Self Employed and Pensions
For those of you thinking about becoming self employed or starting your own business – there is a good chance you will end up with a high stress piss poor job not the freedom you thought you were creating.
We now have a “gig” economy. Freelance and self employed are all scratching around for short term ‘gig employment’ – the dream of flexible working – when you want. It’s a myth.
Most self employed are all free ranging, mainly wandering around “free” just looking for more work and hoping they can find some.
Like chickens mindlessly scratching around in the hope of finding something worthwhile.
Few take the time to really build a proper business. They are probably not ever going to have a business, but with a few changes it’s possible to secure long term income streams and a viable future just by adding a couple of tweaks to existing services and products.
Don’t get confused with Self Employment and Entrepreneurship. They are very different, entrepreneurship means spending a few years in your underwear working stupid hours from home doing something most are not prepared to do in return for a lifetime of financial independence.
Entrepreneurs create systems and processes that can be done by someone else while you work on the business not in it.
This is a further problem for pensions, they are so inflexible and virtually useless for modern lifestyles.
Back to the masses. Let’s look at what most people do every day.
Get up, moan, drive to work, go through the day, spend money on lunch. Drive home, drop a few glasses of wine/beer/poison of choice, mindlessly watch the news/soaps/Facebook/Twitter. Go to bed, sleep. Repeat.
Most are downright miserable, complaining about how crap life is. Never thinking any further than a few beers at the weekend, ignoring their kids… You know what I mean.
Few, sit down carefully and consider what needs to change. They never look for anything good in their lives and wonder why N O T H I N G changes. I’ve done, you have done it.
The masses also invest in pensions, they hope that’ll pan out. Hope that at some point in the future, just before they’re ‘pre zimmer’ they can stop work. Reality is, there an entire industry promising that dream and now – more than ever they don’t care and won’t be punished for not delivering for you.
That’s how important these pension issues are, they are no new but for the first time in modern British history they are looking more like something the masses are going to be very disappointed with.
If you are self employed and considering investing in pensions. Do the maths. Take £100 and invest that in a pension or in stock. Most of the time you’ll get a far superior return on the stock, that also keeps you in control and you can roll it over. Once you’ve rolled it over three or four times your money has doubled (based on 30% profit margin) – can’t do that with a pension.
Sometimes there are few easy answers. But tying money up for thirty of forty years is not really a viable option.
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