The rise of the gig economy has given birth to many people choosing a non-traditional career path. The freelancer can choose what to work on and when. They can also decide how to manage their money 100% after paying tax. It’s a new reality that we’ve not navigated before.
Here is the thing though, being outside of the traditional career path, they have also deprived themselves of being subjected to something like the Pension Act. For instance, the Pension Act of Nigeria requires that both the employer and the employee contribute a certain percentage to the employee’s pension account monthly. In other words, traditional employees are mandated to plan towards a time when they won’t be strong enough to work again.
Given a choice, the traditional employee will rarely make such a monthly contribution. But because the law requires it, everyone in formal employment has a pension account funded monthly as a plan towards when they won’t be strong enough to work again.
Unfortunately, no law binds the gig worker to contribute to a pension scheme. Yet, just like the traditional career person, the freelancer will also get to an age where s/he is better off relaxing and going on holidays than working with the same energy that s/he worked when s/he was 20 something years old.
To this end, I have a proposition that’s too good to refuse.
Planning your “retirement” with Risevest
We have both agreed that you don’t want to work “forever” and even if you wish to, strength might fail you as you age. So how can you use Risevest to help you achieve your “retirement” goal?
- Risevest as you might know already is an asset management company committed to bringing you the best investment opportunities around the world. Our portfolio of investments is managed by seasoned experts. With the array of products that we have currently and the ones to come, there isn’t a better option to manage your “retirement” investment.
- You have an advantage over the traditional career person because all your investments with Risevest will be denominated in dollars. Why should you want otherwise?
- You are exposed to the best-performing assets in the world. Stock, Real Estate and Fixed Income.
All of these put together empowers you enough to make important financial decisions for your future.
Using Risevest, you can set up a plan, name it Retirement, Future Enjoyment or whatever name you’d like. Have a specific plan about how you will fund it and the rule that will guide when you can withdraw it. Simply put, set up your personal “Pension Act” and abide by it. Sounds simple, but it may not be simple.
Here are 3 guidelines to help you along the way of implementation.
- The first thing you will learn from the traditional career person is that they don’t feel the effect of the month-to-month pension deduction from their salary. This is an important point because while you plan for the future, you must exist today. So you can only invest an amount that won’t affect your survival today. Doing otherwise will put on you the pressure of liquidating your “retirement plan”. Don’t invest too much. For this, don’t ever go above 10% of what you earn.
- 10% of what you earn. Unlike the traditional career person, you don’t earn monthly, you earn per gig. So it is important to recognize that and ensure that whatever percentage you choose to contribute towards your pension comes from every gig that you complete.
- Discipline yourself mentally to always calculate your income net of your retirement contribution. Let’s assume you have decided to keep 5% of everything that you earn towards retirement. If you earned $1,000 on a gig then you should see it as earning $950 never to be seen as $1,000 let alone should you plan your life on $1,000.
This is new territory for every one of us. The future of work is still the future. And while our gig workers are living in the future already, we also believe that as your trusted wealth advisor, we should provide you with a necessary guide on this.
The ideas shared above are what we are thinking about at the moment. And we trust that if you run by them, you will have your future guaranteed.
Surely this is not the end of this topic, it’s only the beginning. As you use Risevest’s platform for this purpose, you will have more questions we will be available to answer.
For now, go and set up your “Retirement” Plan on Risevest. In 30 years, you’ll be glad you did..