Emerging From the Lockdown With Four Streams of Income

How I survived playing the pandemic on a difficult mode

I won’t go into much detail about the situation I found myself in back in March. I already wrote about it anyway, but to summarize, I was fresh off the plane in a new country, stuck, depressed, jobless, and in a bizarre love triangle drama situation. Let’s just say that I wasn’t having the best time of my life.

Now, at least here in Australia, the lockdown is a thing of the past and I came out of it feeling like a winner. I went from living mostly from my savings to having four different ways of making money in just about a month.

Is this a humble brag article? I don’t know, maybe. I don’t think I’m doing anything too groundbreaking and it’s important to realize that having multiple streams of income doesn’t mean I’m rolling in dough.

But I am very proud of how I managed to survive this yet another rough life patch. It was an exercise in patience, resilience, and creative problem solving for sure, and having been able to “beat the game” in spite of so many people and often myself not believing that I could do it is a great source of happiness in my life right now.

I do want this to be an inspiration to people who might be in similarly difficult situations. The pandemic wasn’t easy for anyone and in many countries around the world, it is still the current reality. I’d like this to be a reminder that not all is lost and when you push through it, you can end up thriving even when the universe seems to be against you.

Here are the four things that are helping me to get my life back on track.

Getting a job

Yes, duh. I was lucky enough to find some casual employment pretty soon after the businesses opened back up so obviously, that is my primary source of income right now. So what am I, a university-educated office rat, doing for a living in the “new normal”? Waiting tables.

The move to Australia and Covid-19 have both drastically changed my views on work. Not that I ever actually thought that any job is inferior or “lesser than”, as long as it makes you the money you need to live and be independent, a job is a job. But the sad reality is that back home, being a casual part-time waitress would not cover my living expenses and I wouldn’t do it unless it was my absolute last resort.

Australia is way more equal when it comes to wages, has the world’s highest minimum wage, and everyone, including people working regular, “low-skilled” jobs, gets paid a living wage and can afford a comfortable life. Also, here in WA where the FIFO work and the mining industry are booming, these jobs make young people rich if they happen at mining sites. You never know how much money anyone makes here based solely on their job title.

Australians, I think, also view work very differently than we do in Europe and rarely make their job their entire identity, so there seems to be way less job-shaming going on around here.

The Covid pandemic showed us all how everything about work is a social construct and how when times get hard, the workers we would call “unskilled” before are suddenly “essential” and necessary for our society to function.

Similar to what Ryan Fan discussed in his article about working in an Amazon warehouse, I had to come to terms with going back to a “student job”. And similarly to Ryan, I actually like it, I am grateful for it, and I appreciate the opportunity to try something new and different.

It’s just the internalized shame and worries about what will other people think I needed to challenge.

Upwork & writing gigs

My mom always praised my way with words to the point where she wanted me to become a journalist but personally, I have never seen it in me and haven’t considered writing for a living until the lockdown happened. Because I like to have clearly separated “work time” and “play time”, the freelancer lifestyle never seemed too appealing to me before, but quarantine forced me to explore the options of making money from my laptop.

So I signed up for Upwork and only a month later, I already have a couple of recurring clients and am making some decent income from writing for them.

Upwork is full of people looking for cheap labor who want you to work for peanuts, and the platform takes a 20% commission so for most content creators, it is not a way to make a living, especially in the very beginnings.

But it is a great entry point and it’s absolutely possible to make some nice extra income from there, as it is a way for potential clients to discover you and hire you for longer-term contracts outside of the platform, allowing you to slowly build up your experience and clientele as a freelancer.

It’s not as fun as it seems either. When I was first setting up my profile, I imagined myself creating cool travel blogs, ghostwriting cookbooks, basically writing all kinds of fun, exciting content. Topics I actually get paid to write about? Fences and retaining walls.

But it is rewarding. Not only does it allow me to negotiate an adequate financial compensation, but there is also no better feeling in the world than a client telling you how much they loved your writing on a topic you knew nothing about until the day before.

And hey, if anyone needs some info about retaining walls, hit me up — I now know a thing or two about those.

Medium

I would be earning exactly zero dollars from writing today had I not discovered Medium back in January, so I have to give credit where it’s due because Medium inspired me to look into other sorts of freelance writing.

It has its own category because of two things that make it unique and different from my other writing gigs. 1, the income from Medium is partially passive and 2, it comes with its own distinct set of rules and challenges.

Sure, Medium is not making me big bucks as of now, but I did manage to join the 6 or so percent of top-earning writers in May so it does make me some bucks — and it makes them even when I’m asleep or work my other jobs. Medium comes with no deadlines and doesn’t require me to post on a schedule, so it is not something I have to constantly think about, which is also nice.

But the biggest appeal of this platform is that I get paid for talking about issues that matter to me. For healing from trauma through writing. Even for subtly dissing and exposing people who screwed me over. Where else do I get that? Plus, the possibility of one of my older stories blowing up and making hundreds of dollars overnight is still there and seems just too great to pass on.

Low-risk investing

I am no financial guru and definitely won’t be able to tell you how to invest, even more so because the type of investing I do is specific for my country. But as we hear time and time again, investing is a must for young people to build wealth, so I am going to say that anyone should probably give it a shot.

My investment account is, however, not that profitable because it comes with essentially no risks. I set it up before leaving for Australia because I had some extra money saved up and found myself on the Gucci website a bit too often, so I wanted to protect it from me potentially spending it on something useless and stupid. It was no crazy big sum, but enough to get a bag or two and you don’t need a lot of money to start investing.

I am not a great investor by any means. I see my investments more like a fancier savings account where the money gains a bit of value and it is not accessible to my spending impulses 24/7. But it is still a source of income for me and another choice I made that is proving to be a good one.

There we go. I don’t know how much money all of this makes me as of now because I am still in the process of setting everything up and creating a routine and a budget for myself. I might need to add a second job or another online gig (*cough* OnlyFans *cough*) eventually to make back the saved up money I lost in isolation.

But right now, I can at least comfortably say that I survived the lockdown and win despite everyone thinking I wouldn’t make it. And that is all that matters.