Self Employment

How to Approach Self Employment

You say that people should open their open business.

But I know that most new businesses fail within the first year. Aren’t you giving out bad advice?

Tad

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It is true that most new businesses fail quite quickly, usually because they are under capitalized from the very beginning.

However, it is also true that, except in very rare cases, you’re not going to become financially free working for someone else. Most of the time you will be making sufficient money to keep up with the mortgage and put the kids through school, with a yearly vacation thrown in, but you will be more or less on a treadmill, never really saving enough to be able to tell your boss to “take this job and shove it.”

Most people are not able to save more than a few thousand dollars for retirement in spite of the growing number of tax sheltered programs the government offers.

The kind of self employment I suggest you look into are businesses that: a) you can do out of your home; b) part time at first while keeping your present job; and c) that require little capital outlay.

I don’t advocate that you open a restaurant or a sporting goods shop or anything similar. It takes too much money and time to do it right.

Find something you can do at nights and on the weekends. Turn a hobby or something you love to do into a business. Or open a website and try to make money that way. See Employ Yourself for more ideas.

Maybe you’ll lose a few hundred dollars if your first try is not successful, but nothing that is going to drive you bankrupt. If the first effort at self employment fails, try again. Learn from your mistakes and be persistent. Persistence, more than anything else, separates success from failure.

If you do it this way, you keep your regular income until you succeed. You also pick up tax breaks that may help shelter some of your regular income. You only walk away from your day job when you making at least as much, if not more from you own business.

Nothing in life is easy or without risk. But as they say, “nothing ventured – nothing gained.”

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