Good Financial Reads: Freelancing & Side Hustles

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Catch up on some of the latest posts with this week's roundup:

3 Side Hustle Business Ideas

by Chad Rixse, Millennial Wealth, LLC

For many Millennials, long gone are the days of the status quo of climbing the corporate ladder and working for the same employer for their entire 30+ year career. Instead, Millennials “plan to work for many employers over their lifetimes, or for many employers and themselves, along with becoming business owners,” according to Accountingweb.com. This is due to of many of us Millennials having the “attitude that life planning should center around experiences rather than wealth accumulation.” We are effectively living by the mantra “work to live, not live to work.” We view money more as a means to an end with the goal of gaining experiences versus accumulating wealth. So, it’s no surprise then that many Millennials are turning to side hustles in a search to garner greater financial freedom so we can pursue the experiences that are meaningful and fulfilling to us.

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The Importance of Building Different Sources of Income

by Levi Sanchez, Millennial Wealth, LLC

When it comes to building wealth, saving and investing for your future, and achieving whatever other financial goals you might have, it’s important to develop other sources of income other than what you earn. You could be earning $500,0000 by age 50, yet if you haven’t saved a dime, you’re not going to be able to retire anytime soon. This article will explore the different types of income, how to establish other sources outside what you earn, and why it’s important to begin thinking about and establishing these sources early.

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Making Ends Meet: When Freelancing and the Gig Economy Collide

I’ll start with a line in the sand: Freelancers are self-employed and they take what they call gigs, but freelancing is not the so-called “gig economy” that has captured the attention of the media (and a respectable chunk of the economy) as of late. I don’t know if anyone has agreed on a formal distinction between what differentiates freelancing from gigging, but to me it’s fairly simple:

Freelancers are hired for jobs that only a person of their particular skills and training could do.

Gig economy workers (giggers?) are hired for jobs that require nothing but a live human to perform them.

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Act Like a Millionaire: Six Behaviors of Wealthy People That Can Help Freelancers Achieve Financial Security

by Ben Henry-Moreland, Freelance Financial Planning

What does it take to build up a million-dollar nest egg? What about just an emergency fund? The answers to these questions might actually be the same.

In the 1980s and 90s, two researchers named Thomas Stanley and William Danko studied the behaviors of people who had accumulated over a million dollars of net worth. The culmination of their research was the 1996 book The Millionaire Next Door. Stanley and Danko’s findings showed, as their book’s title suggests, that millionaires don’t tend to look or act the way we expect them to, much less the way popular culture has trained us to perceive them. In reality, the people who build up lot of wealth also drive boring cars, hunt for bargains, and fly coach even when they have the means to throw their money around if they wanted to.

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How (and Why) Freelancers Should Start Saving for Retirement

by Ben Henry-Moreland, Freelance Financial Planning

Some of the first questions I’m asked from new or prospective freelance clients are how much should I have saved for retirement? and how much should I be saving now?. These are good and important questions, and also ones that I have no answer for. That’s because there are some even more important questions that they need to ask themselves first, namely: “What does retirement mean to me?” and “Why is it worth saving up for?” My job as a financial planner is to help people achieve their goals; if those goals are muddy and unmotivated, any plan to reach them will seem pointless and be quickly discarded.

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