The Small Business Development Centers are a national group of affiliated centers that are sponsored by grants from the Small Business Administration and various colleges and universities. The centers provide free consulting to owners of small businesses in the areas of law, accounting, grants and loans, Web design, marketing, green optimization, import-export, business-plan writing and related areas. They also give low-cost, three-hour classes in these areas for time-pressed businesspeople with limited resources.

Answer: Thanks for highlighting this wonderful resource, which helps more than 1 million small-business owners every year with free, one-on-one consultations and low-cost training. Readers, you can find out more about these centers at the Assn. of Small Business Development Centers’ website at http://www.asbdc-us.org. You can search by ZIP Code or state to find a center near you.

Joseph D’Agnese and Denise Kiernan have written a terrific new guide, “The Money Book for Freelancers, Part-Timers and the Self-Employed,” to address that gap. More on that in a minute.

The reason most advice assumes traditional employment is that most workers (about 75%) are, in fact, traditionally employed, working for a company that pays them at regular intervals. But that leaves quite a few who don’t have traditional jobs, including (here comes the irony) a lot of the people writing that personal finance advice.

I’m self-employed. So is Kathy Kristof of MarketWatch. So is Ilyce Glink of ThinkGlink.com. All the big guns—Suze, Dave, David, Robert—are self-employed. So are many of the best personal finance bloggers who, even if they haven’t yet left their day jobs, are typically earning money on the side.

So we all know the pain of paying for all our own benefits, saving for retirement without a match, irregular incomes, estimated tax payments and clients who don’t pay or pay late. Yet too often that experience isn’t reflected in what we write.

Of course, the best advice is universal. Live below your means. Track your spending. Save for the future. Know your goals and have a plan to get there. But how you get there is going to be a little different when you’re on your own.

Once they cover the basics of organizing your finances, estimating your future income and figuring out where your money is going, The Money Book’s authors have some great suggestions. One of them is to save a percentage of each check you receive for taxes, retirement and emergencies, rather than saving a set dollar amount each month for those goals. With irregular incomes, your dollar amount may be too big one month and too little the next. (Ideally, you’ll be saving 25% to 30% to cover taxes, 10% to 15% for retirement and maybe 5% for your emergency fund. That may seem like a lot, but the tax portion at least is about what an employer would slice out of a regular paycheck.)

That’s just the start of their good advice. If you’re self-employed or your income is irregular, I’d strongly encourage you to pick up this book.