HOW TO DIVERSIFY YOUR INCOME

Income diversification is the process of creating more sources of income so that you and your family will not depend on only one source of income to survive. To rely on only one source of income to feed yourself and family as well as meet your needs is a big mistake. It is like driving a car on one wheel instead of the four wheels. Many people depend on their salaried job or single trade and vocation to earn income for survival, so anything that goes wrong with this sole job or trade pushes their live and those of their family who depend on them to financial crisis. When you depend on only one source of income for survival, you are putting all your eggs in one basket, if that one basket breaks, you will be in big trouble.

Let me use Nigeria to illustrate how dangerous it is to depend on one source of income. Nigeria, since the discovery of crude oil in Niger Delta in 1958 has abandoned all her sources of income from the export of cocoa, rubber, groundnut, etc, and has relied solely on the sell of crude oil for survival. By this act, Nigeria is continually at the mercies of external events that affect oil prices. Nigeria went into recession and millions of people lost their jobs; many states could not pay staff salaries because oil prices crashed in 2016. Nigeria has yet entered another recession in 2020, with attendant loss of jobs because the novel covid-19 has caused another crash in crude oil price. The Nigeria naira has lost over 150% of its value against the US dollar from 2016 to date because of falling oil prices. The Nigeria minister of finance had to revise the 2020 budget twice and cut it from its ambitious height of N10 Trillion down to N5.5Trillion due to fall in oil price. In fact, Nigeria as a country will remain poor until the government rises to the occasion to diversify the country’s income. Similarly, as an individual, you can not be wealthy by depending on only one source of income. If you want to be wealthy, diversify your income.

The importance of diversifying one’s income cannot be overemphasized. Firstly, diversifying your income is the only way to building enduring wealth. Nigeria can never be called a wealthy country because Nigeria depends solely on one source of income-crude oil to feed her over 200 million citizens. The second importance of diversifying your income is to protect yourself and family against avoidable hardship that ensues when the only one source of income is no more. For example, the Access Bank staff who recently lost their jobs are going to face tough times if they never diversified their incomes before. Thirdly, diversifying your income makes you and your family financially resilient so that when one of your many sources of your income is affected badly by any events, other sources of your income keep providing for you and your family. Someone who depends only on salary from their job for survival is highly vulnerable to hardship and suffering because in any event of loss of job where salary ceases, there will be no other source of income to live on. Fourthly, income diversification makes you financially independent. This is the dream of everyone who wishes to experience peace and live joyfully in life. Financial independence means having enough income to pay all your expenses without having to be employed by anyone. We all need financial independence, but we can only achieve it by diversifying our incomes.

So, how do you diversify your income? Let me say that anybody can achieve income diversification if they are committed to doing so. This is because everyone has something new that you can do in your present environment to earn a new source of money apart from what you have been doing to make a living. Do not assume that because you are a doctor or chartered accountant, so your income must come from treating patients or managing money for companies and individuals. Or you are a teacher so your income can only come from teaching school children. I am here to debunk this erroneous assumption and share with you some of the ways you can diversify your income.

I have highlighted some of the ways you can diversify your income in this piece for your immediate action.

·        Sell Food: regardless of your location, there is a food that you can buy and sell. You can buy food stuffs like yams, beans, rice, crayfish, palm oil, etc in large quantities and package them in small leather bags to sell. Food selling is a big business that offers opportunities for you to earn new income/money. According to National Bureau of statistics, Nigerians spent N22.7 Trillion on food alone in 2019. So, what more can you ask for? Just sell food. Buy 10 bags of pure water and resell. Start from there. Buy a 25kg bag of rice for N10,000 and split and sell in small quantities.

·        Sell Products online: You can buy items like electronics, shoes, cloths, etc in any market near you and put it on ecommerce website like Jumia to sell. You can register with Jumia as a merchant, get your stuff that you intend to sell, put it online and sell. You can use this link to register with Jumia as seller: https://sellercenter.jumia.com.ng/user/signup/dostep/step/1

·        Upsell your service/skill: If you already have customers that you are satisfactorily providing services to, take this advantage and sell a new service to them. For a example, if you are a teacher who teaches home lessons to secondary level students in a family that also have primary level pupil, offer to teach the primary school pupils as well.

·        Drive uber/Bolt or put a car on ride hailing: you can register a car on Uber/Bolt and operate it by yourself to make money every weekend when you are off your week day job. You can also buy a car and register with these ride hailing services and get paid weekly.

·         Buy, store and Sell agricultural cash crops: if you live in states where agriculture production is done on large scale and cash crops prices are relatively cheap, you can buy cash crops like soybeans, rice, yams, groundnut, sesame seed, melon, etc , store them up and sale later when prices have increased.

·        Learn and Become a Graphic Designer: Anybody can become a graphic designer if they put in 3 months to learn the skills. It is all about having your interest and passion to learn. Once you are done learning, you will start your graphic freelancing and start to make money.

·        Start a family Business: save money out of your salary and open a provision store for your wife and children to sell when they are back from school. The location should be close to home to make it less stressful. Remember you spend much of your income on provisions, so why not start selling provisions to other families in the neighborhood.

·        Dress Making: You can learn dress making in 6 months and begin a fashion business. Anybody can become a fashion designer if they are willing. I have met bankers who left banking to run fashion businesses.

·        Prepare and sale Online courses: If you have a skill and you are experienced in what you do, you can create a course in that area where you are the subject matter expert and sell it online. You can prepare a course on accounting, IT, law, medicine, architecture, etc and sell it on website such as www.udemy.com and earn some dollars.

·        Build Houses and Put on Rent: You can build low cost houses and put them on rent to earn rental income. This recommendation is for people who have the money to invest in properties; it is a good investment that offer double gains: property value appreciation plus the rental income.

·        Open cyber café/Business center: You can set up an internet café and business center to do JAMB registration, NYSC registration for students and earn money. It is a good business that does not need bug capital to start.

·        Start a Mobile Money business: This business is extremely easy to start as side hustle whether you live in City or village. Many Nigerians now have bank account and ATM cards and would want to withdraw and send money. So, you have a market right in your neighborhood waiting. They also want to buy recharge cards and pay for DSTV subscriptions. You can click on this link to register with Opera pay https://operapay.com/agent to become one of their agents on your street.

·        Invest in Bonds and Earn Interest Income: The federal government issue bond for the public to invest in periodically and earn decent interest in return. So seize this opportunity and invest in government bonds every month using your savings to earn decent income.

·        Set up poultry farm: you can start a small poultry farm at your back yard, even if it were with 10 chicks and grow. Chicks mature every 6 weeks and open a new source of income for you and your family. Everyone eats chicken, so selling your broilers would not be a problem.

·        Enter the Egg Supply Chain: Just locate a poultry farm in your area where eggs are produced in good numbers and buy crates of eggs from the farm at discounted prices like say N800 per crate and bring them out to sell to your neighbors at N1000 per crate.

You can see that everyone can earn income from multiple streams apart from their current source of income. The options are limitless. All you need is to act now. Do not be an endangered specie by living and depending on only one source of income. Diversify your income now.

Stay Blessed. Stay Safe.