3 Kinds of income

 

Every outgoing adult should have three kinds of income. This would help you battle recession in a most strategic way. Think about it this way: suppose you have one source of income and because of current economic circumstances that source tends to dry up! What do you do? Well the obvious reaction is to start job hunting. Again, this is not the ideal time for that. You can hear it in the news regularly that the job market is under pressure that there are so many unemployed people in the market. We do not say that it is wrong for you to start looking for a job. But it really is better for you to look for a job from a strong point, rather than a weak position of total unemployment with next to no income coming your way.

So in order to avoid this situation and to ensure that you do not rely on one source, try to diversify your earning capabilities into three:  Regular or monthly, project or occasional and investment or residual. Look at it this way: if your income stream is one river and there is an obstacle that blocks that river, then there is trouble. Where will you get money to meet the basic things in life? Even if you have savings there is a limit to the period to which these savings can last. So hurry now and think of other ways to make money with out necessarily straying from your main business or salaried job. Often when I give this encouragement to civil servants, they sight their bond which limits them from:”doing other things while they are actively employed”. My intention here is not to dissuade you from obeying the law! But we all know that everyone could do with a little more money here and there.

So this is how it works: Keep your salaried job. Get involved in a project at least once a year that would yield you income. IT could be an event that takes place while you are on leave. It may be a one of transaction of a commodity you were able to buy and resell over a weekend or whatever period you are not at work. The project is the one of event or sale process you engage in during your leave or spare time, but there is also an investment you can make that would yield money while you are at work. Some people are into trading on line via software; others have joined online cooperatives which pool resources and buy as well as sell items in bulk. There are various websites which would direct you on earning income from various activity that you do not have to be involved in on a regular basis. You may not fancy the stock market because of the volatile nature the purchase and sales of stock, but government bonds are perfectly safe since they are underwritten by a government and would not go out of business anytime soon. Treasury bills are also safe and the interest rate on them, though minimal is much better than keeping money in the bank where charges are routinely created to bill you as regularly as possible.

If your husband or wife is not as busy as you are then there is an advantage there. Enter into a business agreement, as long as you can trust each other, and  start something together. Set the terms required for manning the business and you would be surprised what could come out of it. In Nigeria, many families have what is known as a home business. Set on a piece of land that is vacant and not in use close to the homestead. Fish farms, Chicken farms and Snail farms have been started far from the prying eyes of the tax man. Some of them yield incredible income after a period. Some of them are purely for subsistence usages. But what is important is that an effort has been made to make money beyond the ordinary salary or income that is being pressured by debilitating economic  conditions that we cannot control.

Perhaps the banks and financial institutions should not be totally ruled out in this. IF you run  a savings account or perhaps you can afford a fixed deposit account, there is a need for you to talk to your bankers about the interest rates. Savings accounts are supposed to bring interests based on deposits for a period of time. So are fixed deposits accounts. Bankers can be crafty if we do not make inquiries about  what we are due, we may not get it.