Is $5 an hour too cheap for a VA?

I answer a lot of questions at Quora – are you familiar with this site? Today I was asked if $5 an hour too cheap for a VA. My answer was this:

Depends on a number of things:

Have you actually done a budget forecast for the year to ensure that you are charging sufficient per hour? For example, if you want to earn just $10,000USD per annum and plan to work a minimum of 30 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, then that would be close to sufficient. However, if you want to earn double, triple or more than that, you need to seriously consider how many hours a week you want to work, and how many weeks per year. Do you want to allow for holiday time? What about sick leave? Will you need to be covering insurances and equipment purchases? What about software purchases or monthly payments? When you add these into the equation, $5 per hour probably doesn’t cut it.

In fact, on reflection, it would be closer to 40 hours a week and would not allow for time for this VA to do their own admin or marketing based on the above unless eating into hours outside of normal working time.There’s more to running a business than just servicing clients and invoicing them for your time. You need to factor in business expenses and your own time for running the business as well.