Betting Your Life on One Income Stream Is Risky
A quiet alternative to personal finance.
Writers make me extremely emotional.
I’ve read too many stories that say something along the lines of “they changed their platform and now my writing is dead.”
One income stream is like playing the lottery. Bad things will happen. Viruses will shut down parts of the world. Recessions will happen like they always do. Companies will fire people to cut costs. This is the world we live in. Complaining about it does nothing.
The problem is we’re addicted to getting one income.
The place tranquility goes to die
One income is the default. It’s nobody’s fault.
Our global economy runs on salaries. A salary is a single deposit into your bank account from a company either once a fortnight or once a week. The regularity of the payments is addictive. Routines make us comfortable. We crave comfort in an uncertain world.
I’ve been addicted to a salary for most of my career.
The event that changed my life is when I got my salary cut off with a huge pair of garden clippers. My heart sank that day. I walked out into the street. The team I managed was on the other side of the road. They looked over the street at me and wondered why at 3 pm on a Friday I wasn’t in the office taking customer calls.
I tried to shout nonsense over the noise of the traffic. Through an act of god, they couldn’t hear me. Phewww. Moments later I burst into tears. When you have one source of money and it gets taken away, you feel stupid. You feel like you don’t matter. Everybody else now has a salary except you.
Then comes the fight to get back your one income source. I did daily job interviews. Job interviews are harder than a real job. You have to add a pinch of niceness, a touch of Tony Robbins inspiration, a dash of Gandhi’s wisdom, and plenty of Einstein genius. The truth is, it’s an act.
If those who did job interviews with me could have seen me behind closed doors, they would have seen a giant mess. Without that one salary you feel a piece of your life is missing. You can’t relate to people you used to work with anymore. They have a salary. You don’t. It’s as simple as that in your messed-up head.
I eventually chased the salary far. I found a salary waiting for me at the bottom of a city street next to a train line with homeless people sleeping underneath it. The first day I arrived at the office I smiled. Not at new faces, but at the fact I’d regained my salary, and therefore my life.
The salary win didn’t change my life.
A few short years later something else happened.
Giving up the salary
Once you get the one income you lost back again time passes. It feels as though nothing has changed. The change happens in slow motion though. You begin to become quietly ungrateful for the salary you have.
It’s hard to explain.
Then a pandemic strikes and lots of people from your workplace get fired. There are no farewell parties or cardboard boxes full of desk items to carry out the glass entrance doors. Nope.
You get fired while working from home.
It’s easier for the company that way, although they’ll never say that. It’s bad for the happy office culture displayed on their LinkedIn company page. Even when it’s not you, something in the smell of your morning coffee changes.
This question punches you in the face. “What if it happens to me?”
The bad memories from the sacking of a lifetime come flooding back. The emotion overtakes your body again. It’s not you … but it feels like you. Some guy in a penguin suit could be in a home office somewhere adding names to a spreadsheet. Your name could be a meaningless line item on his list. The list could be full of names that have to go. It’s about saving costs, remember? The spreadsheet owner has no emotion to the situation. He does as he is told. It’s either him or you.
This was my life and my career.
One income source no longer felt safe. I didn’t quit right away. I simply adopted after hours multiple income thinking. You can too. Like this.
This Is How to Reprogram Your Financial Thinking
James Altucher dropped a bomb on me. In his popular story “How To Quit Your Job the Right Way” he introduced one simple idea.
You’re a business.
James says we should call ourselves a business named ME.INC. It’s a subtle shift. It simply means you are no longer an employee who earns a salary. From now on you’re a business. And a business has multiple income sources, as should you.
Think about how fragile one income source is. But with two, three, or four income sources, losing one doesn’t feel like a spear through the heart. You can always pick up another income source when you’ve created multiple.
So, after my epiphany watching my colleagues get fired and treated like ants who got stood on for going about their business, I simply opted out of the system. No more. Enough.
I started working on other ways to make money. Here are the ways I chose:
- Write eBooks and dare to charge money for them. Once you sell eBooks on your website, do a Todd Brison, and move up the ladder. Publish your books on Amazon. Learn the ropes of how Amazon works.
- Buy financial assets that grow in value and pay you money while you sleep. I chose stocks and crypto. I am about to go further and buy crypto specifically to play around with Defi (decentralized finance) and yield farming.
- Teach the skills you use in your day job. I started teaching my side hustle skills. I’m going to be teaching the skills of presenting and sales in a future online course, which is how I used to earn my 9–5 salary. Then I’m going to teach personal finance using everything I learned working in banks for most of my career.
Repackage and resell your 9–5 job as an online course.
- Get your first freelance client. I got one good client early in my career. They paid me to write articles on entrepreneurship. The fee would make your eyeballs melt. When they named their price I tried not to drool.
- Coach one person. Disconnect from the label for a second. People hear the word coach and cringe. Yet their child has a basketball coach to teach them how to shoot and they say nothing about that. People need help. Again, why couldn’t you use your 9–5 skills to coach others? A friend of mine, Austin Belcak, got rejected badly when going for jobs. Eventually he got hired for a job he wasn’t qualified for, working for one of the biggest companies in the world run by Bill Gates. Now he coaches others on how to get jobs. People have fantasies of getting a job at Google. Austin knows their hiring process back the front. People gladly pay him thousands from their first year of salary to shortcut the process. That’s multiple income thinking. Try it.
Closing Thought
Having one income stuffed up my life. But it taught me a valuable lesson: betting on one income is risky and unnecessary.
The quiet approach to finance is to make two or three incomes. Don’t brag about it. Don’t talk about it at work in front of your colleagues. Just work away outside of business hours on an alternate income stream. Once you’ve got that, add more. Then add money while you sleep from financial assets.
Think of yourself as a business called ME.INC. The more income streams, the less you’re affected by market forces — or acts of nature caused when a bat sneezes on a human in a forest where a tree falls and nobody hears it (did it still fall?).
One income stream. Two income streams. Three income streams. And money while you sleep from assets. That’s exactly how you de-risk yourself financially, so you can live with less stress and get a good night’s sleep.
This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.