Freelancing is great if you've built up a network of professional contacts who appreciate your work and will both contract you and recommend you to their network when someone is looking for work done. You typically get paid a far higher hourly rate than if you are working full-time - my contract day rate amounts to nearly double my full-time day rate.

And presuming you keep delivering, impressing people, and gaining more skill and experience, it just goes up and up and up.

Like anything else, it is much harder if you are on the bottom rung.