[ghaff]

Do the math.

If you can bill 40 hours/week for 50 weeks per year, that's about 2K hours so $120K/year. But you can't. You'll probably do well to bill half that because contracts probably don't fill basically the entire year neatly like that. You probably also want to budget time anyway for vacations/illness/etc., selling, billing, learning, and all the other off-the-clock things you need to do.

So now you're closer to $60K per year and that's with self-employment tax and no benefits including health (unless you're on a partner's plan).

So at $60/hr, even with a fairly full calendar, you're pretty much scraping by in the US.