Be Your Own Boss

Joe Pregiato gave up selling bonds on Wall Street in favor of snapping pictures of blushing brides.

In doing so, Pregiato made the leap from working for someone else to being his own boss - joining the ranks of the millions of self-employed Americans who decide to hang out their own shingle for any number of reasons.

"I am so glad I cut the umbilical cord," says Pregiato, who quit his job in the fall of 2001, ending a nearly two-decade career on Wall Street. He thus began a new professional journey, turning a hobby and passion into a full-time business - Arbor & Ivy Photography. Most of his work is shooting weddings.

"I second guessed every career decision I made on Wall Street at some point, but I never second guessed this one," Pregiato says. "This just felt right the minute I cut the strings and decided to do it."

Roughly 9.51 million people were self employed in 2005 - not counting farm workers. They accounted for 6.8 percent of the U.S. work force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among those self-employed - 5.94 million - are men, the bureau says.

Going the self-employment route can be rewarding financially, recent research by the Federal Reserve suggests.

The average income in 2004 for families headed by a self-employed person was $141,500 - roughly double the $70,100 average for a household whose head is working for someone else, according to the Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances.

One reason may be that the ranks of the self-employed can include higher paid professionals or people with specialized skills, economists said. Some of the higher income also could reflect investments related to saving for retirement, analysts said.

Pregiato, 50, who has two young children and a self-employed nutritionist wife, says he is faring better financially now than he did in some of the jobs he held on Wall Street.

To be sure there have been some trying times along the way. "It was scary in the beginning," Pregiato recalls. He remembers running up charges on his credit cards in the winter and taking all summer to pay them off.

These days his business run out of his home in Westchester County, New York, is firmly established and thriving, he says. And because of that, he was able to build a sizable addition to his house.

Although the number of the self-employed - excluding those in farm industries - has drifted upward over the last 50 years, their share of the overall work force has gotten smaller as the work force itself has grown over that same period.

According to research done by Steven Hipple, an economist at the Department of Labor, based on 2003 data, the self-employed are more likely to be older, white and male.

In terms of education, people working for themselves can be found at both ends of the spectrum - those with advanced degrees as well as those with less than a high-school diploma, Hipple found.

Excluding the farm industry, the self-employed are scattered across a wide variety of occupations. Some especially popular ones include: construction; health care; personal care (such as barbershops, nail salons and beauty shops); artists, writers, photographers and musicians; as well as real estate and tax preparation.

Chris Krupinski, 54, decided to start her own business - rather than work for someone else - after her husband died unexpectedly in 1995. She was a stay-at-home mom raising three children when her life was turned upside down.

"It was a rollercoaster ride," recalls Krupinski, who first tried to make a living as an artist. Eventually she went back to school and acquired the computer and other skills needed to be a graphic designer. Her company, ck art and design studio, designs brochures, newsletters, stationery and other things.

She works 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and sometimes on weekends in her studio at her Fairfax, Va., home.

"Once I am at my studio, it is as if I left my house. You have to do that. You cannot make excuses and you can't stop because I don't get paid for sitting at my desk," she says. "I get paid for producing."

Although Krupinski has steady work and feels she is doing well financially, it can be a struggle, especially when it comes to paying for rising health care costs for her family.

"We just keep plugging away," she says.