14 hustle goals to set for 2021

1. Build networks

Maintain a good professional rapport with everyone you come across, and actively seek to expand your network, to increase your visibility in your field and build a reputation. Build credibility by following through on promises and commitments in time.

Also, build actual friendships by staying in touch rather than just cold networking and be diverse, looking even outside your field. These people can come in very handy when you get retrenched.

2. Don’t give 100 per cent of your brain power to your employer

Does your typical work day look like this? You wake up, get ready for work, work for eight hours (with a lunch break), go home and laze on your sofa with the TV on, or go to the pub then it is sleep time. And the cycle continues. If that is your schedule, well, you are in good company.

Your organisation gets the best of your productive hours and the time you should instead use to work on your self-development is spent lazing about.

How about you invest some time out of your day for learning a new skill, taking a new class, reading a self-development book, cleaning and sending out your CV? That way, as your organisation grows due to your efforts, you do too.

3. Keep learning

Build on what you know by reading and taking courses in your profession and also diversify your abilities. Learn new skills, take new courses and keep learning.

No one is indispensable, but you can make yourself as close to that by being valuable to your organisation and if retrenched, being highly attractive and employable to others.  

4. Set your retirement plan already

If you haven’t started planning for your retirement, then you better start soon. Sundeep Raichura, CEO of the Alexander Forbes Group in Kenya says that many Kenyans are often caught flatfooted.

“The statistics are quite frightening. If you take 100 Kenyans who are aged 40 now, by the time they reach 55, almost 90 per cent will either be forced to continue working or will be reliant on their families. A very tiny fraction, maybe five per cent will be OK, and only one per cent will be comfortable in retirement. The young will say retirement is a long way away, but what we do not realise is that we are ageing every day.”

 5. Set up a parallel income stream

This is what people call hustling. Always have a side hustle as an extra source of income. This will cushion you in case you lose your job. Do your research and have some kind of business that you can run on the side based on your interests, in a way that does not interfere with your main job. The earlier you start, the better.

If you start early, you don’t have to rush, and it gives you room to make mistakes and recover. However, when you start it with your retrenchment package, you can put up a business and it is gone within a year, leaving you in dire straits. People with professional knowledge can also consider consultancy, whose overheads are not as high as starting a business.

6. Read and learn about money

Life is about growth and increase hence the imperative to keep on multiplying our money. But money is a very shy and elusive servant that has to be attracted with tact and then protected jealously. Three main ways of growing money include:

1. Expanding your financial literacy

2. Prudent investing in carefully selected quality asset portfolios

3. Proactive risk mitigation to protect your portfolios.

With financial literacy, you master how to make money multiply and protect it to serve you for life and leave the world a better place. It’s important that you know your ignorance on money matters is the worst risk in retaining and growing your money.

Additionally, Warren Buffet’s investment rules should be your mantra, thus: Rule 1: Never lose money. Rule 2: Remember Rule no.1.

Moreover, remember that money grows on “trees” known as your thoughts.

7. Minimise overhead costs

If you can see retrenchment looming, change your lifestyle. If you are living in a heavily mortgaged house, your children are in expensive schools, you can move to an apartment building and rent your house to start making money and then take your children to more affordable schools.

If you are not maximising your income, then you must minimise your cost of living. Your living standards need to change. You cannot do things the same way you were doing them before.

Always try to save at least a third of your salary.

8. Save and invest

Maximise on savings, with a target every month. Using these savings, you can invest especially in real estate, a market which hardly ever goes down. Think of buying land and buildings. You can only invest if you are saving. Join a sacco, such as your work sacco where you save a certain percentage of your salary.

Tip: Always try to save at least a third of your salary.

9. Preserve your capital when investing

When the deal is too good, think twice.

“Many people do not value their capital enough, since they keep exposing it to avenues of loss. Preserving your capital is the first law of growing wealth,” says Kellie Murungi, a financial consultant.

Many people lose money because a certain investment promises to double their money, has an investment return of 20 per cent per month and so on. However, before you invest, figure out how the investment makes money and how it will generate that 20 per cent per month that they are promising you. So for example, if someone tells you to buy Bitcoin, but you do not understand it or how it works.

Either take time to understand it or stay away. Whenever an investment relies on you to recruit people, stay away. Ensure that whoever you are entrusting with your money has a track record and you are protected by contract.

“Be cautious even as you go into business. Go into it knowing that two out of three businesses fail. If you put all your precious savings into a side venture, you have to be careful not to lose it,” she says.

10. Watch for the signs

If you are keen and have some inside and financial knowledge of your company, you can foresee retrenchments.  There are always signs before companies start retrenching. Commons ones are struggling to pay rent, delay of salaries, dwindling sales etc. 

The biggest overhead for any company is usually payroll, so that is the one they cut most. Do not be caught flatfooted. See 11 and 12 for more insight.

11. Be realistic

Retrenchment means that a salary that was previously guaranteed is no longer there, so your lifestyle will be affected. People usually don’t realise how bad it can be until they find themselves in that situation, and it leads to people giving up and sometimes committing suicide.

Getting another job is very difficult nowadays, especially with young people coming from university who are willing to settle for peanuts that can’t sustain someone with dependents. Age is also usually a factor in determining who to employ.

12. Have foresight

Lack of foresight is the biggest mistake people make. Retrenchment can happen to anyone who is in employment. No job is permanent. Have a financial management mindset in order to prepare for any eventuality.

Get a financial consultant in order to up your financial management skills. Consider self-employment as much as possible so that you are the person controlling your financials.

13. Resist peer pressure

People want to live above their means in order to show off and match their peers’ standards. This could be as simple as going to restaurants that, gauging by your salary and how much you need to save, should be out of your reach, to buying bad assets like expensive cars. Resist this and instead, develop an investment and financial mindset.

14.  Set your retirement plan already

If you haven’t started planning for your retirement, then you better start soon. Sundeep Raichura, CEO of the Alexander Forbes Group in Kenya says that many Kenyans are often caught flatfooted.

“The statistics are quite frightening. If you take 100 Kenyans who are aged 40 now, by the time they reach 55, almost 90 per cent will either be forced to continue working or will be reliant on their families. A very tiny fraction, maybe five per cent will be OK, and only one per cent will be comfortable in retirement. The young will say retirement is a long way away, but what we do not realise is that we are ageing every day.”

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