How I screwed myself out of $18,000

And how to keep yourself from falling into the same trap

Being an independent contractor can be a fantastic way to earn money; when you are contracted by an honest person or company. Unfortunately, if you are like me; naive and nice, it can be hard to know if you have signed with an honest one.

Before I begin this I want to state that I am not a lawyer. Any advice I am putting in this paper is from the standpoint of a non legal professional who had a big lesson to learn. Any use of the words “illegal” or “legal” have been used with careful research to make sure I understand what really went wrong here, though definitions may change and become outdated with time. If you have any questions about your employment or contracting please do your own research as laws may vary state to state.

My story starts out as a product of desperation. My mother is permanently disabled; my stepfather was laid off from his job. I was working as a manager in a retail store only making $9.50/hr and was starting to think it wasn’t even close to worth the aggravation after I started only getting 13 hours a week because of an influx of new hires. I scoured Craigslist looking for a job. And there it was. It was the perfect job for me combining my two favorite things. For the sake of the fact that I do not want to get sued, I will not say what those favorite things are, but anyone that knows me will tell you, I love those things more than any other thing I could have taken a job for. I will also tell you it involved performance. (No I was not a stripper, for those whose minds immediately jump into the gutter.)

For the sake of explaining what went wrong, I am going to put an asterisk(*) next to all the red flags I missed or ignored that could have saved me a lot of trouble (and money!) in the long run had I paid attention.

I went for my interview, and was early like all interviewees are told they should be. It was at a restaurant in the town where my interviewer lived. *My interviewer was almost an hour late to the interview. (My first red flag.) Now I realize that things come up and people have things that make them late, but I wasn’t even notified that my interviewer was running late until 30 minutes after the interview was supposed to start. This shows that my interviewer is unreliable. Remember, when you are going on an interview, you are being interviewed, but you are also interviewing the company.

I signed my application form and was told the company would love to hire me and that I could start training whenever I was ready. I would be paid $12/hr for 4 hours of training sessions. Ok, cool. The word “independent contractor” was waved in my face. I figured it was just my job title. I didn’t realize it would require so much more than my regular employment did.

I was told my interviewer had to speak to the higher ups about my hourly wage and my interviewer would get back to me on it, but it would be somewhere between $15 and $21 per hour, plus gas, tolls and mileage.

“Wow! Awesome. I have a ton of previous experience in this field so I’ll probably be higher up on the pay scale” I thought to myself. *I asked my interviewer how they knew how much to pay us and if we needed to record our miles and hours and was told “Nope. We know everything about where you are going and how long it will take”. RED FLAG! You will find out why later, but ALWAYS record all of your data; mileage, hours, save your gas receipts. TAKE PHOTOS of your start and end times and mileage. Even if you trust the people you report to, keep track of everything.

Back to my story. The job required a lot of driving. A LOT. Like from the bottom of my state into two other states, a lot. I didn’t mind. I liked driving and seeing new places. “Great, I’ll see you at training! Nice to meet you!” I went to my training. It was me sitting in on what my interviewer was doing for 30 minutes. The places varied between 30 mins away and an hour away. $12/hr for that wound up being $6 per training session, at an almost per diem schedule. I only did one training session a day. No big. I wasn’t really doing anything during the performances anyways. Until I was.

The last two half hours of training were only 15 minutes away from where I lived and my interviewer wanted to finish my training and decided we could lump two together since it was two back to back half hours that were scheduled. I got a phone call from my interviewer who said it wouldn’t be possible to make it due to a schedule mishap and I would have to bring the performance items in and conduct both performances on my own. It wound up running into being 1.5 hours long.

I told my interviewer what happened, and then inquired if I would get full pay for the 1.5 hours I was there since I had to do everything on my own. Nope. *Still only get $12/hr. Here’s another red flag. The difference with this one is it wasn’t a retrospective one. I felt ripped off at that very moment seeing as I had to conduct the whole thing completely by myself. It was no longer “training”, it was actual job action.

From this point on I am going to call my interviewer “my boss” because *despite the claims that there were higher ups, I never met them, and as it turns out, the LLC is actually in my boss’ name. This is a HUGE red flag by the way and it was something that bothered me the whole time, yet I ignored. Why would an honest boss lie about having higher ups? I was told they were in an office in another state, yet the LLC is clearly registered in our state, under my boss’ name. Continuing on. My first performance was to be about 1 hour away. Ok cool. Not too far. My boss sat with me and told me I was doing an excellent job after my first two performances. We went out to our respective cars and I asked my boss. “Now that I am done with training, have your bosses said what they are going to pay me?” My boss seemed to think about it for a few seconds and then said “I think they want you to have $15/hour.” Bummer, but it was more than I was making in my management position.

***TIME TO WAVE THE BIGGEST RED FLAG***** I was NEVER given a contract to sign agreeing to this wage or any other financial agreements (mileage, gas, tolls) as were discussed during my interview. This is a BIG DEAL. I thought nothing of it at the time, and as time went on, it slipped my mind COMPLETELY. Eventually when it did come into my mind, I thought that perhaps the application I filled out counted as my contract and I had forgotten what was on there.

As you know from the title, I got screwed out of almost $18,000 dollars. The estimated hours I was not properly paid for alone come to about $3,935. There was also $1,316 for unpaid gas reimbursements. Ok…but there is still about $13k unaccounted for.

MILEAGE. When somebody tells you that you will be paid for mileage, it is kind of an “oh…ok…uh that’s like a few cents per mile..or..whatever”. But it isn’t! And it REALLY adds up! The federal requirement for mileage reimbursement in 2013 was 56.5 cents for every mile driven. As I stated earlier, I was told to drive anywhere between three different states! That is A LOT of driving. 25,000 miles of driving during the 5 months I worked for the company, in fact.

By the time I finally wised up and quit, I had driven my car 5 days a week all day long for this person. I worked (mostly driving) between 12-14 hours a day towards the end of my time working. I only used my car for personal about 10% of the time because I was working SO MUCH.

So $.565 X 25,000 = $14,125. BUT I have to take out that ten percent for personal use, which leaves me with $12,712.50 that I should have been paid for in miles alone. HOLY CRAP. I lost almost $13k because I thought mileage meant NOTHING.

Now, I’m sure you are wondering, well what about the pay check? How could you let that happen?! I was nice and gave my boss the benefit of the doubt. I will tell you right now. If you are EVER suspecting that you are being treated wrongly, in any situation, not just payment, DO NOT GIVE THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT. Investigate it. And believe me, I tried. I had suspected I was given not enough for just hours alone for quite a while.

Here is my first example where I raised an eyebrow after realizing something was wrong with my payment. In three days, I would spend $90 on gas, and then maybe another $60 in the next two. If I made $190 in a week then I was only profiting $40, but I worked at least 4 hours each day for 5 days….shouldn’t that alone have made me $300 not including gas? I couldn’t tell if my math was off. It didn’t make sense. How could someone this nice be skimping me on that much cash?

I figured I would ask my boss straight forward. “How are you calculating my pay?” I didn’t get a response that was satisfying. *I got “It’s a really complicated formula and I don’t have time to write it down for you right now”. Avoidance. I did that thing nice people do again, gave my boss the benefit and waited since my boss seemed busy or wasn’t around to hand me my check in person the following weeks.

In time, I forgot again. Still, could a nice person be screwing me over anyways? I must have just been miscalculating. Three months in, I asked for copies of my paychecks since I never received any record of what I was paid, and the checks I received were handwritten. My bank only saves handwritten checks as “check #(######)”, or not at all if I cashed them right away. So I wanted to have my own records. It took my boss a little while to get them to me, but I finally had some record of what I made.

Little by little, the job that I loved turned into an even bigger nightmare.

There were days where I worked 14 hours and my boss didn’t even schedule enough time between performances for me to eat something. Many days went by and all I would have to eat from 5am to 8pm was a granola bar or 4 Oreo cookies. I would tell my boss that I needed more time to be able to eat, and was brushed off.

The driving left me exhausted. I would leave at 5 am and not return until 8pm. I often found myself falling asleep on my way home. I am so lucky I didn’t get into an accident.

Then I got sick. I’m not sure with what to be honest, the doctor’s called it “flu-like symptoms”. I had a 103 fever, and I was exhausted. I had to call out for two weeks and my boss threw a hissyfit. Well sorry. I am not driving for 14 hours with a 103 fever. I couldn’t even sit up, let alone be coherent enough to drive or deal with large groups of people. I also didn’t want to get anyone else sick.

There were other issues too, like faulty equipment and dangerous “performance props”. I would have to carry and unload heavy items that required at least three people by myself. Any time something went wrong, I was yelled at and told to “deal with it”. The money was all my boss seemed to care about. I found out later, just before quitting, that if anything had gone wrong, I would be the one who got sued, not the company that contracted me. I’m glad I refused to comply the times the equipment wasn’t working correctly and I was told to “just put it up and deal with it”, because then I would be in even bigger monetary trouble.

Just before my biggest issue with faulty equipment, my car broke down. I’m going to side note for a minute here and tell you all that my car was in fantastic condition before I started working for this company. The amount of miles I had put on my car in my first four months was so astronomical that my car imploded on itself and everything was going wrong with it. I fixed the minimum that I could afford to, to the tune of almost $500.

When I called my boss to say my car was out of commission and I could only drive it locally, my boss flipped out at me, telling me I was screwing the company over. I ask you dear audience, who was really screwing who over? At this point I was told I could drive my boss’ car but *I was not allowed to call out any more or ask for any days off. Now wait a second. I was an independent contractor. It had finally hit me after doing some research what that really meant. My boss had been scheduling me without my consent all this time and I was just agreeing to it. I wasn’t an independent contractor if I had no say in my hours and days of work. “Ok narrator, so what does that even mean?”. The difference between an independent contractor and an employee are two things. Taxes and scheduling.

Independent contractors have to take care of their own taxes, nothing gets withheld and sent in by “the boss”. BUT the independent contractor decides his or her own hours and days of work. There are no schedules. It is “I will be free to come in at this time”. You tell the boss, the boss does not tell you. And yet, here I am, being told I can’t ask for any days off. Huh. By this point I was livid. I basically lost my car to this job and I still didn’t think I was being paid correctly.

Throughout all this time that things were going south, my mistreatment had been enough for me to decide to quit a few times, but I lost my nerve each time whenever my boss would tell me “Thank you so much for everything you do. You are the best [performer] I have. [Your favorite client] was asking about you the other day, he loves you so much”. It was like my boss knew I was about to open my mouth and quit. I felt guilty. So I stayed. Every time. Not to mention, having left my retail job, this was my only income.

Eventually, I decided to give my boss one more chance. I asked again about how I was paid, this time asking my boss to break down my actual pay with my current paycheck. “I don’t have the formula with me, can I show you later?” I am a nice person. “Sure, no problem.” This time I knew my boss was avoiding telling me.

By now I was fuming and my family was ticked off because they knew I was being ripped off and they had been telling me to quit for over a month. I was in the car with my boss one day and got a phone call and had my ear ripped off by my mother who was angry that I still hadn’t quit. My boss asked what the problem was and looked at me with the most terrifying face I had ever seen on someone when I said I was just told to quit. After some attempts at diffusing, my boss calmed down and told me I almost got kicked out of the car. In the middle of the highway. In state that I didn’t live in. Real professional.

I said my mom was angry because I wasn’t making enough money and she wanted me to leave. I told my boss we were struggling with bills and food. *My boss then told me the company would give me an additional $100 a week under the table and even pay for my families groceries. I politely declined the offer. But I thought. “Wow. That is really nice. I’ve never had an employer care so much about me.” I decided to stay. Now the reason I red flagged that is because my boss was suddenly VERY willing to offer me something that is VERY illegal. If my boss was willing to jump to do that, what else was my boss doing that was illegal?

Two weeks later on a Friday, I drove back to my state extremely drained. I had a very long day where I had been late to an important performance and was screamed at by my boss for almost an hour. I dropped off the car at my boss’ house and decided enough was enough. I worked 65 hours that week and if my paycheck was any less than $400 I was out of there.

My mom and stepdad picked me up from the house and I went home and calculated what my check should have been, just in hours. I worked 12 hours each of the first two days. 13 another. And 14 each the remaining two days. At the promised $15/hr I should have made $975 not including my gas and mileage. And yet, here was my check. $275 dollars.

That was it. I was done. I was tired of being taken advantage of and abused for things that were beyond my control like heavy traffic (which I was yelled at for on multiple occasions) and the fact that my car broke down. I sent my boss an e-mail saying I was unavailable as of the following Monday. I received an unfriendly email back stating that since I had violated my contract by not giving two weeks (and how could I with the threat of kicking me out of the car previously? I didn’t want to get stranded in another state out of spite.) my boss was going to call the police on me. I asked my boss to send me a copy of my contract so I could review it and then received no response.

I guess I really didn’t sign a contract.

So here I am at what seems to be the end of my horror story, and yet it’s not. I would love to take this company to claims court. I would LOVE to get the money I am owed. As you know the company owes me almost $18k. But I cannot prove anything. In the beginning of this article, I told you if you become an independent contractor to keep track of EVERYTHING. I am not kidding. I have no record of the hours I worked or the mileage I drove. I know for a fact that I started at 78k and some odd miles and ended the job with 103k and some odd miles.

But I can’t prove it. I would receive hand written schedules, and would get calls halfway through the day changing my schedule so I would work more. I would throw out my schedules since they were inaccurate. Now, I also have no proof of hours worked or scheduling. The company’s lack of a contract with me also means I can’t prove I am owed money for gas or mileage or even that I was promised $15/hr on top of it. I have those check copies my boss gave me that date up to the middle of my three month mark, but I have no other check copies after that. I never logged my hours or my miles. I never took any photos to prove where I was or how long I was there. Because I trusted my boss.

I am writing this article as closure and as a warning to other inexperienced workers desperate for money. I realize it is hard to imagine that someone could miss that he or she is missing out on that much income, but while I knew I was missing out on some amount of money, I wasn't entirely sure how much. Part of my "benefit of the doubt" reasoning was that maybe my boss only paid half for driving because it wasn't the actual performance? Or maybe I was only paid half mileage? As I stated earlier, mileage was the biggest part of my missing income, and I thought nothing of it at the time I wasn’t getting any, because to me it was literally cents.

I honestly did not know if I was right or wrong or missing any pieces because I was brushed off multiple times while asking about pay, which in retrospect makes me think I was being paid by my boss just pulling numbers out of the sky.

I am the kind of person who tries to see the good in people and doesn't often mistrust anyone, so instead I tried to rationale my way out of believing I was being duped. It wasn't until I started working those crazy hours that how much I was being ripped off finally showed it's ugly head.

In the beginning, the differences weren't enough for me to think something strange was happening, they were just enough for me to think “Oh, maybe I miscalculated a bit”. Math has never been my strong subject, so all of these numbers were prepared for me with the help of an experienced accountant, literally yesterday, several months after my leaving in preparation for tax filing, hence why I am writing this article now, as opposed to when I quit.

Anyways, this article is riddled with advice that is scattered and I want to condense it into one reading area.

If you are going into an independent contract learn from my mistakes:

• Make sure you actually sign a contract! Don’t let it slip your mind. Make sure it includes all aspects of your compensation. What makes my issues immediately dismissible is that I have no proof that I was promised to be paid a certain way.

• Record EVERYTHING. Don’t just do it in writing, take photos. Reset the odometer and take a photo of the time you leave and the zero mileage, take photos of the time you arrive and the mileage. Don’t trust your employer to do it.

• Save all of your receipts! Even if you get screwed over like I did, at least you can claim the amounts as tax deductions

• Do not let anyone tell you that you HAVE to work certain days or hours and that you can’t choose your days off unless they are going to provide you with a W-4 for tax information. If they are choosing your exact hours, they are illegally paying you as a contractor. For more information on the difference between an employee and Independent contractors visit http://www.legalzoom.com/everyday-law/workplace/employee-vs-independent-contractor-differences

• Make copies of your checks. Even if your boss writes down what you made, your records are much better off as actual copies of the checks.

• Find out what your pay formula is DURING THE INTERVIEW. If you don’t understand, ask the person who pays you to break it down for you so you can double check your pay checks. Even though someone may not necessarily be trying to screw you over, there is always the chance of human error.

• MOST IMPORTANTLY: Trust your instincts. If something turns you off about the job and doesn’t sit right with you, don’t take it, or leave as soon as something seems awry if you cannot get a reasonable explanation.

If I can save even one person from being fooled and screwed over like I was, then I will consider my losses worth it.