Everything and Only One Thing Freelancers Need to Know About Investment
Freelancing is unstable. You don’t have a fixed income, you don’t have retirement funds. You have to handle yourself your finances.
That’s why you may often hear that you need to study finance and invest in stock, forex, housing, or other difficult sounding financial products.
This isn’t true for most of us. Unless you make 4-5 times more than your friends, you don’t need to worry about investing your money to make money, because your biggest asset is yourself and your time.
What is an “asset”?
An asset is something that generates money. For example, your shoes are not an asset because you can never sell them to generate profit, unless it’s your business or unless you are a celebrity. Your house and land are your assets because their value can increase and you can sell these for more than what you originally paid.
In that sense, you or your time are assets. You and your work make money. Your earnings can increase if you work harder or smarter.
So asset management and investment is choosing to use your money and time to make more money.
Investing money to make money sounds smarter and easier, but I promise you, investing time is a much smarter investment.
Model case of time investment:
If your hourly earning is 10 USD, you can either work and get 10 USD or do something else during that one hour.
After you earn 10 USD, you can spend it for yourself or invest the 10 USD to make money.
You can also optimize your workflow to decrease your time of your non-billable hours -like making invoices or sales- and saving 2 hours of non-billable time monthly.
If you chose to optimize your workflow, instead of getting 10 USD, you will suddenly have 2 more hours available each month, meaning you can make 20 USD more each month, which adds up to 240 USD a year.
If you choose to study new skills to get a better paying job and increase your rate to 15 USD per hour, you will earn 25 USD more a day if you work 5 hours a day, which adds up to 1500 USD a year.
If you are lucky and good at it, your return of investments in financial products would be maybe 10 to 20%. Of course, it won’t be generated without a lot of effort and time spent studying. You have to actively buy and sell everyday and it takes time.
On the other hand, if you invest in yourself, the return of investment can be more than 100 or 1000%.
This might sound too good to be true, but it’s a realistic number in the first year of your freelancing because you have so many things to improve.
Invest your time to increase options.
Investing time to make more time will give more options. For example…
- Make more money
- Study to increase your hourly earning
- Study investment to financial products
- Exercise to stay fit
- Have fun
- Spend more time with your family
- Use money to outsource your work
The inconvenient truth of life
Whenever I search for tips on how to be a nomad or how to be successful, I systematically find a lot of websites which supposedly teach you “the secrets of billionaires”.
Everybody wants one big shot that turns their life around, but it’s much harder to find that one big shot than to get moderately rich from steady honest work.
I’m not saying that this one big shot or that the secret to becoming a billionaire do not exist. There might be a loophole in the financial market or laws that you can take advantage of, but how do you find them? The answer is studying more finance or laws.
You have to work and study hard to find the secrets to getting rich.
The easiest way and the quickest way to get rich and to become successful is by practicing a steady and honest work.