Seven faces of the freelance economy

THE YOGA TEACHER: Skills and mat are all that's needed

NAME: Peggy Chan

AGE: 64

JOB: Yoga instructor

A FREELANCER FOR: 15 years

EARNS PER MONTH: Between $1,800 and $2,500

ADVICE FOR OTHER FREELANCERS: "Freelancing is not for everyone. You need to consider your financial circumstances. If you have to pay for housing loans or children, your priority should be a stable income."

When her yoga students become friends, that is when freelance instructor Peggy Chan is most satisfied with her work.

"Over time, students tend to open up about their lives and we form a deeper connection," she says.

The free-spirited 64-year-old singleton also likes that she does not have to answer to superiors. "That also means when something (bad) happens, I kena (get into trouble)," says Ms Chan, a former travel agent.

A yoga teacher for the past 15 years, she has six students ranging from 40 to 70 years old. Ms Chan says older students "appreciate the one-on-one sessions and know better what they want", as opposed to a younger crowd who might still be figuring out what classes suit them best.

Ms Chan sells 10-lesson packages at between $80 and $100 a session and conducts group sessions. These work out to an income of $1,800 to $2,500 a month. Each lesson lasts an hour at her students' homes.

She has to keep a few hours free each day in case students need to reschedule their lessons. She also keeps three slots open every day.

"Freelancing is tough because you have to find your clients, and it's a niche, a certain type of people who want your services," says Ms Chan. "There are so many yoga instructors. Why would they want to pick you?"

The worry is that students may not sign up again after 10 classes or that she does not get paid on time.

"Some want to stop because they are relocating or want to get pregnant," she says, noting that she takes students only through recommendation.

On being able to cover her expenses, she says: "My income fluctuates so it's hard to predict whether I can make enough in a month."

She adds that she has to pay only for her own bills, food and other necessities.

She lives with a cousin and another flatmate in a Housing Board unit near Geylang. She also rents a studio at a nearby shopping mall to teach groups, but did not want to comment on the rent.

Freelancing really works for her because all she needs are the skills and a yoga mat, she says.

The pared-back life is a far cry from when she was 19 and started work at a multinational travel agency here, going on to London for 20 years in the same line, and fitting in her own travel to the United States, Europe and South America.

"I knew that I wanted to be in the travel or hotel industry because I want to see the world and talk to people," Ms Chan recalls.

After returning to Singapore in her 40s, Ms Chan became a freelance tour agent. She used to earn $4,000 a month when employed by agencies, but as a freelancer, earnings could hit $10,000.

This gig lasted until the mid-1990s when the Internet changed how people did their travel arrangements, and profits shrank.

"People were going online to book their own tickets. They didn't need travel agents," she says.

Ms Chan started to get serious about yoga, which she had picked up in London, and opened a studio in Upper Circular Road around 1995. It ran for about six years before competition and rising rents forced her to close it.

A former student later called to check if she was still teaching yoga. Ms Chan decided to teach freelance."That was how it began, and I have enjoyed the job ever since."

THE HANDYMAN: "Ah Beng" kind of job? It gives him freedom

NAME: Desmond Toh

AGE: 45

JOB: Handyman

A FREELANCER FOR: 23 years

EARNS PER MONTH: $3,000-$4,000

ADVICE FOR OTHER FREELANCERS: "You can't just stay at home every day. You have to go out, make friends." As a teenager, Mr Desmond Toh would help his father fix up old attap (thatched) houses in kampung villages. It gave him a taste of working with his hands.

Now 45, Mr Toh has been a freelance handyman for more than 20 years. Many look down on his profession as "an Ah Beng-Ah Seng kind of job", he says (referring to being uncultured), but he has never contemplated a change.

"I don't feel like being tied down," he says. "I want the freedom to be my own person."

From morning to night, he drives from home to home around the island, installing lights, painting walls, repairing furniture - you name it. "If you're willing to pay," he says, "I'm willing to do it."

He pulls off around four to five jobs a day, rushing from Pasir Ris to Bukit Batok to Tampines.

The back of his 19-year-old Mercedes Vito van is stuffed with the tools of his trade. A wood-cutter fits snugly up against stacked bottles of thinner and floor cleaner; a step ladder balances on top of drawers of screws in all sizes.

He prefers to work alone. "I found I cannot trust other people," he admits. "It takes me half an hour to install a light, but what if it takes my worker two hours? What if he breaks the light? How do I explain to the customer?"

Mr Toh became an electrician on graduating from the Institute of Technical Education. To win more jobs, he taught himself to expand into other areas - air-con maintenance, for example, and carpentry.

He earns about $3,000 to $4,000 a month, although about $1,000 goes to expenses such as maintaining his van and health insurance.

"I don't have CPF," he says. "But I stopped worrying about it."

His chosen path means working odd hours, as many of his clients prefer him to visit after 5pm when they are home from work. He is usually still tinkering with appliances at 9pm or 10pm, and has been up as late as 2am rushing a job. He works on Saturday too, but his wife, 35, put her foot down when it came to sacrificing family time on Sunday with their daughter, 16, and son, five.

The bulk of his business comes through word of mouth. In the old days, he would get his friends who ran hardware stores to recommend him to customers. In recent years, he has started using phone apps such as ServisHero, which he can check on the go.

These apps have come in handy during leaner months such as June, when his customers often go overseas for holidays.

Mr Toh is aware that there are not many tradesmen like him around. "Nowadays in Singapore, it is quite difficult to find handymen," he says. "Young locals don't want to learn this trade because it is considered a dirty job."

Instead, he faces competition from foreign handymen who undercut his prices. "Maybe you charge $100 for a job, but the Malaysians come in and will do it for $50. We're worried now that when we raise the price, some home owners don't want to pay."

He adds: "Often they don't pay us on the spot because sometimes, something happens to the thing we fixed. Perhaps they damage it. Then they want us to go back and fix it again for free.

"We must say no at some point. Otherwise how do we survive?"THE DRIVER: It's a struggle but he loves the road and flexibility

NAME: Henry Sun

AGE: 50

JOB: Driver of limousine van

A FREELANCER FOR: 10 years

EARNS PER MONTH: $5,000

ADVICE FOR OTHER FREELANCERS: "Your hours will be very irregular so your family must be very understanding even before you start. Always communicate."

Many nights, Mr Henry Sun goes to sleep not in the warmth of his bed, but curled up on the passenger seats of his limousine van.

The 50-year-old driver of the passenger carrier often has to resort to this when a client's late night out coincides with an airport pick-up at the crack of dawn. "Sometimes I only have three hours in between," he says. "If I went home to shower, it would be all gone. So I rest in the van. It's like a second home to me."

Mr Sun has been a freelance driver for nearly 10 years. "It's a one-man show," he says. "Everything, I bao ka liao (Hokkien for 'handle everything')."

His clients are mostly tourists whom he is introduced to through tour agencies, or foreign visitors here on business or for events. In between these, he fits in the odd Uber or GrabCar trip for extra income.

An O-level holder, he went through a variety of jobs, including as a car salesman, a cabby, and helping out at his father-in-law's coffee shop, but none of these gave him the satisfaction of being his own man.

In 2007, a friend approached him for help. His brother had lost his licence due to drink driving and needed someone to chauffeur him around. Mr Sun agreed, and liked it so much that two years later, he bought a seven-seater Mercedes van for $100,000 and went into business on his own.

"My friends told me to do my own thing," he says. "I thought it would be free and easy; own time, own target." It turned out to be a slog. A hard day means 10, even 12, hours behind the wheel. He brings in about $5,000 a month, but takes home $2,000 after deducting overheads such as vehicle maintenance and loan instalments.

This, he said, is comparable to the earnings of a taxi driver, but he need not pay rentals to a company and has the added bonus of being his own man. "The freedom is there, and the flexibility."

Mr Sun says drivers like him operate in informal tribes, or "fleets". Each fleet has a WhatsApp group with hundreds of members, who are brought in based on reputation by existing members who vouch for them.

Should one driver be unable to pick up a passenger, he will seek help from the fleet - a move known as "throwing the job" - and pass the gig to whoever "catches" it first.

It is a system that requires a great deal of trust in one's fellow drivers. Mr Sun says he continues to keep track of whether the other driver shows up on time and treats the passenger well. "The responsibility is there, because it's still my customer."

He must sometimes weather dry periods, during which he might go an entire day without a single passenger. "In the past one to two years, the market has not been very good and there are fewer tourists," he says.

"I live on a month-to-month basis. It's a struggle sometimes - we chalk up credit card bills, borrow from parents and friends, and wait for the good times to come around."

The long hours and late night calls also take a toll on his social life. A divorcee with two daughters aged 17 and 21, he is now dating a 43-year-old bank administrator, whom he calls to update on every job he is on. "I explained to my girlfriend early on that she must understand what I do," he says. "If I have to rush out in the middle of the night, she must know it is for work and not because I am meeting someone else."

But he plans to stick with this lifestyle so he can continue to savour the freedom of the road. "I love driving," he declares.

THE PRIVATE TUTOR: Quality time with daughter and students

NAME: Madam Noorhana Kairi

AGE: 35

JOB: Tutor

A FREELANCER FOR: Four months

EARNS PER MONTH: $640

ADVICE FOR OTHER FREELANCERS: "It is important to be passionate about what you do. If you love your job, you will want to do it well."

Higher pay. And something more than mere money - the chance to make a difference in the lives of her only child and struggling learners.

That is why Madam Noorhana Kairi left her part-time job tutoring primary school pupils at an enrichment centre to go freelance as a private tutor.

She now makes double the $320 that the enrichment centre paid her each month at a rate of $15 an hour, says Madam Noorhana, who holds an engineering diploma from Singapore Polytechnic.

She is one of a growing group of Singaporeans who have decided to forgo employment perks such as medical and maternal benefits and the security of a fixed income for a flexible schedule.

Madam Noorhana decided to turn freelance in January this year, leaving a job she had held for six years, to give private maths tuition. Three students come to her four-room flat in Choa Chu Kang on Mondays to Wednesdays.

This gives her flexibility to spend time with her daughter, aged 13 and who is in Secondary 1, and also satisfies her desire to help young people.

"I am very satisfied when I manage to help (my students) understand difficult concepts," she says.

"I've always enjoyed working with people, especially children," she adds.

It was this desire to go the extra mile that frustrated her in her previous job teaching mathematics at an enrichment centre in Yew Tee.

During her time there, she developed a love of teaching and formed close bonds with her students.

She would stay back for 45 minutes - beyond the two hours required - to help weaker students, because a class size of 16 made it difficult for her to focus on those who needed extra help.

However, "sometimes I would cry at night because I couldn't do more to help them in class", she recalls.

But now, as a freelancer, "I have the chance to spend more time with students and help them with their schoolwork".

Indeed, her altruistic nature led her to leave her first job out of school, as a chemical engineer, for a less prestigous role as a customer service officer at a telecommunications company.

At the same time, she enrolled in an early childhood course because she wanted to work with children.

But problems with her pregnancy forced her to quit her job and studies.

"It's a promise I made my husband 13 years ago, to be a wife and mother first," she says, adding that she never regretted her decision to focus on her marriage and her daughter.

But there are downsides. Madam Noorhana worries about having enough to retire. However, she does not want to sacrifice time with her daughter.

Her engineering husband, 43, is the family's main breadwinner. They have paid off their flat.

"I spend a lot of time with my daughter," she says.

Madam Noorhana saves her weekends so they can go out for "photowalks", as she calls them, and shopping.

She is looking to expand her pool of students, but being a mother and wife are her foremost responsibilities, saying: "The times we have together as family are priceless."

THE WEB GUY: Time for family and to pursue big dreams

NAME: Syed Anees Khan

AGE: 41

JOB: Web developer

A FREELANCER FOR: Eight years

EARNS PER MONTH: $7,000

ADVICE FOR OTHER FREELANCERS: "Financial discipline is very important. There are some bad months when money will be tight, so you always have to save for a rainy day."

Pursuing a dream to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, strengthening his programming skills and catering to the demands of his growing family - Mr Syed Anees Khan has been able to do all these by becoming a freelancer.

For the past eight years, the 41-year-old has been working as a freelance Web developer to have the best of all worlds.

The push to go freelance came when the firm he was working for changed to a new server framework. "I was getting stronger in PHP (a programming language)," he explains. "I could choose to pick up the .Net framework (which the company was switching to) or focus on getting better at what I already knew."

The 41-year-old chose the latter.

Quitting his full-time job, however, was difficult as Mr Khan's wife, who was not working at that time, was expecting their second child.

He started out first by freelancing while staying on at his full-time job. The short trial reassured him that he could quit and still make enough to cope with the higher household expenditure.

The nature of his profession also made it easy for him to be a freelancer. "If I were working on a factory line, I would need to be there but, with computers and the Internet, I can work in a home office," he says.

The father of three children - aged three, seven and 11 - treasures the time he gets to spend with his family.

"Family time is a major concern," he says. "I want to be there not just for the big moments such as graduation but also the smaller, everyday ones."

He also has more time now to work on a variety of programming projects he would otherwise not have had time for.

He hopes that one of his passion projects can "make it super big". "There is always the hope and it drives you," he says.

On average, Mr Khan handles three projects at any one time. At his busiest, he has managed 10 projects. Each lasts about three months. The rigour, in turn, has made him a better programmer, he says. "If you stay in one company, you have to follow its direction which may not necessarily be in line with (the latest) technology."

As a freelancer, Mr Khan stays on top of the latest technological trends.

"This is my passion," he says. "When my clients come to me, I will implement the best and latest solutions. So they are happy, and I am happy doing what I do best."

Mr Khan started doing freelance projects when he was an engineering undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University. He took a course in Web design and applications in his second year and enjoyed it so much he decided to make it his career.

He had previously worked for a couple of years at a non-profit outfit and an educational firm.

"It's not that I didn't want to work, but I wanted the flexibility to see my children whenever I want," he says.

Still, he misses the social aspects of working full-time, such as learning from colleagues, going for coffee breaks and letting off "work steam" with them.

His last drawn salary was about $4,000, and he makes an average of about $7,000 a month now.

"I might be drawing more than (what I earn now) if I stayed on in my job," he says. "But I am richer in other ways."

THE PHOTOGRAPHER: Living off his passion for personal projects

NAME: Zakaria Zainal

AGE: 31

JOB: Portrait photographer

A FREELANCER FOR: Five years

EARNS PER MONTH: $1,000-$8,000

ADVICE FOR OTHER FREELANCERS: "Give yourself a routine. Get up early, put on pants, put on a shirt, get to work. You cannot waste the day."

"Put your pants on and get to work" - this is the motto of freelance photographer Zakaria Zainal.

"People think I'm just waking up late and goofing around at home in pyjamas," says the 31-year-old, who has been doing portrait and events photography for five years. "But I get up at 9am. I have a task list. I have yearly goals."

When he graduated in 2010 from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) with a degree in communication studies, Mr Zakaria gave the nine-to-five life a shot, spending seven months as a civil servant.

But he gave up the job to pursue a personal project documenting the lives of the Singapore Gurkhas. The book of portraits and anecdotes, Our Gurkhas: Singapore Through Their Eyes, was published in 2012, the first of three books he has worked on.

His parents were shocked when he left his stable job to be a freelancer. "They kept asking, 'So soon?' In the first few years, I couldn't afford to give them a proper allowance."

Mr Zakaria has since co-produced three books on subjects like the Little India riots, as well as done research and interviews for a multimedia documentary on former inhabitants of Singapore's Southern Islands. This would not have been possible if he had remained in full-time work.

But with this freedom comes fluctuating earnings that can soar to $8,000 a month, then plummet to $1,000 the next. "You need to control how you spend and not be fussy about what jobs you take," he says.

He supplements his earnings with income from mentoring National University of Singapore students on an internship programme with the Malay Heritage Foundation, and serves as an adviser to NTU student publication The Nanyang Chronicle.

For three months a year, he also works as a programme officer with NTU's Asia Journalism Fellowship. "It's a nice extra dose of income to pay my mortgage," says Mr Zakaria, who lives in a four-room Build-To-Order flat in Tampines.

"I guess (having multiple jobs) makes me sort of a hybrid creature, but as more people look towards freelancing as a way of life, you have to start doing more to stand out from others."

He has also started to form collectives and collaborate on projects with other photographers. "It can get lonely, being a freelancer," he says. "Sometimes, if you have a job you think is more suited to another guy, you step aside. You have to trust they'll do the same for you."

Since he took the plunge into freelancing, he has married and is contemplating starting a family. His 28-year-old wife runs an online apparel shop, for which he takes the product photos.

Despite the pressure of family planning, he has decided to give freelancing another five years. "I read somewhere that in the next 50 years, true wealth will be measured not in how much money you have, but in time and attention," he says.

"I need time for the book projects. I'm trying to give respect to the people I photograph, and the books really elevate that. I repay the trust they put in me.

"I'm not just a technician. I'm somebody with something to say about the world."

THE FILM COORDINATOR: Heady life on set but cash flow is an issue

NAME: Vannesa Sim

AGE: 24

JOB: Film and TV production coordinator

A FREELANCER FOR: Two years

EARNS PER MONTH: $2,800-$3,200

ADVICE FOR OTHER FREELANCERS: "Always pro-rate. A lot of freelancers don't know how to do this and accept rates that are actually lower than they think, and they lose a lot of money."

When Ms Vannesa Sim was 12 years old, she saw the American film Pleasantville, in which colour leaks into the black-and-white world of a 1950s sitcom. Thus began an obsession with cinematography.

"I knew then that I wanted to make films," she recalls. "Of course, I didn't realise at the time that it was going to be so difficult."

Now 24, she has been a production coordinator in the film and TV industry for close to two years.

In her brief but intense career as a freelancer, she has already seen her name roll in the credits of Hollywood film Equals and TV show MasterChef Asia.

But she has also had to work extra hours for little money, skip meals while waiting for her pay to come in, and even clean toilets of faeces.

Ms Sim started freelancing on film shoots to put herself through Lasalle College of the Arts, where she studied film. When work was scarce, she did odd jobs from deejaying to hair modelling.

After graduation, she plunged straight into the industry, working on short films, commercials and TV shows. She started out earning $2,000 a month, and can now earn between $2,800 and $3,200.

Her job scope has ranged from casting and hiring to managing a fleet of drivers, sending them off to pick up special guests from the airport or "buy roti for the crew".

Once, she had to clean a dressing room toilet bowl splattered with faeces. "It is, sometimes literally, quite a s****y job," she says.

But even worse are the cash-flow problems. "We don't have CPF," she says. "We don't have health benefits. We have to watch our own backs and make sure we have enough savings to settle the rent in the months when we're not paid."

One major bugbear for her is that rates are not standardised, allowing many employers to pressure newcomers into accepting lower rates, or working six days a week on a five-day contract.

Others are not wise to the intricacies of the payroll. She once saw a colleague lose $600 a month because she did not know how to pro-rate, or divide her rates by the number of days worked.

"When you're fresh, you're pressured to say 'yes'," says Ms Sim. "You can't kick up a fuss, especially when you're new, and you don't want to p*** someone off in case he doesn't hire you again."

Late payment is another problem even industry veterans face. Ms Sim is sometimes not paid for four or five months. "Once I was owed so much that my production manager gave me $200, saying 'I know you don't have money to eat now'.

"I said I couldn't take his money. He said 'never mind, just pay it forward'."

She hopes to do that some day for other freelancers. She plans to do corporate work in human resources, with film projects on the side.

This would place her in a better position to advise freelancers on HR and finance matters.

She will miss, however, the heady life on set and the late nights sitting up with other crew members, eating food left over from the shoot with their fingers. "We looked like beggars," she says, "but it was the most fun I've had."

This article was first published on April 10, 2016.
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