How to secure one's effort when working on a contract?
"Anytime you do work without any payment until the work is complete, you are effectively extending credit to the party receiving your service. How much credit you are willing to extend will vary greatly, depending on the amount and the trustworthiness of the party. For example, if you are charging $50 for something, you probably won't bother to collect money upfront, whereas if you are charging $5,000 you probably would collect some upfront. But if the party you are working for is a large financially sound company, the number may be even much higher than $5K as you can trust you will be paid. Obviously there are many factors that go into how much credit you are willing to extend to your customer. (This is why credit reports exist for banks to determine how much credit to extend to you.) As for the specific case you are asking about, which may be classified as a decent amount of work for a small business, I would default to having a written scope of work, a place in the document for both parties to sign, and specify 50% upfront payment and 50% payment at completion. When you receive the signed document and the upfront payment (and possibly even after the check clears), you begin work. I would call this my ""default contract"" and adjust according to your needs depending on the size of the job and the trustworthiness of the customer. As for your question about how to deposit the check, that depends on what type of entity you are. If you are a sole proprietor you should ask for the checks to be made out to you. If you are a business then the checks should be made out to your business name. You don't need ""in trust"" or anything similar because your customer, after paying the upfront fee, must trust that you will do the work you promise to do, just like you have to trust that after completing the work you will receive the final payment. This is the reason the default is 50% before and after. Both parties are risking (roughly) the same amount. Tip: having done the ""default"" contract many times in my career, both as a sole proprietor and a business owner, I can assure you there is a big difference between a potential customer agreeing to something in advance, and actually writing a check. The upfront payment definitely helps weed out those that were never going to end up paying you, even if their intentions were good. Tip 2: be as specific as possible as to what the scope of work will include. If you don't, particularly with software, they'll be adding feature after feature and expecting it to be ""included""." I don't think you need to bother with trust accounts.  The point of a trust account is holding funds that aren't yours yet.  You take a retainer fee that you have yet to earn.  As you work, you bill your hourly rate, your client signs off and you take possession of the funds.   You're going to work a project, you'll take a partial payment as a deposit and partial payment upon completion.  But this is a payment to you, not money transferred to you to hold until you earn it at a later date. Your contract can specify remedies for missing a deadline, or any other thing that could happen.
"EmploymentProTip, especially regarding boilerplate employment forms and larger companies:  When you get to something disagreeable like that, line it out and initial it.   I've done it several times over the years and nobody's ever come back to ask me about it. (Because they don't look at it - they just file it). **IF** they ever tried to enforce it, you just tell them to take a look at your contract. They're either going to end up with a) no enforceable noncompete or b) since they never counter-signed the agreement, it's not a valid contract (which still means - no noncompete)  Note that (b) above might come back to bite you if **you** need to depend on the employment contract, but I'm not sure that's ever happened in the modern ""employees are disposable resources"" age.   NOTE: While I am an attorney, this is not legal advice. Please seek the advice of an attorney licensed in your state." "Because I'll be investing time, effort, energy and take some initial risks I would like to receive more shares (more than just purely financial contribution would suggest) I don't see money in that list.  How much money will you be contributing to your own project? Mutual understanding, focusing on big image, rather that covering each and every edge case. These kinds of one page agreements are an excellent ""idea"" and they work just fine when everyone is happy and everything is working well; they are an utter nightmare if anything goes sideways.  Coincidently, the reason you write anything down at all is to have everyone agree on the same big picture at the same time. People's memory of the original big picture gets fuzzy when their money might not come back to them.  You don't need to cover all edge cases, but you need to cover obvious negative outcomes.  What if you can't find a renter?  What if you're late paying someone back?  What if your vendor ""repairs"" something incorrectly?  What if you forget to get a permit and the vendor needs to come back to tear it all apart and redo the work?  What if your project needs more money, who is required to contribute, who has the option to contribute, who gets diluted?  Who is doing the work of managing the project, how much is that person getting paid, how is that person's pay determined, how can it be adjusted?  Is any work expected from any other investor, on what terms, who decides the terms?  What if you get an offer to buy the building, who decides to sell, etc and so forth and on and on and on... You write down an agreement so everyone's understanding of the agreement is recorded.  You write down what will happen in XYZ event so you don't argue about what you all should do when that event does ultimately occur.  You take as much equity as your other investors will allow you to have, and you give them as much as required to get their money.  Understand that the more cooks there are in the kitchen the more difficult it is to act on a problem when one arises; when not if. Your ego-stroking play to ""open source crowd-sourced wisdom"" is nothing more than a silly request for vague advice at no cost.  Starting a project on trust, transparency and integrity is naive.  This is about money.  Why on earth should anyone trust you with their money if you won't do the most basic step of stewardship and spend a couple hundred pounds to talk to a local professional about organizing your first ever project. To answer your question directly, the first precaution you should take is not taking money from any of your friends or family." Yes he did.  But what Cuban means is that your motivation has to be for the love of the work, not the exit.  If you constantly have one eye on the door, it's going to distract you from building something great.  When the time is right, an obvious exit will present itself. Keep in mind a good lawyer will have the contract cover the five D's: Its really best to lay these things out ahead of time.  I watched, first hand, two friends start a business.  When they were broke and struggling the worked very well together.  Then the money started rolling in.  Despite exceeding their dreams they were constantly at each other's throats fighting and bickering over stupid stuff.  In the end, because they had decent legal docs, they both were able to pull money out of the business.   Had that not been worked out they would have destroyed the business so that no one would have profited. Get a lawyer.  If you're having legal issues - get a lawyer. If you're having contract issues - get a lawyer. If it changes, should get new bids. That will prevent making stupid irrelevant changes. Leaving a contract open ended so contractors can come back for more money over and over and over just isn't smart and is an open call for corruption. In addition to the other answers, consultants and contractors face a real risk (though admittedly small) of not getting paid. The more short-term the gigs are, the higher the risk of not getting paid for a particular job. As an employee, there are laws to ensure that you get your paycheck. As a contractor, you're just another creditor. I know a couple of contractors (software engineers) who have had difficulty collecting after a job. (I'm not even sure one ever got paid the full amount.) I also personally witnessed a contractor show up for a job who was then told by the company that they unilaterally decided that they would pay half of their pre-arranged rate. "This isn't negotiations anymore. They are trying to change the deal after the fact. Stop negotiating and tell them they are bound to the agreement they signed. They are leaning on you because they know you are small and likely can't fight them. Document every conversation. Do not allow them to keep pushing after they've signed the agreement.  They accepted your bid (after giving your pricing to a competitor, which is shitty and should have been your first red flag). Then they started working on you. At that point your answer should have been ""we have a verbal agreement of x services for y price. A different scope of work is not scalable and would require a new quote.""  At this point you can either accept that they will continue to beat you up, or you can jam the contract down their throats until they agree or walk away.   I've been in a situation like this before. A major multinational asked for bid pricing that was agreed to be estimated only based on very loose requirements. Then they handed us a contract with that pricing included as ""not to exceed"".  We ended up walking away. It sounds like you may want to do the same if you can. Big companies often will have legal and payables departments that basically exist to fight any obligation to pay out money. In our case shortly after we ran into someone in our industry who'd worked with that company, and they said to assume that company would reject 30% of all invoices we sent. If nothing else, to delay payment just a bit longer so they could keep earning interest on the money.  Also, in the future I wouldn't turn away work until you are under a signed contract for a big project like this. You can't rely on such a contract to come through. If they drag feet and your schedule is full that's on them, or you bring in additional help or subcontract the work to deliver." &gt;provide cheap, commoditized services.  This is crux to the article's argument. But the point should be taken from the article that you need to value your time (so there is a higher chance of success with the business endeavor).   If you can hire someone else to do other (lower level) tasks (i.e. farm out, delegate, contract) you free up time for yourself to do those tasks that bring more results to your efforts. And hence has more value.  Perhaps this is where the [80/20 rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle) comes into play. Me too. Haven't failed because it's shit that I do/did for free. There have have instances where if I didn't have a saved up cushion to fall back on times would have been hard waiting to get paid on some municipal and corporate contracts (can take up to 90 days sometimes). "To take a different tack from qdot - it is advice. Maybe good, maybe bad. In the early 1990s I did exactly what you are intending to do and was stunned at the expenses involved in maintaining the company - primarily the accounting costs. This would have all been different if I'd been making a lot more money out of the situation, but the work was on the side, a few hours a week here and there, and I closed the ""business"" after just one year. Probably broke even on the deal, but certainly did not come out in front. I'd also strongly recommend you take a look at issues like basic book keeping, claiming VAT, setting up corporate bank accounts, and the like. Whether it is ""not a lot of work"" is purely a personal thing - some folks breeze through it all, some hate it. Time Is Money. My 0.02." When I was a contractor I prioritize this way. 6 months salary nest egg while contributing to tax deferred retirement then after that you can pre pay your mortgage.  Remember you can't skip a month even if you prepay.  So once you pay that extra to your mortgage you lose that flexibility. The essential (and obvious) thing to avoid getting back into debt (or to reduce debt if you have it) is to make your total income exceed your total expenses. That means either increasing your income or reducing your total expenses.   Either take effort.   Basically, you need a plan. If your plan is to increase income, work out how.  If the plan is to increase hours in your current, you need to allow for your needs (sleep, rest, etc) and also convince your employer they will benefit by paying you to work more hours.   If your intent is to increase your hourly rate, you need to convince a current or prospective employer that you have the capacity, skills, etc to deliver more on the job, so you are worth paying more.    If your intent is to get qualifications so you can get a better paying job, work out how much effort (studying, etc) you will apply, over how long, what expenses you will carry (fees, textbooks, etc), and how long you will carry them for (will you accept working some years in a higher paying job, to clear the debt?). Most of those options involve a lot of work, take time, and often mean carrying debt until you are in a position to pay it off.     There is nothing wrong with getting a job while studying, but you have to be realistic about the demands.   There is nothing sacrosanct about studying that means you shouldn't have a job.   However, you need to be clear how many hours you can work in a job before your studies will suffer unnecessarily, and possibly accept the need to study part time so you can work (which means the study will take longer, but you won't struggle as much financially). If your plan is to reduce expenses, you need a budget.    Itemize all of your spend.  Don't hide anything from that list, no matter how small.   Work out which of the things you need (paying off debt is one), which you can get rid of, which you need to reduce - and by how much.   Be brutal with reducing or eliminating the non-essentials no matter how much you would prefer otherwise.  Keep going until you have a budget in which your expenses are less than your income.   Then stick to it - there is no other answer.    Revisit your budget regularly, so you can handle things you haven't previously planned for (say, rent increase, increase fees for something you need, etc).    If your income increases (or you have a windfall), don't simply drop the budget - the best way to get in trouble is to neglect the budget, and get into a pattern of spending more than you have.   Instead, incorporate the changes into your budget - and plan how you will use the extra income.   There is nothing wrong with increasing your spend on non-essentials, but the purpose of the budget is to keep control of how you do that, by keeping track of what you can afford. What city are you in?            &gt;  I got a call for contract work and it only lasted two weeks.       This can happen.  Sometimes contracts don't work out.        &gt;  With that contract I was finally getting paid what I was getting paid at my last permanent position, but again I did not receive the same benefits as a full time employee. That contract let me go after 18 months due to policy that they couldn't string contractors along.      This is very common.  Unfortunately due to a court case involving Microsoft contractors 25-30 years ago, many firms limit contracts to a hard stop at 18 months - 2 years.   Not all firms have this policy.        I am interested what city you are in.  My career has taken me throughout flyover country, and finding 6 figure contracts has always been reasonably achievable.  Most cities appeared to have a shortage of workers with 5+ years experience in most specializations.       Fellow IT contractors have felt that IT unemployment insurance is $45 per hour jobs where you compete with H1B body shops, since those almost never get filled.  It sounds like you are in an economically depressed area. You are planning on signing a contract for, likely, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and plan on paying, likely, tens of thousands of dollars in a deposit. For a house that is not built yet. This isn't particularly unusual, lots of people do this. But, you need a lawyer. Now, before you sign anything. Your agent may be able to recommend a lawyer, but beware; your agent may have a conflict of interest here.