What was your IGA today?

The amount of time we waste on daily basis is phenomenal!

If you want to address your financial woes, then you might have to answer a simple question to yourself! What has been your IGA today and for the last week every single day!

First off, what is IGA? Basically, IGA is your Income Generation Activity. So think about it! If you are not happy with your financials, then what have you done to improve it? A simple 9 to 5 job might not be enough – In case you are not happy with how things are going, then your 9-5 will not work it out – you need to break the barriers and question yourself on daily level what can be your IGA? In case you find it difficult, then question yourself on where your time has disappeared?

I am a big fan of productivity in our daily lives! To optimize the time we have in a day, we need to go above and beyond on how things are going till now and improve utilization of our time on incremental basis.

You simply cannot rant on your financial woes if you have a Netflix subscription with a daily mindless consumption of 2-3 hours of different TV shows, scrolling though the TikTokers you find funny or glueing to your instagram. Moreover, scrolling through and trolling on twitter, Facebook or just getting envied by looking at someone’s linkedin profile are all trivial tasks that you should be avoiding – Social media usage should be limited, in fact you need to work towards making a system where it can in turn become money making venture for you rather then fiddling about the time.

I know how difficult it is to put brakes on your smart phone usage and to demonstrate this, have a look at my screen time screenshot below for last 1 week. I have a few apps like YouTube and its studio along with WhatsApp (with top usage) which I know are very important for me and I use them in best productive way possible. But 90% of the time I spent on twitter and Facebook is non productive which I am trying to cut down drastically. At the same time, I must reiterate – I don’t have any subscriptions for Netflix etc as I don’t get time for that.

Coming back to the point of IGA! So if you feel you are not being paid according to your worth, then the simple rule is to switch jobs or start a side hustle and keep working on it until you become financially independent. You are the one who can decide what can be your daily IGA. There can be a wide variety of activities depending on your skillset and your ability to learn and adapt.

I would highly recommend the following traits relevant in today’s world:

Your English language skills (both written and spoken)
You softskills with computers and apps like MS excel.
I won’t recommend you to become a coder here – although this is the most sought after skill in today’s world – rather, I would recommend you to solve daily problems at work and in general through as much computer programing as possible. It is a known fact that rather than just learning any programing language, you will get more hands on by solving some practical problems through the skill.
Try to communicate well with everyone – this is the most important skill that you need. You need to be convinced about yourself first before convincing others. People generally like to talk to confident people – and one of the major indicator of confidence is the way you communicate with people in your surrounding.

With these traits under your belt, you can certainly think about going for IGAs. It goes without saying that your first attempt should be to improve in your existing day job in order to gain confidence of the management and hence increasing your chances of either a promotion and raise as well as increasing possibility of finding a better opportunity with the reputation you gained.

With day job secured which pays well too, you should not settle there and constantly find options for your IGA – some of those are listed below:

Your can find gigs on fiverr / upwork related to a host of tasks from a menial typing gig to a more technical video editing task. Sky is the limit with such freelancing projects.
Find in your local area the option of becoming a part time real estate agent. Believe you me – this is a highly sought after profession which people don’t take seriously. I have seen so many people from various walks of life flourishing in this domain all over the world – you just need to open up your mind. I have discussed this is many past videos on the YouTube channel.
Start creating content – weather its videos or photos. Content is the king nowadays – if you do slightest of good and keep posting consistently on social media with incremental improvements, you are bound to be successful sooner or later. Keep providing value!
I was pleasantly surprised while talking to a colleague a while back who self taught his grade 9 and 11 kids because of non availability and high price of private tutors and recorded each and every lecture in a specific format. He has now a repository of multiple courses ready to be uploaded on YouTube but had apprehensions if those will provide value. To which, I told him, there are 10s or 1000s of reviews of iPhone (which is a very obvious device nowadays) on YouTube – but still, you might learn new things or get a new perspective if you watch a relevant person reviewing it. It’s true in this case too – as he being a rare case of parent teaching his own kids and documenting the whole process for these key stages which might not be even available on YouTube till of now.
“You can’t assume the obvious is obvious. Your experience and knowledge has value in a given situation. No one else has your unique perspective”
Lastly, I don’t consider investing and earning dividends from stocks as your IGA – as this comes under passive income which you should only reinvest if you are still under 50 years of age. IGA for a young person should always be active income while passive income can be a good backup – it should not be relied upon at the young age.

Remember!

As promised, I shall be giving hints on upcoming videos for next week in this newsletter from now on! So, there are videos on how people have simply not taken advantage of mutual funds tax cuts with my own example. Then there are videos coming up on REIT and my own PSX portfolio. STAY TUNED!

The videos uploaded last week: