Pretending not to understand what they agreed to in order to get more free work is a common tactic as is complaining about whatever they can think of in order to get you to offer more work without pay to make them happy.

As soon as you realize that a client’s intentions are to take advantage the faster you fire them the better.

I highly recommend getting at least 50% paid in advance and in my case I have a 100% cash in advance policy. I have never had a quality client complain about that and every time I ever made an exception I lived to regret it. The people who complain are the ones that have no intention of paying.

One tip-off that you’ve run into one of these clients is that they ask you to make new work a priority over the previously agreed to work, want you to apply what they already paid to that priority work, and then try to refuse to send more money for the previously paid work because “they already paid for it”.

Any client that regularly has “emergencies” they want you to fix that cause you issues with being able to have a balanced life and meeting your commitments to other clients needs to be fired because they will consistently turn your life upside down and cause you to miss other deadlines.

As the sign a specialist I worked with at IBM had hanging over his desk said: “Lack of planning on your part does NOT constitute an emergency on mine”.

Yes, we should help all those we can – but NO we should not allow ANYONE to take advantage of us. The clearer you can make what you have agreed to do and exactly when you expect to be paid the less issues you will run into – and the easier it will be to recognize people who would use you unfairly. With experience they will become quite obvious to you.