At saving…..
This weeks post is about making your career as short as possible and why you would want to do that.
As Superyacht crew the vast majority of you have a job and career that you love. Most of you start out in yachting for one of two reasons, you either love yachts and sailing or you want to save money. At some point those of you who started out because you love sailing realise the pay is good and carry on for that reason.
Therefore, although you still love what you do and still love sailing we can all probably agree that by year three of your career you are staying in the industry because of the money which, if you play your cards right will keep increasing as you move through your career.
Now we have that settled we need to talk about what this means.
Yachting provides most of the people who work on Superyachts with 100% (or very close to it) disposable income. You do not have to spend money on anything. If you lived your life like your friends back home, other than the odd night out you would quite literally be able to save your entire salary every month if you wanted to.
There are obvious requirements for some of you such as Tax, phone bills etc but, as we know there are a lot of you who are not required to pay tax and quite a few of you who are still avoiding facing this but, as this is not a tax article I will carry on.Therefore taxes aside, you do pretty well and even when this is taken into account you still have no outgoings on food, accommodation, rent, mortgage, travel, insurance, medical bills etc.
As a result of this the majority of Yacht crew tend to have a fair amount of cash in the bank, which brings me nicely to the point of this article:
Why work in a job where you earn so much disposable income if you don’t take advantage of it?
Money in the bank is dead money. In the current economic climate, even though things are getting better most banks, especially the ones Yacht crew use will pay less than 1% interest. So why is it so many of you have literally 1000’s of Euros or Dollars sitting in bank accounts doing nothing?
I can understand there is the rainy day fund, the holiday fund, the “I’m saving for a deposit for a house” fund and maybe a buffer just in case you lose your job but in reality how much money do you really need instant access to? What is the maximum period of time any of you realistically spend unintentionally between jobs?
Therefore, keep your emergency fund and maybe one months salary and do something with the rest. I have mentioned this before and will do it again I am sure but the Superyacht industry provides people like you with an amazing opportunity to earn substantial amounts of money. So do something with it.
If you put 25% of your salary into a savings account every month over a 10 year career (assuming you progress through the ranks) you would be able to save in the region of €100,000 – €150,000 which looks like a lot of money and a healthy lump sum for you to walk away from a 10 year career that you have loved. But you can do better, MUCH better.
Now, this isn’t the part where I go all Wolf of Wall Street and talk you into giving me all your savings to invest. I know nothing about investments which is one of the reasons why, when I left yachting I carried on working. I fortunately also love what I do but in reality retiring at 33 would have been much better!
What setting up CREWFO has made me realise from talking to literally hundreds of you is that, like me when I was in yachting most of you don’t know what to do with your money either. As a result of this very few of you are where you could or should be financially speaking by the point you have reached in your career so far. All this means is that the day when you can stop work and do literally nothing for the rest of your life is still a long way away.
The moral of this story and the point I made at the beginning is this;
Those of you who save your money are doing better than those who spend it all on beer, Rolexes, shades and clothes. But those who invest a relatively small amount every month will see a substantially larger benefit in the long run due to your two best friends, Time and Compound interest. You are the ones who will have the shorter career, not because you didn’t make it as far as your friends but because you didn’t have to……
For help taking care of any financial questions, problems or uncertainty you may have feel free to contact us at any time, we will always call you back. And by the way, yes we do have regulated financial advisors who work with us and our members who will happily discuss an investment plan with you.
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