How can communication professionals manage their finances as freelancers?

Track income and expenses. Create a budget and set aside money for taxes. Save for emergencies and invest for the future. Invoice clients promptly and follow up on unpaid invoices. Offer payment plans and use a freelance accounting platform.

Yes, planning for the best and worst days/months is very important. You are not going to get projects every month. I have starved for 8 months when I started my freelancing career, before I started to get projects. They say, never work for free. I take it in a different way. Whatever I'm going to work on is going to be on a live project, so regardless of whether client pays or not, I'm going to market out of it in one way or the other. Saying, that not all projects can be just used for experience. Put everything in document and make sure the funds are in escrow (like most outsourcing portals do these days). I started my career when this feature was not there. So, imagine today you have that liberty, so use it wisely. Never assume and do.

Investments apart from expenses is going to be very much a need for any person who does a job. Saying this dont invest all that you earn, live your life now and whatever extra that can go as savings for later.

As cliche as it sounds the best investment you can make is in yourself. Bolstering your breadth of knowledge, the tools you have available to you and your working space are all keys to build a conducive environment for success!

In 20 yrs of my freelancing career who have seen the best and worst extremes. At the end of the day, its all about the strategy that one applies in how/where you get the job/work, how you are projecting/showcasing yourself and how you are managing the clients. The key point for one to understand is, one should be what are the aspects one can work on, but the most important to know is, which is not their cup of cake/tea and waste time on it unnecessarily. Profile building is definitely going to be key factor regardless of a fresher or experienced. One has to experiment on the strategies like cost cutting to build the profile, work on diverse projects to give you chances to try one or the other.

Being a guy who understood that logical mindset is what I'm, and I can't have that creativity, I chose to be on the backend development most of the time, and clearly said to the client that if designs are provided then I shall do the conversion and bring it to reality. There was so much pressure from the clients about taking that UI work as well, with high pay too and some clients threatened that they will go with another provider, I stood my position and explained the exact reason. They eventually understood. Remember, I'm talking about days where the free or premium themes/templates was still new. I would have taken up UI and might have even done it. I was always working frontend frameworks, as long as UI creation is not involved.