If you knew THEN what you know NOW would you have gone into business yourself?

I only ask this because I've had a few ups and downs of late, which, if I had been employed, I wouldn't have had to face.

also, with being s/e, I find that I never switch off, but when I was employed, I would forget about work the minute I walked over the threshold.

Saying that, I love being self-employed, always felt like a square peg in a round hole in employment.

Well im self employed but my motto in life is work to live not live to work so i have no big aspirations and never have had.
I love what i do but i do not ever want it to be in control of me and fortunately havent had to because i married someone that had a good enough wage that i didn't have to work .. so i am not a huge monetary contributer in our family.If i didnt work it wouldnt make any difference to our lives, but we have lived our lives accordingly we live to our means a small house paid off in 3 years ,no debt etc etc we arnt rich by any means my husbands an ordinary met police officer but we have no huge house or fancy cars etc .
Im a beauty therapist thats never stopped working but im mainly a housewife and mum and have been for 17 years and thats whats been best for me and everyone.Now i find myself in a situation where i am looking after my mum and dad in their 80s if i was at work all the time it would be very stressfull but i do have the time to do it.So im happy with my lot and choices in life and no regrets i like that when my kids come home im there always and when my parents need me im there always and for me im thankful i don't have to be stressed over work.

I didn't have children and so was employed constantly until I was 42 in highly stressful, if well paid jobs, a part of that was spent commuting into London.

Then my sister and I set up our interior design business. This also was extremely stressful (for totally different reasons) and I knew what thinking about work 24/7 really meant. We loved it but it came to dominate our lives and we often worked evenings and weekends.

I think if your life demands that you bring in a certain amount, being self employed can be incredibly stressful. Sometimes it doesn't matter how hard you work, things can conspire against you. We had just taken bigger premises (because we were so busy) and 2 weeks later 9/11 happened............all the jobs that we hadn't had the deposits for just evaporated.

I have now had my nail business for a little over 2 years and I am content, yes I'd like more clients at the moment, yes I'd like to be making more money, yes I'd like to think I was good enough to compete............but on the whole I am happy.

I work from home, so do not have the overheads of premises etc as we did before, if days are quiet I get on with other things..........it suits where I am in my life right now - just wish I had got into it earlier.

I would still do it all again but with a few changes....main one being...not to buy everything i see....cos you end up never using most of it......it took me ages to get that buying everything out of my system.

This would be mine aswell, when I first started up I had to buy EVERYTHING. And tbh, 30% of it is sitting in a cupboard at the back of the salon collecting dust

The only other thing I would have done differently, is have a little more of my own money behind me when I first started being s/e, just to take a little of the stress off me in regards to house bills etc so that 100% of my focus was on the salon