Creating multiple income streams will launch your lifeboat to freedom from job dependence.
If you have money flowing in each month from a freelance side business, a rental property, and/or a specialty website selling niche products (just to name a few), then you are no longer so dependent on getting or keeping a job for your family’s well-being.
Some of you may be thinking there is no way you will find the time and energy to launch so many projects, money-making or not. But no one starts multiple ventures all at once. They start them one at a time.
And if you can shift your thinking from making money as a trade for your time to looking for ways to make money that can be automated to roll in with little time and effort (more on this in future posts), then the idea of multiple income streams becomes quite appealing.
Barbara Winter, author of one of my favorite books Making a Living Without a Job, divides this process into 90-day periods, starting four new profit centers (as she likes to call them) a year. Barbara compares her efforts to those of a juggler who spins first one plate on a stick, then starts a second going, then a third, and so on.
Like a juggler, Winter takes 90 days to launch a new money-making endeavor, then—when it’s built momentum and is spinning along— she shifts her focus to starting the next project. Depending on her financial and personal goals for each business, she can allow more or less time to get each one launched.
And, when one business is slow, for whatever reason, she can count on income from the others to keep her going.
This is quite a different model from the picture most of us were given while growing up – a picture that usually involved working at one job or one business full time for the rest of our lives (And, unlike tie dye and lava lamps, we all know the lifetime job is not coming back.)
In my next post Multiple Income Streams: 5 Steps to Start, I’ll share 5 easy steps to launch this process for yourself.
What do you think about creating multiple income streams? If you’ve already begun, how is it working for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.