When it comes to misery, the UK loves to hate itself. However, it turns out there’s a sure-fire way to be less miserable – become an umbrella company contractor.
Right, so who here truly loves their job? I’m not talking about loving what you do for a living – everyone should be so lucky – but who really loves having to get up every day, roll out of their warm bed, and slough off to work? Wouldn’t we all rather just not have to work and simply be independently wealthy, going off and doing whatever we want to with no worry about cost or bills or anything like that?
Well, that’s never going to happen for the majority of people. That means of course that we’ve got to earn a living – and that’s where the misery comes in. Meanwhile, it looks like the people in the UK that slog through work every day but feel the least miserable about having to do so seem to be freelancers and umbrella company contractors, to name a few.
Self-employed Brits, of which there are something like 4.6 million in the UK today according to the Office for National Statistics, turn out to be the happiest out of the bunch when it comes to people who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths and that have to work for a living. In fact, Brighton University’s school of business took a survey of more than 300 self-employed Brits, discovering that they were all more happy working for themselves instead of some heartless employer.
Honestly I can’t say I’m surprised one bit. Working for yourself has so many advantages over being a wage slave after all. I mean you can more or less have whatever working hours if you want; if you need to take a day off in the middle of the week because you’ve got to go to the GP or pick up your relatives from Heathrow you can do that without having to try to explain it to your boss. Not only that but you can decide your own pay rates – and best of all you get to choose which projects you work on and which clients you wish to work with. Sure, you have to find your own clients most of the time, and you might never know month to month where your next big one is coming from, but it’s a damned sight better than letting someone else run your life!
