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As for taxes, I remember when I was an Independent Contractor (real estate agent), I had to pay "estimated taxes" every quarter. If I didn't put in enough for estimated taxes, there was a penalty I had to pay come April 15 income tax time. Lot more paperwork income tax wise.
Did you sign a contract with an agency. There may be a non-compete clause. Works the other way. You also can't "steal" a client.
NON COMPETE
Perhaps it would be possible to set yourself up as a company, and hire yourself to your company. That would take the pressure off your clients to 'hire you as an employee'. You could contract to outsource all the tax and other employee paperwork to a small business that specialises in running those sorts of things for other small businesses like yours, they certainly do exist. I know that my daughter hires herself to her own company in the UK, for tax purposes, and it is apparently legal. It might be worth checking out, but clearly nothing is going to be easy or super-cheap. 'Under the table' is cheap but dangerous and doesn't provide you with multiple employee / tax etc benefits.
If you are paid in cash then no money is going into your SS benefit account for your own future retirement. And, there may not be enough "quarters" (40, or 10 years) of your working and putting into Medicare for you to receive it once you are 65 (assuming you aren't 65 already).
The agency charging clients a much higher hourly rate than what you were receiving is called "normal business". There are business expenses that you can't even begin to imagine. Having been in business with employees for almost 40 years, I can tell you it is expensive to run a business. We charged our corporate clients $250 per hour and our employees made far less than 1/3 of it, however they got 100% gold-level healthcare and full dental, paid vacation, holidays and PTO, free parking, and more.
You will need to figure out how to work as an independent yet take time off for vacations and unexpected sick days. You will also have to be your own collection agency.
Healthcare and teaching are professions where there is a tricky balance between paying professionals appropriately and at the same time keeping it affordable for the end users. If the government subsidizes any of it this means all taxpayers are paying for it, many without benefiting from it.
"I find it difficult to do taxes..."
This is what bookkeepers are for.