First, let’s define what we’re building.
Lifestyle Business: A lifestyle business is a business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle
Meaning, the purpose of this business is to fund my life of travel. Every dollar not spent on that will go back into the business. I will set my salary, pay myself no more, and any extra profit will be reinvested to perpetuate growth.
RULES TO LIVE BY (stole these from GaryVee)
1. Bring value to the customer
2. Provide 51 percent of the value in a relationship, whether it’s with an employee, a client, or a stranger
3. Always play the long game of lifetime value
4. Smart work will never replace hard work; it only supplements it
5. People are your most important commodity
6. Patience matters
7. Never be romantic about how you make your money
8. Try to put yourself out of business daily
Answer the following questions: What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What am I passionate about? What do I want to out of life? What are my goals? What is happiness to me? Am I living for myself, or to meet the expectations of others? How can I bring value to people? What do you actually know about? What are your passions? What can you share with the world to make it a better place? How can you interact with an audience? How can you distribute your product?
Plan your content out, and post to the various platforms. Content: quantity over quality. Community: quality over quantity. Meaning you need to post constantly to satisfy your community, but don’t be discouraged by numbers. Quality, invested followers are worth more than strangers’ eyes.
With mindset out of the way, it’s time to focus on execution.
How do I actually fund the lifestyle I’m trying to build?
I make my art using my iPad, pencil, and Procreate, upload the art to Printful or Printify (print on demand services), use that artwork to design clothes and other products, and publish those products to my site. It takes a bit of work to go from idea to printed product. But the idea is, put the work in one time, and sell it over and over again. I use print on demand services because it requires no overhead, no inventory, no printing, nothing besides my art. It’s not as lucrative, but I’m also not trying to put in the effort to stock everything, nor do I have the space to house the operation. For now, This is the option that makes the most sense for me. Got a better solution? Hook me up!
The hope is that this will be my primary source of income for a few years. I’d love nothing more than to be paid to get better at everything I know how to do. The more practice I put in, the better I’ll get, but it’s hard to put in the time for no profit. Not necessarily hard, but disheartening for sure. If I’m getting paid to do it though, I’d work 16 hours a day. I’ve realized that I can get lost in the things I like doing for hours at a time without noticing. That’s the real goal. If I’m getting paid, and I’m toiling away for hours, but thoroughly enjoying what I’m doing…I wouldn’t even call that a job
Expecting people to hire me just from my site is stupid though. I don’t have traffic, so I’ll have to go to where the people are.
Fiverr and Peopleperhour and Upwork are all freelance job boards where people create their profiles and offer services. You can sell a multitude of services at different prices with upsell opportunities.
Studypool is essentially doing someone else’s homework for pay.
Picoworkers is a site that connects content creators to brands. I will be creating content based on a company’s requests.
Acx pays voice actors to read audiobooks. Voices will pay people for voiceover work. This might pay less than Acx, but the assignments are much shorter too.
Transcribeme is one platform that will pay you to transcribe, Rev is another, and 3playmedia is one more.
Lottery 🎟
I’m calling this section “lottery” because I don’t actually expect any of these methods to make me real money, but it is possible, and they require very little effort. So if I take a few minutes and set it up, and one of them does blow up, it’d be like winning the lottery
Ideally, I want my income to be completely passive, meaning I put in the work to set it up, and afterwards it generates income without doing anything else. The purpose of this is to have a steady stream of money that will allow me to go after what I want, without worrying whether or not it’s making money. So let’s first look at a few passive models that I’ll need to set up.
Pinterest affiliate marketing.
Originally I got the idea from this TikTok and this one.
YouTube has two different passive strategies. Obviously making videos can make money, but more goes into that, and we’ll address that method later on.
For now, we’re going to look at creating loop videos (TikTok tutorial, Orangefreesounds for music/effects, Pexels for images/videos) and shorts (tutorial).
Ebooks is a big money making potential too. I can make/pay someone else on Fiverr to make children’s books, coloring books, and activity books that I can sell on Amazon kdp. I could also sell calendars, planners, and lettering workbooks on Etsy.
Since I’m already using print on demand, I need to upload those designs on other marketplaces like Amazon Merch and Redbubble
I can also sell some of my photography and video content on Clickasnap and Envato which will pay per view/download, essentially turning your stuff into stock images and videos that others can license/view.
I’m also going to try to convince my wife to sell used panties/socks because, it takes literally no effort besides listing it and shipping it, no one has to know who she is or what she does (not that she’d mind), and it is actually pretty lucrative.
This blog could also function as a passive income stream. I don’t plan on making any money off of it, but enough traffic could make that happen. I’m mostly just using this as a public journal, though in the future should I decide to switch focus, I could monetize it. If I’m extremely lucky, I can grown a huge following on socials and make money that way, but I’m not counting on it.
Once I have a little bit of disposable income, I’ll buy an HNT miner, and set up a BTC and ETH miner so they can make me money in the background.
Elbow Grease 💪🏻
Power washing is pretty self explanatory. Buy a power washer, charge people money to wash dirty shit. Next step is to use that power washer and integrate into an auto detailing business. The reason I chose this is, not much up front capital required, high paying clients means you make that money back (and afterwards profit) quickly, not much upkeep, and you can clearly see if you’re doing a good job or not. I haven’t done a ton of research on it, but when I make my shopping list of chemicals and supplies, I’ll let everyone know exactly what I did.
Fliping things on Amazon. I’ll download the Amazon Seller app, and buy a Bluetooth scanner. I’ll go to clearance sections, dollar stores, Walmart, target, etc. and I’ll look at sale items, scan them, and if Amazon will pay more for the item than it’s priced at, send them into Amazon and keep the difference. You can also do this with books. Instead of scanning through thousands to find ones that Amazon will pay more for, just ask for free books. People are constantly getting rid of them, and even if you make $0.10 a book, it’s better than nothing.
I can go on Etsy, find products that are selling well, but priced below average. Take those photos, list the product on Facebook marketplace, and when I make a sale, I just go buy it from the Etsy store, and ship it to my customer.
Domain flipping is going on Justdropped, finding a domain that recently expired, then using GoDaddy’s domain appraisal tool to find out if it’s worth more than the listed price. If it is, buy it, sell it, keep the difference.
Money Moves đź’¸
Honesty and transparency are incredibly important to me, so if you decide to support me, I want you to feel like you know exactly what you’d be supporting, what I’ll do with your money, and how you’ll be helping. So I’ll give you a step by step process of what I plan to do with the any sales/income income I make
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First and foremost I am a father of 2, and a husband. So I have to take care of family expenses before anything
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If all our bills are paid and we’re fed, the next thing I need to focus on is online store order fulfillment/any supplies needed for the next freelance gig I was hired for. I have to make sure I keep the system operational.
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Next thing I’ll spend money on is marketing. Not a huge amount, but just enough to run a few ads and get in front of more eyeballs.
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Once all that is taken care of, I’ll be investing in stocks/options so that I have money later on down the line. Investing is relatively new to me, and my family wasn’t very good at it, so I’m trying to change that. I won’t be putting anymore than 10% of my money into this, and hopefully in a few years it’ll actually be worth something substantial.
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If I have enough left over after all that, I need to buy supplies for my supplementary business; auto detailing supplies & scanner to start flipping
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After that, it’s just grind, hustle, me save until we have enough to purchase the bus. After that, the money will go into renovating it.
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This would be pretty far down the line, so these are kind of abstract goals right now, but I’m putting them in here for transparency. Once we have the bus renovated, we set our sights on filming, 48 States in 48 Months
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After that, any left over money, and all future profits would go towards real estate investing, specifically utilizing BRRRR Method
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Once a few rentals are bringing in a decent passive income, it’s time for me to start looking for land
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Once land is secured, we start construction on our house
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Next I build a few physical businesses to fund and support the
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Compound