TUNDE OYEDOYIN
Tunde Oyedoyin is a London-based personal finance coach and founder of Money Intelligence Coaching Academy, a specialist academy of personal finance. He can be reached as follows: +447846089587 (WhatsApponly); E-mail: tu5oyed@gmail.com
If you don’t make money while sleeping, you’ll probably work all your life — Warren Buffett
If you probably haven’t heard of the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, ALCS, before now, no worries. They do exist and are responsible for ensuring British authors are rewarded for the public use of our books. So, if there’s a book in you and you reside in His Majesty’s domain, put in the effort to squeeze the thing out. Will come back to that.
Just over a week ago, yours truly met up with a retired senior government official of the Federal Republic. It was on the second floor of a Marks and Spencer’s store in West London. Aside from boredom due to having limited opportunities to get out of the house, retirement looks good on the senior citizen.
He spoke of the government in glowing terms, noting that the pension package is decent and comes in regularly. Thus, he doesn’t have to invoke fire from heaven or engage the services of any advocacy organisation. He credited former President Olusegun Obasanjo for listening to them during his tenure by reforming their retirement benefits.
But not all retirees are that fortunate to be in his shoes in later life. Reason being that their own state pension may not have earned them a comfortable retirement. Where opportunities abound, many of such will have to dust their CVs and seek employment somewhere so as to look after themselves.
That’s perhaps why the legendary sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett made his often quoted statement that anyone who cannot make money while sleeping will need to keep working till the employers take out an injunction for them to stop coming to clock in.
By the way, working for the rest of your life isn’t bad, but only as a hobby and not as a means of putting food on your table. While onboard a train at Euston station last week, my eyes strayed to a billboard promoting Jeffrey Archer’s new novel, “An eye for an eye.” Like yours truly, ALCS must definitely have the bestselling author and senior citizen on their payroll.
So, here’s the thing, writing a book is one method of making money while you sleep. While one’s own royalty income is way down the league compared to the likes of Archer, the tiny bits that come round yearly is an incentive to create intellectual properties that can at least put something in your pocket long after you’ve done the work.
Agreed, we can’t all be authors and, besides, it isn’t that the payment is huge. But the mere fact that you do the work once and still get paid many years later makes a ton of sense. Imagine getting a hundred thousand Naira in your account every Christmas for a previous work. You wouldn’t mind thanking the organisation that does that.
So, if composing or singing or drawing is your thing, there should be a route there. If you can get your work displayed in an art gallery, something may be there too. Therefore, if you don’t fancy having to be forced to work beyond your sell-by date, join me in thanking ALCS. But please, remember to start thinking of what Buffett said.
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