Freelancing for students’ assignments

I started doing some small freelance Java projects for university students about 1.5 years ago. The money is not great, afterall, how much can students afford to pay? Sometimes a day in the office gets me more than 3 days on the students' assignments. The good thing about it is I get to learn about new stuff I wasn't aware of, or I get to do some hands-on stuff on the things I had read. I did my first decent Swing program (a Point-Of-Sale system) as a freelance project, and learnt about the new features of J2SE 5.0(in particular, generics) in another. As quite a big bulk of the projects/assignments deal with data structures, I also had the opportunity to refresh my concepts on sets, tries, trees, linked lists and such. Couldn't I have done this on my own free time? Definitely, but I guess I'm a bit lazy, and tiny monetary incentives can give me a nudge in the right direction. :)

I have a few "customers" who contact me now and then when they need some help, and I will oblige if I know what to do and have the time. Previously, I worked on a trust basis, as in I'll send them the source code first, then they'll transfer the money to me. But I had a nasty experience when one person went MIA after I sent him the source code, didn't reply to my emails. I guess I was too naive, but thankfully I was able to find out who the person was in real life as his real name was in the Word document which contained the project specs. I googled for his online nick and came across it in a certain university discussion board, where he left his real name as well. So finally I was able to identify him, which gave me some leverage when I asked for payment, which came in the end. So I've changed my billing policy since then. More on that next time.