The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Making Money After Work
Work Is Never Done When There Is Money To Be Made
For most of the world, work is the place you go to for your primary means of making a paycheck and paying your bills. Once work is done and the day is over, most people go home, make dinner, do some chores, help the kids with their homework or keep them entertained, settle down, and are no longer making money. For a growing minority, however, the workplace is no longer enough, and while the call for making more money is certainly appealing, there is more work to be done.
These types of people who finish with their day job are now turning their hobby into their night job. This is not to say that they will make money by doing so, and they may just enjoy their hobby because it takes their mind away from work and the stresses of life. For those who have a hobby that they would like to monetize, they are finding ways to do so. This idea of turning a hobby into a business that makes money is nothing out of the ordinary, as plenty of billion dollar companies started inside of a garage.
The combination of a hobby and a money maker together is powerful. When people are showing up to work and making money doing it, they are not particularly loving what they do. However, when a person is able to combine their hobby, their passion, into a money maker, they have found something that not many people seek. Unfortunately, this does not always mean they will be successful either, as plenty of startups have began as a hobby, and ended up becoming a complete failure. When it comes to basic economics, regardless of how passionate you are about your product, if there is no demand for it, there is no chance for it to thrive in society, your area, or even on the Internet. Making sure that you choose a hobby or a talent that has some type of demand will certainly help the cause.
Turning a hobby into a money-making business is a dream come true for many people, especially when they were not making any money before. The ambition lies in the fact that there are many people who will never be satisfied until they have some form of recurring income, even while they sleep, because they know they can turn their hobby into a demand that the general public will want to buy.
The idea of having to go to work for 8 to 9 hours a day, 45 to 50 hours a week, means that the majority of us give up a portion of our lives to work for the things we rarely even get to enjoy. From Baby Boomers who are retired and finding themselves back at work to the New-Age Millennials who looking for ways to break the traditional workplace hours, a recurring income is the dream. For Baby Boomers, social security was the dream and a great idea at the time, and for the most part, it should work. For Millennials, social security has now become a 401k which will assist in living alongside social security. Beyond these two types of money-savings systems, which are only eligible in retirement, Millennials are beginning to wonder why they should have to wait so long in order to have a recurring income that they can enjoy.
While people are certainly utilizing their 401ks, there are far too many people who simply distrust that type of system, unable to think about life after retirement. There are far more companies that still fail to offer anything that represents a type of money-savings system. For those Baby Boomers who are now retired and collecting a small social security check each month, if you could go back and tell yourself to save more money, would you?
For those who are younger, in their 30s and 40s, imagining your life in about 30 to 40 years from now, if you can save an extra one hundred dollars a paycheck and were told that you would be able to collect that money when you retire, would you do it? If putting that money away now meant that you got to retire three to five years early, would you do it? Logically, you probably should do it and save yourself money now in order to enjoy it later in life.
No one wants to retire and have to go back to work because they outlived the savings they put away. Many people die everyday, but the hope is that you, we, all live a long and prosperous life. Does your 65 year old self really want to be living like you were during your college years, in which you had to nickel and dime and prioritize things in your life in order to enjoy other areas? Certainly you would like to have generated enough income to not have to go to work and not have to worry about money, either.
Imagine going to the bathroom and coming out and having made a thousand dollars. I certainly will not knock any CEO or any celebrity who has made their way into their fortune, but Oprah could buy a brand new car in 15 minutes or a house by doing nothing for an hour. A top CEO of a major company only needs two hours to buy a new house. While this might make people mad, it is not the point of this article. Though there are plenty of people who probably wouldn’t mind making this kind of money themselves, and if they happen to find the niche business, they may have the opportunity to do so. The fact is, regardless of what they are doing, they are making a recurring income.
Recurring income is the new American Dream, and it goes beyond the American Dream of becoming a worldwide dream. After all, who would turn down the ability to make money while they are not working? I would bet that I don’t need a poll to know that if given a choice, the majority of people would love to not have to go to work all day, and still make money. This has been seen in the ever-growing number of “work-at-home” programs that keep springing up – some which are legit – and more that take advantage of people. Being able to work from home and make money doing it or being able to not work at all and still make money is a dream come true for many of us.
We could take our chances on playing the lottery, but we would probably do better in learning to be good at something and learning how to monetize that specific thing, specifically in this case, our hobbies. Once we learn how to do that, we can learn how to automate our process or at least enjoy doing it so that it becomes a type of recurring income. Whether you start a business on the Internet or in a store-front, it would be great to be able to take a vacation for a few days and still make money. Recurring income is a great opportunity for any of us to finally enjoy other things in life, rather than just rely on a paycheck because we showed up to work.
