There’s no doubt that the UK economy has taken a beating during the coronavirus pandemic, with real household disposable income expected to grow by just 1% (or £220) per person over the course of the current Conservative government until 2024.
However, while many people may try to eek out savings as a way of boosting their financial circumstances, it may be better to boost and diversify your income streams in an age where it’s relatively easy to access investment opportunities.
In this post, we’ll offer three tips for diversifying your income streams and creating a sense of financial security during such austere times.
- Start with Your Day Job
The term ‘side hustle’ is widely used in the digital age, with innovation and rise of digitization having made it easier than ever to create an additional (and sustainable) source of income.
However, it’s important to focus on your day job and primary source of income when looking to diversify your earnings, not least because this will dominate most of your time and may offer various opportunities to increase your financial circumstances in real-time.
This is particularly true if you work as a freelancer, as this may provide you with the freedom to increase your workload, alter your pricing in line with experience or learn additional skills that enable you to provide a wider range of relevant services.
If you have a more traditional day job, you may want to consider talking on additional shift or overtime, or even seeking out internal promotions as and when they’re made available.
- Start to Trade the Financial Markets
If you do decide to seek out a secondary income stream, this would ideally be passive and something that doesn’t have to consume too much of your time on a daily basis.
For example, you may want to consider trading the financial markets, especially flexible and derivative assets such as currency.
Make no mistake; the forex market is now more accessible than ever before, while the deployment of advanced analytics, automated trading and so-called ‘Expert Advisors’ (EAs) continue to empower sustained success without requiring constant human involvement.
On a similar note, modern trading platforms feature advanced risk management measures such as stop-losses. These can be applied to all trades, while they work by automatically closing positions once they’ve incurred a predetermined (and manageable) level of loss.
You could use a company like Finarm to help you find different services that can help with your forex trading making it easier to make money.
- Invest in Real Estate
Of course, real estate can also deliver passive income over time, but this is a much larger type of investment that may require significant capital upfront.
Real estate remains a popular way of diversifying income, however, primarily because it provides a secure store of wealth and offers flexibility to those who are looking to bank reliable returns.
Flipping properties arguably represents one of the most popular options, particularly if you’re able to target low-cost real estate and improve this before reselling the asset for a profit. The buy-to-let market works in a similar way, although you’ll generate a yield in the form of monthly rental payments from tenants.
Crowd-funded real estate has also proved popular in recent times, while this certainly helps to spread your risk and access relatively low minimums if you’re conservative in your outlook and new to the market.