My intention is to organize my thoughts on this website in a way that aligns with the different ways one could actually earn $100 a day. Here is a graphic that I hope helps visualize how I will be thinking about all the various revenue streams you could undertake to get to your target daily earnings:
Longevity simply means can the income survive you. If you die or are otherwise restricted from work, will the revenue stream continue on. In the case of A1 and A2 type items it will – with B1 and B2 type items it will not.
Flexibility means something you can do outside of normal work, at least to some degree. B1, A1 and really A2 all fall into this category. It’s just B2, your primary work, that does not.
B2 – Regular Work
I’ll start with the category you are most familiar with – B2, or regular work. This is income earned by trading your time, labor and smarts to earn an income. It depends on you doing the work and aligns with what I’ll call normal working hours (which for you might be the graveyard shift) – what are the hours you call normal.
While you are working this category is quite boring and doesn’t reflect extra earned income. When you retire, however, this could easily be your largest source of income – maybe you retire from your job as a staff accountant working for a firm and during retirement run a small side business doing taxes during the day.
B1 – Hobby Work
This category of income streams is for things you can do outside normal working hours (meaning you can maintain your B2 – regular work job whether in retirement or not). Examples might be taking and selling photographs at sporting events, doing odd jobs like pulling weeds or mowing lawns on the weekend. Something that requires your labor. It’s on the left side of the grid along with your regular work because if you die this income stream immediately disappears. So it is nice while you can do it, but it won’t outlive you.
A2 – Unique Effort
This category does require your time and energy (rarely do we get anything worthwhile without that) but you could temporarily stop the effort and still see the revenue. There isn’t a direct tie to your time. For example, when I was a serious Amazon affiliate I had a couple of $3,000 months. It took a lot of effort to get to that point but a minimal amount of time to maintain it, money starting to accumulate because of past efforts. Sure it dried up because I didn’t maintain the effort, as did my Adsense revenue and all the other sources I was generating from my blogs (more about this in future posts). The point is there are ways to make money where you can disconnect the timing of your effort with the income, meaning you can be earning money in your sleep as a reward for all that work.
A1 – No Effort
The A1 – No Effort revenue stream is the holy grail. Earn money 24/7 with no effort. Continues on even if you die, with no additional effort by your beneficiaries. As I am writing this the only examples I can think of in this category are dividends and interest. I’ll be looking for more though!
I’m not 100% in love with this grid to be honest – it’s a work in progress. And over time I’m sure I’ll change it and the categories. But it’s a start.
See you next time!
J.C.