The Issue With Multiple Income Streams

Having multiple income streams sounds like an amazing thing but in my experience it can be harder to keep them all flowing well at the same time. We have all heard money making gurus say stuff like, "You should work at your full time job and then work on your business at night." It is cookie cutter advice that in my opinion isn't worth much to be honest. The reality is that full time job could easily go from 8 am to 5 pm and then suddenly it is more like 7:30 am to 6:30 pm or more. Add in commute time to work and there went more of your day. I guess you could try to sacrifice your health by not working out and not getting enough sleep to try to work on your business at night but that would be shit advice that will catch up to you fast. Really when it boils down to it you would be tired when you got home and wouldn't have much time to work on your business. If you quit your job and you aren't already well off, have investors, or are being subsidized by family or something you could be into financial pain pretty quickly depending on your expenses.

Let's say you end up in a situation where you aren't working full time for someone else but are working on creating the multiple incomes. Anything that is tied 100% to your time will ultimately be an issue for the most part. In an attempt to build other income streams outside of that one that is totally tied to your time your income will go down because you aren't able to pay enough attention to it. I have found that this is true for semi-passive and passive incomes streams as well. I consider drop ships, affiliate marketing, YouTube, and Steemit to be semi passive in nature. Now some of you might argue with that but let me explain myself. If you find good suppliers for doing drop ships you are still going to have to complete the purchase and ship to your customer. It is still going to take some of your time and attention. Also overtime you might get squeezed out of the market and that income will partially get cut off. I have had this happen with some of my drop ship products for various reasons. With affiliate marketing links some of the same things can happen. I have also had it happen several times where affiliate marketing links go dead after spending all types of time deploying links and all that. With one affiliate program I got to a point where I made $800 off of it one month and then the next month the links were broken and that continued for the next six months. I kept calling the manufacturer of the product and no one would give me any straight answers. It was extremely frustrating that I was driving traffic to their product still and they couldn't give me answers on why I wasn't getting paid. I was so pissed. With YouTube I have experienced a decline in Adsense payouts if I'm not creating more content consistently and engaging with the audience by responding to comments. It is true I'm still making money on videos that I posted more than 6 years ago but the majority of the earnings don't come from those videos. With Steemit you have a short window for the payout and have to continue to curate and create content for payouts. It only becomes semi-passive in my mind if you utilize bots for curation or to bank on the fact that Steem Dollars (SBD) will stay stable and you invest a decent chunk of money in that and earn the interest off of it. A person is still going to have to transfer earnings from a power down to an exchange and convert it at this point until the STEEM economy gets built out more.

Fully passive income streams are super elusive and almost require fairly large initial investments. For instance if you purchased real estate property notes, CDs, Bonds, or dividend payouts. To really live off the interest the investment has to be relatively large compared to your monthly living expenses. Holding real estate notes could go from passive income to not so passive real fast if you have to foreclose on the property for non payment.

I was in a situation almost two years ago now where three of my major income sources got shut off at once. I always thought that having the multiple income streams would protect me from my income almost being shut off like a light but I guess I was wrong. Ultimately the issue can still track back to time. You only have so much time in the day to create value.

Money is like stored time. If you don't have enough of it already then you are constantly having to utilize your time to compete with others for the money. Purchasing machines and employees can solve the time situation but it cost money. It is a truly frustrating paradox that most of us will have to deal with to some capacity for the rest of our lives and guess what. Time is running out. :-(

(Image Credit: The image above was taken by me this past week on my camping trip. Multiple streams and a hint at one of the falls to come in my multi-part Havasu Falls posts.)

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