and ignorant people will say, "Wow, you made $3500!"
I know it doesn't work that way of course, I lost my butt this spring on a job, worked for $2.00 an hour covered no overhead. But paid out all the labor and materials. I made a mistake on the bidding and estimating, you live and you learn
Now let's say you get on ten grand (!) job a month during 'the contruction season of 8 months. You just made 28 grand for one year.
That's ten grand UNDER the median income for your state....oh, and you're living in a very high cost of living town in a state with a very high cost of living.
I do a solid volume of work 8 months of the year, a 10k job is a small fraction of income per month, yes there is 4 months of "slow", but I'm always busy for the four months, this winter is look very good
And I'm assuming in order to subtract all your costs from that 10 grand (!) you also deducted things like your health insurance, workers comp insurance (aflac?), business insurance, work related costs such as tools and consumables, rental expenses for any shop/warehousing, and of course if you don't take the time to calculate all of these, then also deduct the price of an accountant/cpa.
cost of job 10k: 20% covers overhead, I bill myself out at $30.00 per hr when I'm working on that job, add up material and subcontractor invoices and then subtract....................
People that don't understand this, we can take the time to educate them.....or just ignore them and move on. I do the latter as life's too short to be constantly dealing with ignorant people.