I've been doing contract work for the last 6 years. In the markets I'm in Dallas and Chicago for my skill set (18 years) i'm finding it easy to find jobs at $125/hr but not much more than that. Even at that number I get lots of "thanks but no thanks." My most recent project, Apache Kafka and Spark, is only $115/hr. Which is close to $250k/yr but not any where near $400k/yr. I'm wondering where you're finding clients willing to pay this much and what type of work are you doing?
patio11 has a lot of articles and comments about charging by the week. From your comment, that sounds like how you'd make the leap; you get a lot more autonomy as well.
