How feasible is it to make at least 20k a year working for oneself? What kind of skills or business ideas would prove fruitful? I could probably make close to that as a freelance transcriber working from home, but I'm talking about things that are actually reasonably interesting to do and offer some sort of growth or career progression.
I've been working a barely above minimum wage job after a long spell of NEETdom and it has made me realise how precious my time is. I've gotten used to working a regular 9-5, but I would now rather spend those 8 hours working for myself.
>How feasible is it to make at least 20k a year working for oneself?
It's completely feasible if you've got a halfway sensible idea and some marketable skills. It's a pipe dream if you have some half-arsed notions around "doing something online".
I'd strongly recommend getting in touch with your local Growth Hub, who can give you free support and advice on starting and running a business.
>>14146 >It's completely feasible if you've got a halfway sensible idea and some marketable skills. It's a pipe dream if you have some half-arsed notions around "doing something online".
Otherlad, here. Can you distinguish between a "pipe dream" and a "halfway sensible idea"? Because that reads as totally subjective.
Do the thousands of users getting contracts but barely making a living on Fiverr count as having "marketable skills"?
>>14147 I took it to mean the difference between people actually worth 20k p/a and myself - a benefits lout living on 6k p/a who spends most of their time playing at a computer. Sure, I spend a lot of time at a computer so probably could use it productively, but I don't know what I'd do other than 'something online'.
I supose another way of looking at it would be if you actually want to do the thing, or just want the means to continue your current lifestyle.
If you've got an idea and have actually looked into the realities around it, maybe even in the process of developing a detailed plan regarding, give it a go. If you're just sat around like me, it's probably a pipe dream.
It's a big topic which is why I recommend getting some professional support and advice. In brief, you need well-researched answers to the following questions:
Is there enough real demand for my product or service?
Can I find a reliable stream of new and/or repeat customers?
Can I make a healthy profit and defend it against competition?
Do I have the skills, capital and support to actually deliver this idea?
The thousands of people on Fiverr making piss-all money come unstuck on two or three of those points. Their plan for acquiring customers is "list myself on Fiverr", but that's a marketplace with far more sellers than buyers. They're entering a marketplace that already has rock-bottom prices and most of them don't have anything that sets them apart from the thousands of other wannabes.
Say you're a graphic designer on Fiverr, you've got reasonable design skills but you're making absolutely shit-all money. A viable plan would look something like this:
I'm going to specialise in packaging design and marketing materials for the meat industry. I'm going to religiously read trade magazines and do loads of other research so I have a deep understanding of the industry and the challenges they face. I'll attend all the networking events and trade shows I can, with the primary aim of learning rather than just touting for business.
I'll build a solid portfolio of meat-related design work, doing fictional mockups or freebies for small businesses. I'll build a website for my portfolio and regularly write a blog on meat marketing topics. Within a year or so, I'll be an expert on the particular needs of the meat industry and I'll have built up a contact list of hundreds of small-to-medium producers who might use my services. These clients could just go on Fiverr or get someone's nephew to do it, but a couple of minutes on the phone will demonstrate why I'm worth hiring and worth paying over the odds.
>>14150 Thanks a bunch for explaining like this. It's very helpful.
>I'll have built up a contact list of hundreds of small-to-medium producers who might use my services.
After then does it simply become a waiting game while remaining active in the area?
Is it usual for people to use their contact list in touting for work? How might a business do that effectively?
>After then does it simply become a waiting game while remaining active in the area?
Is it usual for people to use their contact list in touting for work? How might a business do that effectively?
A bit of both. Once you're established you should expect to get a good amount of work from word-of-mouth, particularly if you actively ask clients if they know anyone who might need your services. The marketing wank term "top-of-mind awareness" is annoying but useful - if you're that guy who did some work for us last year, that guy who did a great job for my mate or that guy I met at the thing, you're far more likely to get the work than a total stranger. The more you put yourself out there, the more likely you are to come to mind.
There are loads of ways to network with local businesses, from Facebook groups to business brunches to events at the Chamber of Commerce. Most business-to-business deals start with a conversation rather than a sales pitch - just chatting to people about their business allows you to get a sense of who they are, what their needs are and how your skills might be relevant to them. Those conversations don't always pay off immediately, but often you'll pick up a titbit like "we're launching a new product in March" that might turn into work down the road. Sometimes you'll get an e-mail out of the blue from someone you spoke to a year ago, or a call from a friend-of-a-friend of someone you don't even remember meeting.
If all else fails, there's nothing wrong with cold calling. Obviously you don't want to make a nuisance of yourself, but in the previous example it might be prudent to have a look around for companies with dated websites or amateurish packaging and get in touch. Some of them won't give a shit, some of them won't have the money, but some of them might have thought of getting a designer in but just haven't got round to it or didn't know where to look.
Getting started is always daunting, it can seem like a fruitless slog in the early days, but the connections you make will gradually snowball into a proper career if you keep showing your face and keep doing good work.
>>14146 >It's completely feasible if you've got a halfway sensible idea and some marketable skills. It's a pipe dream if you have some half-arsed notions around "doing something online".
That's the entire point of this thread though. What kind of skills are most in demand if someone has a desire to work for himself and has enough money to invest in the appropriate training?
>>14152 >Is it usual for people to use their contact list in touting for work? How might a business do that effectively?
Even bigger companies do this. Our sales team dedicate a lot of time just to phoning up prior customers and having a conversation along the lines of "you bought something from us 3 months ago but havent heard of you in a while, how's business?"
Companies who just sit on their hands waiting for jobs to come into them tend to end up losing out over time because either people just forget them, or people change companies and new people come in and don't know what they sell.
The specifics of the skill are less important than delivering value for businesses. I know that sounds unhelpfully vague, but it's a vitally important mindset. Businesses don't give a toss about copywriting or web development or anything else you can do a Skillshare course in, they care about making more money.
If you start from that perspective, you'll end up picking up a wide range of skills, most of which aren't directly related to the thing you ostensibly do. Start by gaining a bones-deep understanding of the needs of small-to-medium businesses and follow wherever that leads. If you've already got some skills then try to make use of them, but don't let the cart lead the horse.
If I were starting over from scratch today, I'd be inclined to do something logistics-related - never let a good crisis go to waste. Customs agents and brokers have got more trade than they can handle, thousands of small businesses are completely bewildered by the import/export situation post-Brexit and I don't see that changing in a hurry.
>>14156 >Start by gaining a bones-deep understanding of the needs of small-to-medium businesses and follow wherever that leads. If you've already got some skills then try to make use of them, but don't let the cart lead the horse.
I think this might be at odds with what the OP had in mind:
>I'm talking about things that are actually reasonably interesting to do and offer some sort of growth or career progression.
I'm not saying that a sweet spot doesn't exist between "what people find interesting" and "what businesses need" doesn't exist, but it seems like an extremely rare combination.
Unless you've got a passion (whatever that is), there is an unbeatable sense of job satisfaction in doing something that's actually useful. A lot of ostensibly "interesting" careers have just been glamourised by popular culture and are mostly tedious busy-work, while a lot of ostensibly "boring" careers offer far more variety and satisfaction than you might expect.
The other factor is that if you're doing something with very high value and know how to capitalise on that value, you don't have to do very much of it to make a living.
Not meaning to hijack the OP's thread but this is a pretty interesting discussion.
I admire your pragmatism, but it also seems painfully obvious to me that many things which are deemed "useful" are actually just "profitable". There's plenty of useful (or otherwise fulfilling) activities that don't make money for businesses. Narrowing our view to what makes money rules out a lot of really important human activities. There are some obvious examples; I'm happy someone out there is doing their degree in Art History, something I wouldn't personally stick out but do benefit from indirectly if I visit a gallery, read their work, or even just have a nice conversation with them.
On the other hand, I totally agree with you that certain careers are glamourised in a very misleading way. I was someone that almost but never quite went down the road of becoming a medical doctor, and I'm quite glad I didn't.
>The other factor is that if you're doing something with very high value and know how to capitalise on that value, you don't have to do very much of it to make a living.
Without giving away any identifying info, I'm now really eager to know what you do (and how much of it you do). I'm someone that definitely gets a lot of their personal identity from their career, and unfortunately this also means I've been stuck in jobs I don't like trying to "work my way up", and wasting a lot of time in the process. I often wonder if it would be better to just have to entirely separate lives, one to make a living and the other to actually live.
>Without giving away any identifying info, I'm now really eager to know what you do (and how much of it you do).
I'm a consultant in the software industry. I have a mathematics background and dabble in a few fields, but my core skill is something called formal verification - I use mathematical methods to prove the correctness of an algorithm or system with absolute certainty. I help to design the most critical parts of systems that simply cannot be allowed to fail under any circumstances.
I have a fairly simple lifestyle and only need to work for a couple of weeks per year, but I typically do more than that if I'm offered interesting or particularly lucrative work. I have a couple of sidelines, which are really just tax-deductible hobbies.
I'm not a free-market fundamentalist, but I do believe that impactful things are often (though not always) highly valued by the market. I think that people tend to conflate "interesting to me" with "important for society", especially people with a humanities background.
Modern society relies on a lot of very un-sexy plumbing that we only think about when something goes wrong. In the west, we tend to be blind to the simple fact that miserable poverty is the default state of humanity; we take for granted the systems that put food on supermarket shelves, keep the lights on and keep the economy ticking over. The basics of our daily lives are miracles of coordination.
I've got a lot of time for the likes of Greta Thunberg, but I think if you really want to have a big impact on the environment you should probably get an engineering degree, figure out how to make a boring but energy-intensive industrial process slightly more efficient and start a company to commercialise it.
You don't have to pay tax on unrealised capital gains, such as the increase in value of shares that you hold. You do have to pay tax when those gains are realised, e.g. selling those shares.
Musk doesn't take a salary from Tesla, but his compensation package includes stock options - he can choose to buy a certain number of shares at a predetermined price, regardless of the value of those shares at the time.
Musk has options on 22.8 million shares at a price of $6.28, which was the market price of Tesla shares when that option was agreed in 2012. Tesla shares are now worth about $1000, so by exercising his options he will realise a taxable capital gain of over $20bn. It's slightly worse than that because options are treated as earned income rather than a capital gain, meaning he'll pay slightly more than 54% tax on that amount. Those options expire next year.
The problem for Musk is that he doesn't actually have any money. I know that sounds daft because he's a billionaire, but that's all wrapped up in his shares rather than being cash in the bank. To exercise those options he'll need to find some cash to pay the tax, so he has two choices - borrow against the value of his shares, or sell some shares.
Borrowing is an attractive option because it avoids tax, but Musk quite reasonably believes that Tesla shares are massively over-valued and continuing to borrow against them would store up problems for later. If the share price drops dramatically, the lenders could call in their debts and spark a vicious cycle of selling. Selling allows Musk to cash out at a high price, but doing so would spook the market - the CEO selling off a huge chunk of their shares doesn't reek of confidence.
The question he posed on Twitter was meant to reframe these complicated issues into one of altruism, suggesting that he might sell some shares just so that he could pay tax out of the goodness of his heart. It was a ruse to soften the blow of selling his shares, which evidently hasn't worked; Tesla shares fell by just under 12% yesterday.
To address a broader question of "should rich people pay more tax?", my answer would be "yes, but not in the way you might expect". Shares are literally a share of the ownership of a company, so I'm not wildly enthusiastic about taxing unrealised capital gains. It's tantamount to a tax on improving a business and would lead to all manner of perverse incentives and damaging side-effects. Implemented badly, it would amount to a creeping nationalisation of everything and I desperately don't want to be living in a communist regime run by the shower of pricks we have in Westminster.
What I would like to see is much higher rates of inheritance tax and a tightening of loopholes that allow wealthy people to protect their assets in supposedly "charitable" trusts. I don't want to discourage people from starting businesses or growing them, I don't particularly care if companies become massive because they're just excellent at what they do, but I do want to discourage the perpetuation of intergenerational inequalities and the creation of a new aristocracy. Let people get rich, let people retain control of the businesses they built, but don't let them pass that on through the generations.
I'd also like to see a proper carbon tax, a "council super-tax" on high value property and a cleaning up of the corrupt processes that grant so many government contracts to the likes of Serco and BAE, but that's another matter really.
>>14162 >I think that people tend to conflate "interesting to me" with "important for society", especially people with a humanities background.
I see what you mean, not everyone is going to care about the specific Norse influences on Old English poetry or how much it used to cost to produce a book in a 15th century printing press, but I think these things can be important to preserve for society as a whole. Some things have an innate value that isn't properly expressed in a market.
>Modern society relies on a lot of very un-sexy plumbing that we only think about when something goes wrong.
I came to the conclusion long ago that my particular field is mainly about infrastructure and how fucked we are without it, honestly. All of the elegantly planned interventions and technological developments count for nothing without a reliable supply chain to deliver it.
>I have a fairly simple lifestyle and only need to work for a couple of weeks per year, but I typically do more than that if I'm offered interesting or particularly lucrative work. I have a couple of sidelines, which are really just tax-deductible hobbies.
This is pretty remarkable. I work in a fairly quantitative field, not engineering, but I've been frantically searching for a few hours if your core skill is something which can be applied to my particular area. Is there any chance you could shoot me a mail to the below temporary address? I know it's a bit weird to connect over .gs, but I do my best not to let things like this pass by when it looks like an opportunity.
lawott (at) protonmail (dot) com
Because we're well known for staying on topic here aren't we lad. Richlad just sounds like the kind of person who might have a better insight into these matters than most of us.
As I see it part of the problem is that it's possible for men like Musk to technically have a net income of zero, financing themselves with dodgy loan shenanigans, despite being ostensibly the richest person alive.
Do you think something can be done to directly tax a person's net worth? Cut out all the red tape and just say "look mate, you're rich as fuck, cough up"?
>>14169 >Because we're well known for staying on topic here aren't we lad.
Says the lad who complained that the response he got wasn't on-topic enough for him.
>>14169 I'm not him, but I think you're asking two questions there. Could something be done to tax the elites in a way they can't get out of? Sure; of course it could. Will they allow such a thing to happen? Hahaha, lol, and lmao, in that order.
I'm not so sure, I think we are going to start seeing a backlash over the nest few years as governments realise their committent to free market liberalism has let individuals and corporations become definitively more powerful than them.
For now the politicians are happy to take their bribes and back room deals, but when it really starts to threaten national interests or security concerns (and therefore, the political establishment's grip on power) I think the pendulum might start swinging back the other way, with governments trying to re-assert authority instead of being pushed aside.
>>14172 >I think we are going to start seeing a backlash over the nest few years as governments realise their committent to free market liberalism has let individuals and corporations become definitively more powerful than them.
I get the feeling that some won't realise that they've been feeding the crocodile and will happily continue to do it.
>>14172 I think that's already starting to happen. But I suspect it might already be too late. If nobody in the government showed up to work one day, I doubt most people would notice. If Google or Facebook went down for 24 hours, people would be kicking off within the first ten minutes. And if the people had to choose whose side they were on, I can't be certain that more than 50% of people would side with politicians.
Anyway, while a tax on net worth probably wouldn't go anywhere, negative interest rates are very nearly the same thing and they've been proposed a few times.
If you're still around, software lad, I stuck a temporary email address at the bottom of this post. I was hoping to ask you how you came about finding this niche and if anything similar might apply in my field off .gs.
Not meaning to e-stalk or take up your time, so no worries if you'd rather not, I just thought I'd give it one bump in /*/ and then leave it.
