American workers are hectic creatures. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans will work in 12 different jobs over their career lifespan, on average. This equates to a change about once every five years.
Additionally, we’re all working later into our lives than ever before. This may be a product of poor savings habits overall, changes in workplace norms, or a genuine enjoyment in applying skills and knowledge to a specialty craft. Here are a few career ideas you can pursue later in life.
Nursing
Becoming a family nurse practitioner is a great way to reboot your career later in life. A trade from the boring office job into the primary care space is a wonderful way to inject a new and adventurous sense of excitement into what may be a stale corporate existence. Nursing is concerned first and foremost with health promotion among patients, and it’s a career field for those who care passionately about the health and well-being of people.
Nurse practitioners are hard-working and compassionate people by nature, and they reap the rewards of a fulfilling, yet stimulating and challenging, work environment. It’s a great place to land when considering a career change that will take you into an exciting new field. Also, registered nurses with a newly minted collegiate nursing education are in high demand as the United States and government bodies all around the world continue the fight against a rapidly spreading virus that shows no signs of slowing. You’ll be going right into the fire, but for a mid-stream career change, this might be the perfect introduction into a new and fast-paced field.
Investing for Passive Income
Other career changes involve the amassing of passive income investments in order to create dividend wealth that will continue to pile up into and beyond your retirement. It’s entirely possible to begin building monthly income through your investment portfolio that will translate into retirement wealth. This allows smart money investors to leave the traditional workforce altogether far sooner than anticipated.
There are a few methods of driving dividend growth that will snowball into true wage replacement. The best way forward is to identify a mixture of asset classes and types of investments in order to create solid cash flow to reach your financial goals. The first pillar of this type of investing comes from an aggressive stock market posture. Many dividend-paying stocks produce a ramping up of cash payout year over year. These select few companies are known as dividend aristocrats and have paid out yearly increases like clockwork for the last 25 years, or more — some approaching 60 years of annual increases. Buying into these investments requires a long term hold strategy. This is because the longer you possess these commodities, the larger your dividend percentage becomes. The buy price remains static, but the quarterly payments continue to rise.
Becoming a Real Estate Investor
Coupled with a long term strategy that involves killer growth options, buying into higher risk, faster-moving assets will help you gain financial freedom in rapid time. A great way to supplement holding patterns is through real estate investments. Buys in the real estate market will give you a physical property that will generate rental income on a monthly basis, or property can be resold for a profit if you choose to flip houses instead.
The real estate trade differs significantly from the stock market, but the potential for massive returns on your investment lie squarely in the property market’s corner. Stock market trading is essentially capped at the market’s own 7% to 9% annualized growth rate. Professional stock pickers are largely unable to beat the market over the long term, so a retail investor stands little chance of besting market conditions. The best way to create growth is to invest in high paying dividend stocks, mutual funds, and index funds, and then place your riskier money elsewhere, where the returns are high enough to create true passive income that can help you transition out of that office job.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to switch your career later in life, but anyone can start investing, and the healthcare field is in extreme need of help currently.
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