Another day, another article about passive income. Hey, that’s what I do. I love reading books and articles about passive income—I call it “reinforcing principles.” I can read about people living on dividends and building rental empires all day.
One of my favorite topics is living the laptop life? I take this to mean that you can conduct all of your business from your laptop. And this can be more than just a business; it can be for investments, real estate, and cryptocurrencies.
If you have read some of my articles before, you know that my dream is to live the laptop life from a white sand beach with my wife, kids, and grandkids. Simple right? Not so much. You see, you will have to create your laptop life before you live it.
5 Habits to Envision a World of Money
The idea of laptop life. Many people dream of working from their computers, on a beach somewhere. The idea isn’t to work on anyone else’s schedule, though. So, if you plan on being a freelancer for someone, yes, technically, it is the laptop life. But, you are not in control of your time.
I view laptop life as freedom of time and money. For example, blogging is a great example of laptop life. You create an article; it generates money over time. Nothing is pressing you to make content.
We definitely don’t want to live the laptop life if it brings a high-stress environment every time we open it up. The goal is to produce enough content before you exit the beach. Or have your business mature enough to handle things from afar. The bottom line, you have to have a mature, seasoned income stream before you disappear to the beach. You will have completed the passive income grind.
My vision of laptop life. I have written down my rich life at least 50 times over my 550+ articles on my blog. Laptop. Beach. Family. Got it. However, I will go into a little more detail on what I envision after a year on the grind.
First, I want the smallest Chromebook available. In 10 years, Chromebooks might not be a thing, but that is my dream for now. I love Chromebooks because I spent years fighting with Windows and Mac laptops. I particularly hate the slow updates. When I hop on a laptop, I have a business to conduct, and I don’t have 10-15 minutes to wait for an update that will break something.
Living a Middle-Class Life is Stressful
Currently, I am using the best Chromebook available (in my opinion). The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 1 (affiliate link) is under two pounds, has a 4K screen, goes into tablet mode, has a stylus, and the keys allow me to type normally. I am seriously considering buying another one, just to keep it in the box.
My dream was always to have a sexy computer and make money with it on a whim. Now, I am slowly living that dream life. Now that I have my dream laptop, I need a successful business model.
My Business Model. I have a sustainable business model that I foresee myself doing for the long term. It consists of writing at least one article a day, creating article artwork, publishing, and usually making an ebook every day. I call my ebooks “article booklets” because they are small booklets with the main article plus associated articles bundled together.
How Much Money Do You Need for Retirement?
Each article booklet is an asset. I was surprised that a 40-page book would sell for $3, but lo’ and behold, they sell. After reading 60 books in one year, I can understand why. Sometimes you just want a quick win. Sometimes you just want to buy, start, and finish a book in one day. My articles are straight to the point, with little fluff.
Even better, I can bundle my article booklets together at will. So I have 400+ articles I can bundle together. Then, I have 170 article booklets I can also bundle. You see where I am going with this. Once I retire, I will have at least 1000+ article booklets, each its own extraordinary asset. I created a unique bundle of booklets today in about an hour.
I think I have a good thing going. The main thing is that I love creating, writing, publishing, and bundling. It is exciting, and it is fun to see random booklets selling. A booklet might not sell for six months, then one day, it sells two copies. Very strange and fun. Now, let’s turn our attention to you.
What is your dream laptop life? You are reading this article for a reason, so what is your dream laptop life? What is your rich life? My advice is to ensure that you love whatever you plan on doing. There are too many options even to list here.
Good Debt vs. Bad Debt
I just finished an article on 21 Passive Income Ideas, which may be an excellent place to start. These all involve businesses, but there are other ways to live the laptop life. Let’s look at a few.
Dividend investing is a great way to earn income while chilling on the beach. The main disadvantage is that you need a hefty sum of cash to live off of your dividend income full-time. Your days would consist of reading news, following headlines, and making predictions.
Capital Gains investing. I am not a huge capital gains investor, but you would have the time to speculate when you retire. You could speculate with sports cards, gold, Pokemon cards, artwork, watches, etc. If you can allocate 5% of your wealth to speculative plays, you could make a handsome sum from your laptop.
Options trading. I am ready to get into options trading. In fact, I just requested a Tier 0 (lowest tier) options account on my Charles Schwab brokerage account. I am going to try my hand at writing covered calls. Options trading will be an excellent way to produce “synthetic dividends” on your static dividend stocks.
JOMO: The Joy of Missing Out
Real Estate Investing. If you jump hardcore into the real estate world, you will have a team by the time you retire. Your team may consist of real estate agents, property managers, handypersons, lawyers, accounts, and tax professionals. At that point, you will just be a decision-maker and front-money person. You could also lean on real estate wholesalers to find deals your team would vet and work for you—what a nice life.
Private money / hard money lender. You have the cash; borrowers need it to invest in real estate. You can set up a website where you screen the prospective borrower. If the investment and borrower look good, you can have a person on the ground perform some more due diligence. If you can keep this to 5% of your wealth, you can make great returns on lending.
Crypto yield-chasing / yield farming. Finding the best yield for your crypto-bucks is a full-time job. Sometimes, you can catch yield at 40%+ for 2-4 weeks as coins are building liquidity. Yield chasing is fun, but there is some risk. Not everyone is a good actor in crypto-space, so you must perform due diligence on your coins.
Initial Coin Offerings. There is always a new coin coming down the pipe in the crypto-verse. You will have the time to follow coin teams as they progress to their initial coin offering. Getting into a team is hard because you will have to follow them on social media, promote the coins, and bring more people into the group. It may be 2-3 years before they perform an ICO. But if you buy 100,000 coins for $0.05 each, and they ICO for $200/each…Wow. I’ll do the math—$20 million from $5,000. Is it worth the legwork?
The Golden Handcuffs of Lifestyle Inflation
Content Creation. Blogging, writing, photos, vlogging, etc., are best for laptop life. I do not like YouTube because of the need to sit behind a desk and edit with a mega-computer. However, you could buy a Macbook Pro and get some significant work done on your laptop. I love the simplicity of writing, and I think writing stands the test of time in the long run.
Social Media. Creating content for social media can probably be done from your laptop as well. I am not a huge social media personality and don’t intend to be, but I can see the appeal for some personality types.
Conclusion. Whatever your flavor of passive income, get started today. Even small strides go a long way. It took me four months to figure out how to publish a paperback book because I kept messing up the dimensions on the pdf printout.
We all make mistakes and have frustrating moments, don’t let these keep you from creating an income stream. Very few people can say they created an income stream, and even fewer can say they made a passive income stream. It is a fantastic achievement that hopefully you get to experience for yourself. Think about being on a beach, a lake, or a mountain with your laptop, and get to work!
- Build Passive Income: 21 Passive Income Ideas (book)
- Free PDF Downloads: Download FREE PDF books here
- Financial Mindset: Become CEO of Yourself (book)
- Retirement Planning: Retirement Planning at Any Age (book)
- Investing: How We Plan to Retire on Dividends (book)
- Cryptocurrencies: My First Book on Cryptocurrencies (book)
- Real Estate: Financial Independence through Real Estate (book)
- Business: Retire Rich, Retire Comfortable with a Business (book)
- Everything plus way more: The Biggest Book on Passive Income Ever! (book)
- I bought a Kindle Oasis: Check it out Amazon
- Read My Books for Free: Free Kindle Books Schedule
- Sign up to Access our “Hidden” Free Kindle Book Schedule
- My first Children’s book: A Child’s First Book on Passive Income (book)
- Book Reviews: 54 Takeaways from 54 Books (book)
- Want to Build Passive Income from Books and Affiliate Marketing? (Learn here)
- Writing: Can Grammarly Make You a Better Writer? (direct)
- My Favorite Chromebook: The Ultimate Chromebook (direct)
- Follow us: On our Facebook Page and Join our Facebook Group
- Amazon Author Page: Check out my author page on Amazon
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.
Leave a Reply