THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSIFICATION
As a writer, you invest huge amounts of time, energy and money into your project (and you should)!
But because you spend the bulk of your time writing (often a single project), it can be difficult to dedicate energy to other important areas – such as planning for long-term financial health and wealth management…
At Voyage, we aim to look at the life of a creator holistically – it’s not ONLY about sparking the creative fire, honing your craft and developing the most marketable story…
It’s also about helping you to create a balanced and fulfilled life – a life from which the best stories and ideas naturally take shape.
To give you some context: as a writer, you’re starting with a 1% chance of having someone buy your movie or TV project. Now, this should never stop you from pursuing your dreams…
But you want to make sure you’re thinking about other ways of saving and creating wealth, not just from your writing – in other words, you want to save, and diversify your investments of time and money.
Here are 3 simple non-writing ways to diversify and have a strategy for a long-term sustainable career that perhaps you didn’t know about:
1. Acorns
Sounds funny, but we don’t literally mean invest in the acorns you find on the ground. Acorns is a very high-tech system that allows you to quickly enroll in automatic deposits to a personal savings account where their system will invest it for you based on market trends and super cool algorithms – and you can even select how conservative or risky you’d like to be with your money – all from an app on your smart phone! You can even start with just a few dollars a week, so there’s literally no reason not to do this…
2. Equity Crowdfunding
Recent legislation has made investing in companies available for everyone, not just accredited investors. This means you can invest in companies (and therefore own shares in a company). Many interesting companies are doing this, and you can easily become an investor yourself online – it’s really no more difficult than ordering something on Amazon!
3. Self Directed IRA’s
This is a very cool way to invest the money sitting in your IRA, because they allow you to invest your money in “alternative assets” that a traditional IRA would not allow. For example, you could invest in a start up, a film, real estate, etc. The list goes on… In short, you get the benefits of an IRA, but with the added freedom and control to invest in assets you understand and actually care about. We recommend researching your options (Google is a great start) and discussing this with an IRA administrator (start with the firm where your IRA resides).
Fact: the most successful and financially stable people are invested across multiple channels. And when it comes to your financial well-being as a creator (and the relative instability that comes with a creative career), it is incredibly important to have a safety net.
With chances like 1 in 100 projects finding success, it would be foolish not to prepare for a possible future where your project doesn’t go all the way. Now, this is NOT giving up – it’s just pragmatism. It’s so simple to add some financial security to your future, and the piece of mind alone will do great things for your creative freedom…
Let’s create a happy and prosperous 2017 (and beyond) – for all of us…