4 Factors To Consider Before Outsourcing
Have you considered outsourcing any projects or even part of your job? With apps like Fiverr and Upwork along with old standards like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, you could pretty much hire anyone for anything at nearly any time. So this begs the question- is outsourcing a good idea? This article by MawerMoney breaks down what you need to consider before outsourcing a project around your house or in your business.
As appealing as outsourcing is, it’s something you’ll have to go about it the right way to see these advantages. Knowing what to consider before outsourcing is an integral part of this. Four particular areas are worth focusing on, as they’ll make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.
MawerMoney
Two of the biggest issues you will need to work through when considering outsourcing are the scope of the work and quality assurance. You will also want to communicate these aspects very clearly to whomever you hire. For instance, if you want someone to run your social media for your business, you will want/need to consider if they will be responsible for responding to all mentions within a certain period of time and also set clear boundaries on what they should and should not respond to. Likewise, you will need to think through how you will evaluate the quality of the contractor’s work. Are their Tweets “too spicy”? Or are their Facebook replies incomprehensible? While you ultimate want to outsource someone to save you time, you will need to factor time into your schedule to review their work. Curious about outsourcing but need even more guidance? The article goes deep into other things you may want to consider.
Could You Be Saving Too Much Money?
We all know that it’s important to save money. We’re told to invest in our 401(k). And the news is filled with articles about people asking whether they’ve saved enough to retire. I’ve yet to see a reader advice column where someone asks the reporter if they’ve saved too much for retirement. And so if you haven’t given things much thought, you could find yourself socking money away into stocks and bonds even though you have more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life. While at first glance, this doesn’t seem like a problem, when you realize that you’re trading your life’s energy away to earn the money you are investing, you might realize that saving too much money might be possible.
We save for retirement so we have money to spend when we’re no longer working. We save for our kid’s education, so the money’s available when the college bill comes in the mail. We save for emergencies so the money’s there to take care of them when they occur. Saving just to have money for no purpose, is rather purposeless.
Christine Luken
This article by Christine Luken covers her personal thoughts after reading Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. I’ve also really enjoyed Die With Zero and highly recommend reading it. One of Christine’s biggest takeaways from the book has to do with charitable gifts and inheritances. Money has its biggest impact right now. And you’ll also get to witness how your gift or monetary transfer affects the recipient. You will obviously get zero enjoyment out of leaving an inheritance to someone because you won’t be alive to enjoy it. Many people don’t inherit money until they are in their 60s, at which point they are already too old to use it as seed money to start a new business or switch to part time work to spend more time with their kids. If these thoughts have you questioning everything, check out Christine’s article and Bill Perkins’ book.
Buying into the market right before a Bear
In the long run, the stock market always goes up. That’s why people invest in stocks. Of course, if you have a large lump sum of money to put into the market, your returns (in the short run) will depend a lot upon when you invest. If you put your life savings into the market on the Friday before Black Monday, your investments would take a very long time to recover. On the other hand, there are days that the S&P 500 have risen by more than 10% in one day. In this article JL Collins looks at a case study of a woman who invested her life savings in the market right before a Bear market.
With the benefit of hindsight, clearly Ms. Pink would have been better off had her advisors used the “Dollar Cost Average” (DCA) approach to slowly deploy her capital over time. Doing so, she would have accumulated her shares at lower prices than what she paid in December. But this assumes the prices after December would in fact be lower, something her advisors could not have known at the time.
JL Collins
In this first part of the article, JL Collins explains why even though this woman lost money based upon when she purchased the investment, she still made the right choice given the information she had at the time. Research has shown that investing a lump sum on the same day beats dollar cost averaging (or buying small amounts of a fund over time) 75% of the time. Since we can’t predict the future, we wouldn’t have known that dollar cost averaging would have been the better investment in this case. However, what’s even more interesting than the discussion of dollar cost averaging was whether the woman in the article should have invested in stocks at all. If you’re curious about what JL Collins would have done in this case, you can find out his answer at the end of the case study.