Financial Samurai has technically been making money online since it started in July 2009. I think the site made $3 the second month the site was live. Whoo-hoo! Although I didn’t focus on making money online, the site began to generate revenue anyway. Do something you love and the money will follow right?

By the time 2012 rolled around, I figured with the combination of my passive investment income (~$80,000) and online revenue I’d be fine if I took a leap of faith. Besides, my wife promised to keep working for 2-3 more years until she turned 35 as well.

If you’re looking to make money online, become an entrepreneur, or grow your business, let me share some important lessons I’ve learned along the way. These points are salient for anybody looking to grow their career as well.

Before the internet, traditional publishing a book was the main way to get your book out into the world. Today, many aspiring authors have decided to bypass the gate keepers and go the self-publishing route.

Traditional publishing means that your book is published by an established publishing house. The largest publishers are the “Big 4” publishers: Penguin Random House, Hachette Livre, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Simon & Schuster (acquired by PRH in 2020). However, there are about 15 more reputable publishers today.

By going the traditional publishing route, you will have a team of professionals take care of the book design, sales, marketing, editing, ghostwriting (optional), and various other processes of the publishing world.

There are lots of cooks in the traditional publishing kitchen. But the meal has a higher chance of tasting good in the end. Then again, how many big budget movies have you seen that were absolute bombs?

The other alternative is self-publishing. This requires you to do everything yourself. If not, you have to recruit people to help you create the book, market the book, and then sell the book.

Due to huge platforms like Amazon and Createspace, it is easier to distribute a book than ever before. However, selling a book is also more competitive than ever before. If you don’t sell your book on your own platform, you also cannot control the price.

The global pandemic has taught us all that having a job you can work from home is huge. Although my son’s school was shutdown, I was able to keep working as a blogger on Financial Samurai. The fact that I could keep my business open made me an even bigger believer that blogging is the best business in the world.

A successful business is one that has high profit margins, a defensible revenue stream, can be scaled, and is hopefully fun to operate. Blogging fits all these categories.

Making money is all about identifying opportunity and doing everything possible to succeed until that window of opportunity closes. But most people are too afraid to take any major risks. Why should we when we have the luxury of employment to keep us comfortably numb.

Opportunities And Taking Risks

The two most common people who take risks are: 1) those who start with little or nothing, and who therefore have little or nothing to lose, and 2) those who come from rich families and who also don’t have anything to lose. When your name is William Henry Gates III, you’re not exactly going to starve on the streets if you drop out of college.

For those of us in the middle class, we only make a change once we’re agitated enough to take action. For me, I decided I had enough of banking after 13 years. The correlation between reward and performance broke down after the financial crisis.

After 12+ years of writing online and 13 years of researching every single industry for my job in finance, This post identifies reasons why blogging is the best business in the world.

Anybody can start. The internet, after all, will be a lifelong trend. If you’re ready to start right now, signup with Bluehost today. They have the best pricing and make it super easy to get started.

The best time to start a business is during a downturn. During a downturn, there is less competition, more creativity, and more hungry people looking to start something new.

The post, Lessons Learned Since The Financial Crisis, really brought me back to the time when Financial Samurai was started in the summer of 2009.

The Global Financial Crisis has so far been the biggest downturn of our lives. I had just lost 35% of my net worth in six months and scared that I might lose it all. As a result, my mind started to turn and I finally got motivated to start an online business I had put off since 2006!

In this post, I want to figure out why Financial Samurai has survived all these years. My theory is that launching during a downturn has a lot to do with it.

Have Always Wanted To Be An Entrepreneur

Since I was 12 years old, I wanted to be an entrepreneur because I witnessed the fabulous lifestyles of those who called the shots instead of those who took orders. I just didn’t know what to invent. Back in 1989, you actually had to create a physical product to make money.

My entrepreneurial dreams died down after getting a job in finance in 1999. Only after graduating from business school in 2006 did my desire to start a company reignite. I was emboldened to put all I had learned from my professors to good use. Otherwise, what was the point of going to business school in the first place?

But nothing happened in 2006, 2007, or 2008 because I was tired. After three years of working 60 hours a week while also spending 20 hours a week on business school related activities, all I wanted to do was take a break. It really felt like a vacation to only have to work 12 hour days after graduation!

Only until the world started falling apart in 2009 did I finally decide to launch Financial Samurai. It turns out, there were other companies that were founded during the depths of the recession too: Uber (2009), Airbnb (2008), Quora (2008), Kickstarter (2009), Whatsapp (2010) and many more.

Let me share some reasons why the best time to start a business is during a downturn.

Why The Best Time To Start A Business Is During A Downturn

Here are the key reasons why the best time to start a business is during a downturn.

Ever wonder how much can you make blogging for a living? With more people looking to make money working from home, trying to make money blogging is a growing pursuit.

I’ve been blogging consistently since 2009. After more than 12 years, it’s been a long and awesome road. In this post, I want to share how much bloggers can really make and how they make their money.

It took me 20 years to build a investment portfolio that generates over $250,000 a year in passive and semi-passive income. It took only five years to build the same income blogging.

Blogging for a living is the real deal if you stay consistent, build a brand, write strategically, and grow your network. Since schools still don’t teach people how to start a blog or make money blogging, let me share you the secrets.

Reasons Why You Should Try Blogging For A Living

If you’ve ever thought about blogging for a living, now is the time. The global pandemic has proven that online businesses that can’t be shut down are very valuable.

No matter how tempting it is to sell your cash cow blog, don’t! You will regret it. The value of cash flow has gone way up because interest rates have come way down.

Here are the main reasons why you should try blogging for a living.

1) Low barriers to entry.

Depending on where and when you buy, you need $1 – $2M in capital to generate $50,000 in net operating income with property here in San Francisco. It takes at least $1M in capital to generate $20,000 a year in dividend income from the S&P 500 index.

With both asset classes, you can also lose principal. With blogging, it costs as little as $2.95/month to run a website and you get a domain name for free. If things don’t work out, all you’ve lost is your time and a minimal amount of money.

2) Enormous demand curve.

Financial Samurai can theoretically reach three billion people online through search engines, word of mouth, organic promotion, and advertising. If that happens, I’ll be worth billions and I’ll take each of you out to a steak dinner!

However, in real estate, you can only lock in one set of tenants and raise the rent once a year.

In the stock market, you are a passive investor with no control over dividend payouts or other strategic management decisions.

With a retail store, you can only capture your neighborhood traffic. The internet is growing in usage and size every day.

3) Operating leverage.

Because costs are generally fixed (hosting and domain registration), operating profits soar the more traffic and revenue you get. It’s not uncommon to earn 80%+ operating profit margins as a professional blogger, depending on how much you pay yourself. Very few businesses can compare.

Now that I’ve convinced you pro blogging is the best business on Earth, perhaps you’re interested in knowing how much you can actually make? Before we get to the money, let me first highlight the types of people most suitable for succeeding as a professional blogger.

A self-employed 401k plan is a great way to save for retirement if you are an entrepreneur or solopreneur. A self-employed 401k plan is also know as a Solo 401k plan. This article will discuss how much you can contribute to your self-employed 401k plan.

For 2021, the IRS says you can contribute up to $57,000 in your self-employed 401k plan. The amount should go up by $500 – $1,000 every one or two years.

If you’re at least age 50, then you can make an additional $6,000 catch-up contribution, which increases your limit to $62,000. 

The $58,000 self-employed 401k plan limit consists of $19,500 from the employe and $38,500 from the employer. Therefore, to contribute the maximum to your self-employed 401k plan, you must pay yourself enough and have high enough operating profits.

In general, you can contribute up to the maximum employee amount to your Solo 401k plan + 20% of operating profits.

Here is the 401k maximum contribution limit chart for employee and employer for 2021.

Self-Employed 401k Historical Contribution Limits

For those of you who are self-employed or side-hustling with a full-time job, this article will help you figure out how much you can contribute to your tax-deferred Solo 401k with an example.

You can’t just write a check for $57,000 or $62,000 if you’re over 50. There’s a formula you need to follow based off your operating income. I’m personally shooting to contribute $100,000 a year pre-tax in a Solo 401(k) and SEP-IRA given I am an employee and a freelancer.

Remember, if your employer has you in a 401k plan, you can open up a SEP-IRA if you’re side hustling. And if your employer has you in a SEP-IRA, you can open up a self-employed 401k to contribute more pre-tax dollars to your retirement.

If your employer has you in a 401k plan, you can also open up a self-employed 401k. However, it wouldn’t make sense to do it because the total employee contribution is limited to $19,500 across all your 401k plans. The contribution limit goes up by $500 every couple years on average.