[tl;dr]
I used local developer rings, forums and connections to get work because all the hyped sites (upwork/toptal/odesk...) was so polluted with fake to low "people", that was ridiculous in that time. Also, most of the company who seek help on these platforms willing to pay only minimal or nothing because they just want the job done, not well done (nobody care of quality).
So I went for local companies, contacted them and actually get and did several job from discuss possibilities and needs to complete fullstack development.
There are so many pitfall what is already covered by others in the previous comments I will not really write them down again. But one thing is quite important, what I learned from US and UK based jobs: "Always cover your a**". Even tho' it is a harsh sayin', there is experience behind it. The easiest meaning: you have to prepare yourself not just the good times but for the bad ones also.
Write contract always, avoid anyone who not willing to sign it or want lighter version. Try to really defend every aspect of your job, your gig even if they seems quite obvious or "shouldn't be a problem at all" or "this never will occure".
In 95% you will never will use the extra terms and section in your contract. But the remaining 5% always could cause high risk and huge reputation or money loss.
Especially in east EU, the ownership over a product is quite important and should be explicit to avoid unseen behaviours. Here is a real use-case, what happened with me in 2008. I worked on a PHP based project, it was small, but my customer wanted more and more changes. I did it all, but in that time I did not owned the place where I worked, it was uploaded directly to the customer product server. When I finished the job, the customer refused to pay, because the "product" was online, and he refused the fact, I worked on it. Even if I had the agreement contract with that customer. But my contract was short and missed key points over ownership of the code. (The story end was I removed all the files and changes what I ever done and sent them a letter by lawyer to push them to not use anything if they have it until they do not pay me out)
But I learned the lesson, so I started to extend my contract. From a one page contract I ended up with a 14 pages long contract frame. [/tl;dr]
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I was freelancer for a few year (11) mostly in east EU and UK.
My advices:
[tl;dr]
I used local developer rings, forums and connections to get work because all the hyped sites (upwork/toptal/odesk...) was so polluted with fake to low "people", that was ridiculous in that time. Also, most of the company who seek help on these platforms willing to pay only minimal or nothing because they just want the job done, not well done (nobody care of quality).
So I went for local companies, contacted them and actually get and did several job from discuss possibilities and needs to complete fullstack development.
There are so many pitfall what is already covered by others in the previous comments I will not really write them down again. But one thing is quite important, what I learned from US and UK based jobs: "Always cover your a**". Even tho' it is a harsh sayin', there is experience behind it. The easiest meaning: you have to prepare yourself not just the good times but for the bad ones also.
Write contract always, avoid anyone who not willing to sign it or want lighter version. Try to really defend every aspect of your job, your gig even if they seems quite obvious or "shouldn't be a problem at all" or "this never will occure".
In 95% you will never will use the extra terms and section in your contract. But the remaining 5% always could cause high risk and huge reputation or money loss.
Especially in east EU, the ownership over a product is quite important and should be explicit to avoid unseen behaviours. Here is a real use-case, what happened with me in 2008. I worked on a PHP based project, it was small, but my customer wanted more and more changes. I did it all, but in that time I did not owned the place where I worked, it was uploaded directly to the customer product server. When I finished the job, the customer refused to pay, because the "product" was online, and he refused the fact, I worked on it. Even if I had the agreement contract with that customer. But my contract was short and missed key points over ownership of the code. (The story end was I removed all the files and changes what I ever done and sent them a letter by lawyer to push them to not use anything if they have it until they do not pay me out)
But I learned the lesson, so I started to extend my contract. From a one page contract I ended up with a 14 pages long contract frame.
[/tl;dr]