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Diverse Interests Create Diverse Income Streams

Updated: 04/29/2022 by Financial Samurai 50 Comments

Diverse Interests Create Diverse Income Streams

Having diverse income streams is vital for achieving financial independence. And if you have diverse interests, you will likely also have diverse income streams.

The more interests you have, the happier you will be. Imagine if one of your hobbies is analyzing clouds, or cumulonimbuses for the scientifically savvy. You could step outside any time during the day and entertain yourself for hours. 

There are so many things around us that our minds tend to filter things out so we can focus on more important tasks. If we stopped to admire everything, we’d probably never get anything done!

Diverse Income Streams Are Beneficial

Income diversification is important during weak economic times since you never know when one stream might dry up. Having more than one source of incoming cashflow is beneficial for reducing stress and staying out of debt.

The funny thing is that I never purposely thought about creating new income streams for the purpose of diversification until a few months before I wrote this post. 

Instead, my diverse interests have lead me to have a diverse amount of income! It never occurred to me to count up my non-job income and figure out what percent it is of total income.

But, as I started adding things up, I was amazed to realize some months would regularly achieve 25% and up to 50% of my gross base salary! Check out my diverse income streams.

Various Diverse Income Streams

Watches & Collecting

Ever since I was 8, I’ve been enamored with watches. I remember my first watch being a black Casio sports watch for $10 bucks and I was hooked! During the past five years, I’ve been able to collect and sell some of the more coveted watches on the market which can’t just be purchased at any store i.e. Stainless Steel Rolex Daytona, Panerai Ceramic, Patek Philippe Rose Gold Perpetual Calendar, IWC Big Pilot, and several vintage Omega Seamasters for example. 

These are the types of watches where you need to get on a waiting list, or get hooked up by your jeweler since you’ve bought so much already.  For a couple years, I made about $10-$15,000 a year buying and selling watches. When I was a kid, I used to collect sports cards, comics, and ancient (1,000+ year old) coins as well. I wonder what those are worth now 25 years later. As a watch collector now, it’s one of my favorite diverse income streams.

Teaching Tennis

I used to give private lessons for $40-50/hour for about 5-10 hours a month. Teaching is a great way to meet new people, keep in shape, and earn some spending money on the side. In fact, one of my dream jobs is to be a tennis instructor in Bora Bora a couple months a year. Who knows, one day I might meet a sugar mama! I no longer teach tennis, but find comfort knowing that if I needed some money, I could.

Update 2017/2018: I finally landed my dream job coaching Varsity Tennis at a high school here in San Francisco! It only pays $5,000 over a three month season, but it’s incredibly rewarding to help be mentors to kids.

We ended up winning back-to-back championships for Northern California Sectionals. In 2021, I plan to defend our title and three-peat!

Blogging

I love blogging, almost to the point of recognizing that I may have an addiction.  I’ve never focused on blogging as a way to make income, but as the advertising inquiries started flowing in, I realize that one could make thousands of dollars a month from their site so why not. 

A lot of the money after the operating costs are donated away, however if I were to one day retire, blogging is definitely a great source of side income. People will be surprised by how much you can actually make blogging.

Learn how to start a blog with my step-by-step tutorial.

Blogging For A Living Income Example: $300,000+ - Diverse Interests Create Diverse Income Streams
A real income statement example from a blogger. Look at all the income possibilities!

Real Estate

Real estate is one of my favorite diverse income streams. I’m cashing out of stocks to buy more real estate for income and stability in 2022+.

I’ve been buying property for the past 10 years and I don’t think I’ll stop. I equate real wealth to real assets such as property. I like the idea of owning land, shelter, and structure instead of just having dollars and cents stashed away in a bank somewhere.

Ever since the beginning of time, having property meant having wealth. It’s amazing to watch your returns tick up as rent increases, while your payments stay the same. Inflation works great that way for asset owners.

For the next 10 years I think the biggest investment opportunity is buying real estate in the heartland of America through real estate crowdfunding site Fundrise. They’ve allowed easy access to much cheaper properties with higher yields compared to the coastal cities.

Realtyshares Investment Examples
Fundrise Investment Examples

Stocks and Bonds

The stock market is a fascinating animal. I’ve been trading stocks and bonds for about 15 years now and hit the big one in 2000 when some now defunct internet stock returned 52X on my investment in three months. I’ve never been that lucky again, and have also lost plenty of money too, but that was enough to whet my appetite forever.

As a result, I’ve got a couple stock portfolios along with my 401K which I play around with. What you come to realize over a long enough period of time is that once you build a large enough portfolio, small returns still mean relatively large absolute dollar amounts.

Related: The Proper Asset Allocation Of Stocks And Bonds By Age

Freedom As An Income Stream

The only way to save is to save a lot. For the past 20 years I’ve been saving at least 50% of my after tax pay. It’s quite straight forward actually. All one has to do is save one bi-weekly paycheck a month and you’ve got saving 50% down. Once your savings is robust, you can buy CDs, bonds, rental properties, and dividend stocks. Eventually, you might have enough interest income where it’ll cover all your expenses.

Diversify And Be Interesting!

Each of the six items above is like a hobby or a game to me. Play the game long enough and one day, you’ll wake up as I’m waking up now to discover the income potential of them all.

Keep on focusing on building diverse income streams for financial independence. Once you do, you will realize how awesome life truly is.

Wealth Building Recommendation

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In addition to better money oversight, run your investments through their award-winning Investment Checkup tool to see exactly how much you are paying in fees. I was paying $1,700 a year in fees I had no idea I was paying.

After you link all your accounts, use their Retirement Planning calculator that pulls your real data to give you as pure an estimation of your financial future as possible using Monte Carlo simulation algorithms. Definitely run your numbers to see how you’re doing. I’ve been using Personal Capital since 2012 and have seen my net worth skyrocket during this time thanks to better money management.

Personal Capital Retirement Planner
Is your retirement plan on track? Find out for free after you link your accounts.

If You Plan To Speak Forever, You Can Blog Forever

Updated: 07/13/2020 by Financial Samurai 57 Comments

You can make a lot of money blogging for a living. However, a lot of people don’t start a blog because they are too afraid of the work involved. I just want to say that if you plan to speak forever, you can blog forever.

One of the best things about running your own blog is that you can write whatever you want, whenever you want.  There’s really no pressure to do anything really, and I don’t understand why some would feel otherwise.  Several blogging buddies have gone straight up cold turkey, not writing anything for months.

They tell me they can’t keep up with the schedule of writing great content.  Who says content has to be great?  They say new jobs lead them to not have the time.  Are you working 100 hours a week?  I’m sad because I miss their posts and our interactions.

You Can Blog Forever

Blogging shouldn’t be a chore, it should be easy. Blogging is writing, and writing is like speaking, which comes as naturally as breathing.  Surely you speak everyday to people, whether in a fun or work setting no?  If so, why is it so hard to put some words together on paper and press publish?  Oh yes, we’re afraid of what people will think of our writing.

How To Build A Blogging Business - you can blog forever

Yes, it’s sometimes a debilitating feeling. We feel we should always try and write something meaningful and profound.  Gimme a break.  We’re bloggers for goodness sake, not the authors of Crime & Punishment and The Invisible Man!

Look around the blogosphere. There’s hundreds of non profound posts out there. There are posts about doing this and that when the author has no clue.  Boring makes up an extraordinary majority of articles on the internet, so don’t worry one bit if your post has the personality of a waxed figurine.

Although we’re only a small micro fraction of the web, I’m pretty confident that someone will find us interesting.  Don’t believe me?  Try putting the worst piece of crap on Craigslist, and I guarantee you tons of people will ping you to pick it up.

If you speak at all, you can write.  And if you plan on speaking forever, you can write forever!  Come back blogging buddies, come back.

Related: Top 10 Reasons To Start An Online Business Today

Starting A Money Making Blog Forever

It’s been over 10 years since I started Financial Samurai and I’m actually earning a good passive income stream online. The top 1% of all posts on Financial Samurai generates 31% of all traffic. The average age of the top 1% posts is 2.3 years old. In other words, after putting in the hours to write some very meaty content over two years ago, 10 posts consistently generate a monthly recurring income stream that’s completely passive.

I never thought I’d be able to quit my job in 2012 just three years after starting Financial Samurai. But by starting one financial crisis day in 2009, Financial Samurai actually makes more than my entire passive income total that took 15 years to build. If you enjoy writing, connecting with people online, and enjoying more freedom, see how you can set up a WordPress blog in 15 minutes with Bluehost. It’s cheap and easy to start!

Related: How Much Do Bloggers Really Make? A lot More Than You Think!

Regards,

Sam @ Financial Samurai – “Slicing Through Money’s Mysteries”

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