The more I write about passive income, the more I realize society does not build people to receive it. Why is that? Before the payments become passive, you need to do a lot of work to get everything set up—I call this The Passive Income Grind.
I never thought about the grind until I got back to America a few days ago. I spent the last year in Japan, in my barracks room, grinding out books and articles. Now, as a free man, it was hard for me to stop my grind mentality.
I convinced myself that writing articles, designing covers, reviewing books, and building books from sunrise to sunset is fun. Now, if I don’t write 2-3 articles a day, I call myself lazy. My wife just laughs at me.
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But that dedication is what it takes to make passive income. There is no shortcut or easy road to have success building an empire. Every person’s income stream is different because we are all unique. Until you put the work in, you will not know your true income stream.
I just wrote an article titled “Write Book Reviews for Passive Income,” where I said people should plan to read and review 100 books in the first year. That sounds crazy, but it is far from it. I have read and reviewed 59 books in 11 months, but I also have written 320 articles outside of those reviews. So reading and reviewing 100 books without extra pieces is more than feasible.
As soon as I wrote that, I knew that it would turn people off. But that’s okay. Only 3% of the world will ever know what it feels like to be wealthy. The 3% understand what it takes to get ahead in life, the grind.
Behind every rich person, there is a grind. Now, their parents or grandparents may have performed the grind, but someone did. Someone built a business from the ground up, made investments when they barely had money or bought and kept a house through a depression. Someone did something “scary” or “risky” and reaped the benefits of that decision.
There is no cut and dry answer, perfect business, or guaranteed investment that will magically fall into your lap. I’ll do a quick rundown of the obstacles my wife and I faced throughout our passive income grind.
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Real Estate. My wife and I bought our first home in 2008, right before the Great Recession. Our house value tanked—along with our cash down payment. We kept the house through the pain, even when we received orders to South Carolina. I had to go unaccompanied because we couldn’t rent or sell the house. After all, it was still underwater (we owe more than it’s worth).
Today, we are making $600/month passive income from this house. It has been a cash cow for us recently, and it has three acres of land (dirt land) that we can do whatever we want with. I have written a few articles on the topic of land uses, including “Harvest Beneficial Insects for Passive Income” and “Start a Community Garden and U pick-It Farm.”
The Grind for rental income was the 13 years it took for us to get our first house in line with our rental income expectations. Today, we own three homes, and someone else pays the mortgage on all three—including our primary residence. Life is good.
Dividend portfolio. No one ever taught me about investing for dividends and income. I stumbled upon the idea while searching the words “Passive Income.” It was magical. However, when we first began our financial independence journey, we were in debt. Debt is something that people with families accept.
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We do not know any better, and we say, “one day, we will pay everything off.” When I started investing, our first months consisted of receiving bank interest from our high-yield savings accounts. In month three, we earned one dividend from Papa John’s, and it was $0.23.
Now, it is a little over two years into our dividend journey, and in July 2021, I received $350 in dividends. My wife earned $150 in dividends. And we are just getting started. We choose to use some of our dividends to do fun stuff like going to Buffalo Wild Wings or Sushi. The grind for dividends was to learn and also pay off debt.
The Grind is Real. The grind is real, but it is nothing to fear. Think about your first job. Did you know anything about what you were doing? I worked at McDonald’s at age 16-18, and I learned so much while working there—some examples include: customer service, making food, and closing the store.
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Creating an income stream is the same as starting your first job or having your first baby. You have an idea of what you will be doing, but you’ll never know until you put your head down and jump in. Your income stream will change, morph, and shift as time passes in the grind. You’ll start to get results from different things you try—it’s part of “The Practice.”
When I started my blog, I thought I was just going to write “when I felt like it” and post 2-3 times a week. But after reading a few books on writing, “On Writing Well” and “The Practice,” I decided to turn it up a notch.
Then I started “Financial Independence Magazine” to bundle up all my articles into an eBook. Then I started making article bundles full-time. Now, 158 books into the grind, I see precisely what I need to do to achieve long-term success. There is no doubt in my mind what I need to do on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. It feels great to know what to do exactly. But it took the grind for me to discover my passive income streams; I did not start with this knowledge.
Your Passive Income Stream is a business, plain and simple. Whether it is room rental, home rental, dividend portfolio, bond portfolio, options trading, cryptocurrency portfolio, blog, YouTube channel, herb garden, etc., they are all businesses. View them as such.
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You need to know the ins and outs of every business and then figure out ways to monetize them more by adding value to your tenants, clients, and customers. It all comes from the passive income grind. There is no other way to build a business other than to learn from the ground up.
The good news is that your hard work carries over to everything else you do throughout life. For example, I know how to operate a blog and design artwork and covers. So if I decided to start a dog park, I know how to design business cards, flyers and maintain a blog. Everything flows together into our overall base of knowledge—this can make you quite powerful.
Conclusion. I would love to say there is an easy way to make passive income, but there isn’t. I wish we could read books and YouTube videos to figure everything out before getting started, but we can’t.
The best I can say is to prepare for the grind. Envision your rich life, ensure you have enough motivation and put your head down. Don’t come up until you know your passive income stream and how to make it successful, exactly. Good Luck!
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Disclosure: I am not a financial advisor or money manager, and any knowledge is given as guidance and not direct actionable investment advice. I am an Amazon Affiliate. Please research any investment vehicles that are being considered. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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