Work - Life Balance

[The_Flying_Penguin]

Hi all,

I have been working as a trainee in a small Life office for almost a year. I enjoy the work but I don`t really want to spend my life working for somebody else!

My ultimate ambition is to have a very small company of my own or perhaps be self employed. Does anybody have any advice on how to achieve my lofty ambitions.

I`ve heard that some actuaries can work from home 2-3 days a week but I`ve never encountered this first hand. I also thought that certain areas of actuarial expertise may lend themselves to small consultancies, e.g. expert witness work. Really I`m afraid of eventually passing the exams and being confined to working for large city companies for the rest of my days!

Any info/advice would be hugely appreciated.

 

[Zebedee]

Hi

Setting up your own small limited company is cheap and easy; see the companies house website for information. It'll take a week or two to sort out and cost £100 or so. Becoming self employed is even quicker and cheaper. Only real difference between them is tax / IR35 considerations. There's really no need for this to be an "ultimate ambition", if it's the route you want to go down and you've got some exams under your belt then it's an option now.

The most obvious source of revenue in the short term is to do contract work. There are several agencies who you can do this for. I think the advertising rules stop me telling you who but start with the back pages of the actuary. As a student you'll get around 2.5 times your employed student wage by contracting. As a qualified it's about double the employed qualified wage. These ratios vary a bit by location and across practice areas but serve as a rough guideline. Most contract roles are outside London as those are the employers that struggle to fill vacancies.

Downsides? You'll pay your own subscriptions and study costs. You'll also be getting paid either by the day or by the piece of work you do which may cause you to resent taking study days due to the income implications. Many self employed people / small company owners end up pausing (abandoning?) the exams because of this. On the other hand 80% of the numbers I mentioned are still a lot better than employed wages so you can afford to fund a weekly study day. I've sustained this for some time with no big impact on my study progress.

You won't get expert witness work as a trainee, that's at least 10 years down the line for you so I won't go into much detail now but that work is out there for independents.

If this appeals then get on the phone to one of the companies from the actuary magazine for some more detailed advice or check out their websites.

All the best