You cannot achieve true freedom if your focus is constantly on making a living. But, initially, you have to do the work to put the right income generating systems into place.
Now you are on your way to making your budget work & getting rid of any debt burden you are carrying, we can look at ways of generating additional income.
In the session on debt elimination, I asked you to find some spare money in your budget to begin to accelerate your debt repayments. Now, I’m going to ask you to find a little spare time in your busy schedule to put to work making some extra money.
And, what are you going to do with this extra cash? Well, I suggest you allocate one third to speeding up debt repayments, one third to savings and the rest to a little luxury or two for you & your family. After all, by now you probably need a little encouragement & self reward!
So, how are you going to turn a little extra time into future financial freedom? Well, not by stacking shelves at the local supermarket for a start! Nor any other low paid menial task.
It’s time to learn the art of leverage. In other words, use a little time and a little skill to make a bigger income. The true entrepreneur does very little actual work (as we know it), he uses knowledge & skill to apply the techniques we have already begun to cover in the “Going Solo” section of past articles.
If you are already in business, use the extra time to step outside of the business & take a good hard look at how you are presently running it. Are you working hard or are you working smart? The smart business owner works ON the business not IN the business. If you are simply an employee of your own business, you are wasting most of its profit potential.
On the other hand, if you are an employee of someone else, you are probably not yet financially ready to “give up the day job!” But that does not stop you spending a little time on preparing for & building a part-time business.
You may have heard of the principle of “Multiple Streams of Income”. This works on the concept that reliance on one single source of income can be insecure, whereas multiple sources of income give greater security. If something goes wrong with one source, you still have the others.
However, a key requirement for success is focus. It’s no good being a “butterfly” & flitting from one opportunity to the next at random. The way to achieve the security mentioned above is to take your little bit of spare time and build one additonal income stream that can be put onto “autopilot” once it is running smoothly. Only then do you turn your attention to the second stream and do the same again – always keeping an eye on the first to make sure there are no “bugs” in your system.
By working in this way you can multiply the results of your efforts and make the most of your spare time. One day, you could well find that your multiple streams of spare time income exceed the income from the “day job”. If you have set it all up right, you will be well on your way to independence and financial freedom.
So, how do you find these illusive income streams? I shall be going into this in more detail as our journey together progresses.
