Going self-employed

The word on a freelancer’s invoice that misleads an English reader most is das Honorar. It looks like « honorarium », and in English an honorarium is a token sum: the thank-you paid to a guest speaker who would probably have come anyway. There is nothing token about the German word. Das Honorar is the full price of professional work that is not paid as a wage — what a translator, a designer, an author, a lawyer or a doctor treating a private patient charges. Ein Honorar aushandeln is a hard negotiation, and ein angemessenes Honorar is meant to be a living, not a gesture. The rest of the list follows a new business in the order it happens: registering it, choosing its legal form, writing invoices the tax office will accept, chasing the ones nobody pays, and getting through the months before the income is enough to live on.