The Federal Reserve counted one in five American adults doing gig work. The second number in that report explains why so few of them save

The government published a number this year that most coverage skipped past.

In its household survey covering 2024, the Federal Reserve found that 20% of American adults did gig work in the prior month, up from 16% in 2021.

One adult in five. Not a niche, not a side story, and rising.

But the number in that report that actually explains people's finances is the other one. The same survey found that 59% of self-employed adults said their income varied from month to month — against 28% of people working for someone else.

That is the whole problem in one comparison.

You are probably in the 59%, and the savings system was built for the 28%

Think about how every piece of retirement advice you have ever received is phrased.

Set aside a fixed amount each month. Pay yourself first. Automate 10%. Contribute every paycheck.

Every one of those instructions assumes a paycheck that shows up on a schedule at a size you can predict. It is advice built on a payroll deduction — a mechanism where the money leaves before you see it and the decision is made once.

Now try to run that on an income where March is triple January and July is half of both. You cannot commit to a fixed monthly amount you might not have. So you commit anyway, miss it in a slow month, feel like you failed, and stop.

The conclusion people draw is that they are bad with money. The accurate conclusion is that they were handed a mechanism designed for someone else's cash flow.

What the self-employed accounts do differently

This is the part that rarely gets said clearly: a Solo 401(k) and a SEP IRA have no monthly funding requirement at all.

There is no minimum. No schedule. No penalty for skipping a month, a quarter, or three quarters. You can put in nothing until November and then make a single contribution.

That is not a workaround. It is how the accounts are designed, because they were written for people whose income arrives in lumps.

And it inverts the order of operations in a useful way. Instead of guessing in January what you can afford all year and being wrong, you wait until you can see the year, subtract your expenses and your tax, and then decide what the year could actually spare.

The deadlines that make lump-sum saving work

A SEP IRA can be opened and funded up to your filing deadline, including extensions. That means a decision made in the spring can still count for the year before, once your numbers are final. It is employer-side only — roughly 20% of net self-employment earnings — so it scales with profit. Here is how it works.

A Solo 401(k) usually holds more, but needs setting up earlier. For 2026 the combined ceiling is $72,000, or $80,000 if you are 50 or older, with the employee deferral capped at $24,500. Because that deferral is a flat dollar figure rather than a percentage of profit, it often lets a moderate earner shelter considerably more than a SEP would. The catch is that the deferral side has earlier deadlines, so establish the plan before year end even if you fund it later. The two are compared here.

Size it against the real number, not the gross one. Contribution room comes off net self-employment earnings, not receipts. Calculate it before you move the cash.

Why the lump is psychologically easier, too

There is a second advantage to contributing after the fact, and it has nothing to do with the tax code.

A monthly commitment asks you to give up money you might need. Every transfer is a small bet against your own next slow month, and if you are the kind of person who has actually had slow months, that bet feels reckless — because sometimes it is.

A contribution made once the year is over asks nothing of the sort. The uncertainty has already resolved. You know what you earned, what you spent, and what you owe. Setting aside a known surplus is a completely different decision from setting aside a hoped-for one, and people who freeze at the second one often have no trouble with the first.

The cost of the lump-sum approach is that the money sits in your checking account in the meantime, which is where money goes to disappear. A reasonable compromise is to sweep the overage from strong months into a separate savings account as it arrives, and then move the contribution from there once the numbers are final. The sweep protects the cash; the delay protects the decision.

A practical rule for irregular income

Stop budgeting from your average month, which does not exist. Budget from your floor — the amount you can count on in a bad month — and treat everything above the floor as a different category of money.

The floor pays the bills. The overage is what funds the account, in whatever size and on whatever schedule it happens to arrive.

That rule survives a slow quarter, which is the only test that matters. A fixed monthly transfer does not.

One more thing worth checking before you open anything anywhere: what it costs and who gets paid. Ours is written out in plain terms.

The takeaway

The Fed did not report a savings problem. It reported a volatility problem — a fifth of adults doing gig work, and most self-employed people watching their income move every month.

Volatility is why the standard advice fails, and it is also the reason the self-employed accounts exist in the shape they do. If your income arrives in lumps, save in lumps. The rules already allow it, and nobody is going to set it up on your behalf.

Gigaverse is pursuing registration as an investment adviser with the SEC and is not currently registered. This article is education, not investment advice or tax advice, and it is not a recommendation of any particular account for your situation. Accounts are held through a FINRA/SIPC-member broker-dealer. We have no affiliation with, and no endorsement from, any company or agency named here.