Optimise Your Income By Optimising Your Time
It is not unusual in Singapore for an employee, especially PMET to work overtime. If you hop onto a train around 8pm, you will most probably see the train still packed with working adults. Many of them are exhausted from a long and hard day of work.
Working Hours Survey 2014
According to the Working Hours Survey 2014, long working hours lead to a poor work-life balance for Singapore’s professionals. These professionals include economics tutors providing economics tuition Singapore. In fact, 82% of the professionals who responded to the survey confirmed that they worked in excess of the hours stipulated in their contracts. 72% continued to work from home or on mobile devices despite working overtime in office. Shockingly, over two thirds of them felt obliged to do so, probably because they were paid a higher salary as compared with blue collar workers. Is this true? Let us look at it from the economic perspective.
Hourly Pay
A blue collar factory worker works 8 hours a day and 5 days a week with a monthly pay of around $1800. He receives additional pay for working overtime and his overtime pay doubles on weekends and public holidays. A PMET may receive a much higher monthly salary of $4000, although this is far below what an economics tutor providing economics tuition Singapore earns. But they are not entitled to any overtime pay at all, as is the case with most organisations in Singapore. If you divide their incomes by the number of hours they work, you will be surprised to find that their hourly pay is about the same as those blue collar factory workers. I wonder how the PMETs will feel when they are presented with these findings. Tutors who provide economics tuition Singapore, however, earn a much higher hourly pay.
Opportunity Cost
So here comes our question, how do you optimise your income? I believe time is one of our most valuable assets. For everything we do, it comes with an opportunity cost. Opportunity cost refers to a benefit that a person could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action. One can learn the concept of opportunity cost in greater detail in economics tuition Singapore. So with all the precious time you spent on working over time, you could have done something else which would bring you more return, be it monetary return, or better health and happiness, which cannot be measured by and achieved with money. We have heard enough of unfortunate incidents about working adults, so diligent and dedicated to what they were doing, including among others, some school teachers, who collapsed at or after work, due to long working hours and unbearable stress. No wonder there are more and more employees including former school teachers quit their jobs to pursue a career as entrepreneurs or freelance tutors. I happen to know a few tutors providing economics tuition Singapore. Despite the intense competition in the industry of economics tuition Singapore, they live a happy life with financial stability, manageable workload, and most important of all, lots of free time at their disposal! It is also wonderful to be your own boss and free yourself completely of any possible workplace relationship problems. We all know how hard it can be to deal with an unreasonable boss at the workplace.
Starting Your Own Business
Starting your own business seems to be the solution. However, it is a hard decision for employees like most of you who have been so used to working for an employer to get a fixed pay. You may need more than words of encouragement from friends and family members in order to muster enough courage to step out of your comfort zone and start your own business. I personally know a super economics tutor providing ‘A’ level economics tuition Singapore who took quite a long time to arrive at the hard decision to quit his high paying teaching job in a school. First, you have to find something you can do and can do well. Some research needs to be done beforehand to make sure that the market is not saturated. Once you have locked in your target, you can start setting up your own website to sell your services and advertise your website using Google AdWords. Do understand that it may take more than a few weeks for your website to get noticed and for your business to slowly pick up. During this time, you can look into your existing network and find the relevant organisational and individual contacts that you can sell your services to and then, email or text them! They could be your first customers and if they are satisfied with your services, they would help you expand your clientele by referring your services to their personal or business contacts.
Financial Freedom
Now your website is up and you have made use of various marketing tools available to sell your services. Once you get your first business, treat it seriously and try everything you can to ensure a rewarding experience for your customer. I think you are on the right track to achieving financial freedom. With diligence and the right tactics, your business will prosper to the point that you do not need a full-time job anymore! The economics tutor who I mentioned earlier is now one of the most successful economics tutors in Singapore.
Christopher Lau
Economics Tuition Singapore @ Economics Cafe
Principal Economics Tutor: Mr. Edmund Quek