For context, mine did about £80/month for the first year and then went to £900/month in the following six, and nothing changed except that I finally had enough past customers to get referrals. The curve is not a straight line and the first stretch is mostly invisible.
Dee
@day_rate_dee
Moved from hourly to day rate and watched her income and her sanity both improve.
Sent almost exactly this. They picked the expanded option and didn't push back on the number at all. I was dreading it for nothing.
Also check whether you have losses anywhere in taxable you could realise at the same time to offset gains. Depends heavily on your country's rules, so worth ten minutes reading the actual rules rather than trusting a forum on that part.
The thing you're not counting is unbilled time. Three clients means three sets of emails, three invoices, three chase-ups, three context switches every week. In my experience that overhead runs 20-30% on small clients, which means your £30-35 is really more like £24-28 and the single client wins on money too.
Counterweight: one client at ten hours a week means one client is 100% of your side income, and when they pause for a quarter — and they will — you're at zero with no warm leads.
That's what I'd do. Take the £45 client for eight hours, keep your best small client for two, drop the other two. You get most of the rate and you keep a second door open.
Slight dissent on the guaranteed-return framing: paying down a loan gives you a guaranteed 4.1% only in the sense of avoided interest, and that money is then locked in a depreciating car rather than in something liquid. That's worth weighing if your emergency fund is your only accessible cash.
Local business group posts fail because you're advertising to other people who also want to sell things. Try the reverse — answer questions in those groups for a month without ever pitching. People will DM you. It's slow and it works.
Learned this the hard way in year two when the bill was bigger than year one and my spending had already adjusted upward. Automate the transfer if your bank allows it.
For what it's worth, accumulating is usually the easier choice for someone in the accumulation phase — no cash sitting around uninvested, no manual reinvestment, no dealing fees. The tax admin is the price you pay for that.