[eschutte2]

You can (and should) ask for whatever you think is fair. For new relationships, deposits are common, as are twice-monthly billing and net 10 terms.

Here's a piece of advice a friend and mentor gave me when I went from full-time to contracting long ago. We were talking about terms and I said well, I figure we'll just do net 30 or something. He got really serious and said "No, listen to me. You're a contractor now. You want your money, and you want it now."