Reading time; about 2 min.
Here is a conversation from an interview with someone you probably know:
“One day John and George showed up…and told me we had a gig. I said, ‘No. I’ve got a steady job here…I can’t expect more.’ And I was quite serious….But then I thought, ‘Sod it.’ I bunked over the wall and was never seen again by Massey and Coggins. Pretty shrewd move really, as things turned out.” — Sir Paul McCartney
There is no security in life. When 100% of your income comes from a job, and you get laid off or fired, you lose 100% of your income. You do not lose 100% of your bills. When you are an entrepreneur, and 60-80% of your income comes from one client, and you lose that client, your income suffers big time.
And I am not even going to address health, accidents or a pandemic. You cannot even guarantee that you will be here tomorrow. Setting the health issue aside, let’s talk about economic security.
The only way I have seen, and experienced, economic security is to have multiple streams of income.
Back in my youth, I was appointed the Director of Pensions for a large insurance company. It was a great gig: I had a car, expense account, my personal assistant and an office. I felt like a big shot. After three months the company merged with a sister company and fired everyone on the 4th floor. You guessed it; I was on the 4th floor.
BUT, before I went to this insurance company I had been looking at other options, and two days after being let go I started working at a pension company in downtown Los Angeles. And while working with this new company, I was talking to two other people about forming our own pension company, which we did three months later. After three years building our own company, we sold it off to a public company and I was able to start investing in real estate.
Other than the three-month stint with the insurance company, (and my job out of college as a school teacher) I always had multiple sources of income. In my own pension company, we had 300 clients paying our fees. When I did business coaching I had 15 people paying my fees. In real estate I had as many as 50 families paying rent.
Currently, the income for me and my wife comes from coaching, stock investments, Limited Partnerships, triple net leased property, commissions, rents, trust deeds and more. Losing any one source of income does not create havoc in our life as if we just had one job.
Opportunity to grow: Calculate where your income comes from now and see how many additional streams of income you could create.
To Your Prosperity,
Rennie
