<prompt> Human: Wife 28 and I 37 both work as freelancers in cash heavy industries, her as a masseusebar tender and me as a musicianoccasional tutor.Our take home is about 3000 mostly in cash, out of which 1200 goes to mortgage we still owe about 65K, and the rest is for our expenses health insurance, phones, utilities, gas, car insurance, occasional dine outs... We live reasonably comfortably in a part of the country that is not necessarily expensive, and if we were to have a kid in 2-3 years, we could probably swing it.I think overall we are faring rather well and are stable.The problem is we have extremely minimal SS contributions, and we have no idea how to plan for retirement...Our cushion as of now is 9,000 dollars sitting in a savings account generating a handful of dollars every year...Any ideas as to how to build a nest for the future?  <response>: The fact that your earnings are mostly in cash shouldnt affect your social security contributions unless youre committing tax fraud.Presuming you are paying taxes on your earnings, then you have a couple of tax-advantage retirement account options. You probably want to start with a Roth IRA and look at a solo 401k.If you were to not be reporting your earnings on your taxes, then it sounds like you would have the 15.3 SE tax fedstate taxes that you should be paying on those earnings to set aside for retirement in a taxable brokerage account and hope you didnt get audited and have to come up with all that money to pay back taxes and fees - so this approach is highly inadvisable. 