How To Save For Retirement When You’re Self-Employed

Being self employed has so many benefits. You can be your own boss, work your own hours, and make all of your own decisions. For some people, it’s the ideal lifestyle, but there are some big downsides. The main problem that self employed people have is saving for retirement. When you’re working for a company, it’s likely that you’ll have a retirement fund of some kind but a lot of self employed people don’t really know how to plan for their retirement. If you leave it too late to start planning, you might not have the money that you need to live out your later years comfortably. If you’re self employed, make sure to follow these simple tips to help you plan for retirement. 

Decide On Your Goals 

Before you can start planning for retirement, you need to think about what your goals are. Do you want to travel in later life or are you happy to live a quiet life? Do you want to retire early because that’s going to be a much bigger challenge? Whatever your goals are, you need to have a good idea of what kind of retirement you want because that will give you a good idea of how much money you need to put aside. 

See A Financial Planner 

Your next step should be to see a financial planner. You need to take stock of your finances and work out exactly where you stand. If you speak with a wealth management company, they will be able to give you advice on how best to handle your money. Putting money into a savings account isn’t going to be enough, so you need to start looking at your different options for growing your money. 

Your wealth management company will help you to set up a retirement fund so you can start making contributions and they may also give you some advice on investments that will help you to boost your retirement fund. 

Separate Money For Retirement Contributions 

The hardest thing about saving for retirement when you are self employed is separating your money. If you’re running a business, it’s important that you invest money in the company. But that can sometimes leave you a bit short when it comes to retirement savings, so you need to try to keep things separate. You need to pay yourself a regular salary that still leaves you enough money to put back into the business. All of your retirement contributions should come out of your salary, not the business’s money. 

Decide On Your Priorities 

There will be times when the business is struggling and you don’t have that much money coming in. In that case, you need to decide what your priorities are. You might be able to keep contributing to your retirement fund but that may leave you short on money to invest in the business. On the other hand, you can keep putting money into the business and stop your retirement contributions for a while. It’s important at this point to avoid being hot-headed. Sometimes, we feel that we need to get more money right away, so we look to things like investing and diversifying our portfolio. But, while you may look at the Apple stock price or how Tesla is doing, because these stocks always appear to yield high returns, you cannot gamble your finances in this way. It is important to step back and reassess your priorities.

Saving for retirement when you’re self employed is tough but if you follow these steps, you can make sure that you are in a good financial position in later life.