← The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
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These are five money moves that will quietly make you very, very wealthy. They are not conventional, but these are things that I think if you are able to do a couple of them, they will pay dividends year over year and compound so that you can get ahead. Basically, only about 20% of people in this country have a side hustle. I think it's about 42 to $4,500 is the average amount of side income that the average person is bringing in. Now, if you want to beat those numbers or if you want to be a part of that 20%, here's, here's exactly what I would do if I were you. Number one, I'd make sure that I had a high yield savings account and I would be investing in dividend investments. Dividend stocks are amazing because not only do you get the appreciation of a stock which typically grows between 4 to 10% year over year, you also then get every quarter money that is spent back to you, the shareholder. So this is basically a really stable company that is giving you profit sharing, like another diversity, just like they would any other sort of shareholder. So every quarter you get what I call mailbox money. So you're getting that appreciation of that stock and you're giving dividends every single quarter. Now, the smart thing to do here is you don't take that money as income because you don't want to get taxed on it. You then reinvest those dividends back into the stock, and that helps it appreciate and grow even faster. So you're not only getting the return, you're also getting that dividend that is getting bigger and bigger every single time you, you are reinvesting it into the stock market. And that over 10 years can pay off so much. Is it exciting? No. But does it work? Absolutely. That is why it's one of my top ways for you to grow your income. So if you have an investment in a stock and it's $10,000 and it has a 4% dividend return, that means that it's going to give you $400 every single year. And that's money that you can put back into your stock. And eventually that stock is going to grow and grow and grow. That doesn't include the appreciation of the stock itself. That's just the amount of money that you put in. So, so let's say you invested $10,000 into a dividend stock and they pay out a 4% dividend. This would be something like a Coca Cola or a Verizon. Super stable companies. You would then get $400 every year from that company. Now, Instead of having $10,000 worth of that stock, you have 10,400. So then the next time they pay you a dividend, which is 4%, it's based off of your 10,400, not your original 10,000. So every year you're getting more and more of this stock. Now, now, if you're investing in a really good company like a Verizon or a Coca Cola, it is also going to appreciate over time. So that value of that stock is probably not even $10,000 anymore. Maybe it's grown another 3% or 5% or 10% that. And that is why investing in a dividend stock is a really stable way to be able to grow your income and to grow your assets without you taking too much risk. The next one is growing some sort of membership or community. This is really important and this is something that I do with my work smart community. It is my favorite thing on earth because it is a small group of people. Typically about 200, 300 people at any given point are a part of my membership. They're paying a monthly fee to be a part of it, but I create a lot of value for them. So I do live teachings. I answer their questions, I answer their DMs. We get together in person every once in a while and it is an awesome way for me to build some of my biggest fans and biggest followers into my world and for me to provide value back to them. This is a really important thing to do. If you want to be a content creator, an influencer, or have your own business have its own community, consider having a paid community. If it's a free community, that's fine too. People do that, you know, they have 10,000 free members in your community, but they're also monetizing them through other things. I prefer to just let people pay once and then they get all the value. But whatever works for you. The point of it is that if you have a group of people that are with you throughout time and you're providing a lot of value for them, it's a great way to build a long term relationship and to get that recurring money to come in every month. So your community could be a reflection of whatever you're an expert in. So, for example, I'm a paid member of a lot of visual artists. I'm a paid member of a lot of visual artist communities because although I am not a full time artist, I aspire to be one and so I want to support other visual artists. I love watching the behind the scenes of what they paint. Some of them send out postcards and stickers every month. It just depends. I'm also a member of Amanda Seals community in her Patreon. I'm also subscriber of a lot of different substacks. Don Lemon, Joanne Reid. So many different people that I want to be part of the community. I want to support them as people, but I also want the behind the scenes of whatever they're working on and whatever value they're also exchanging. It's just so cool to see what they're working on. But for you, whatever it is that you're doing, you could also offer behind the scenes. So for example, let's say you are really into homeschooling and you're teaching people how to homeschool. Okay, great. Create a community so that people can get access to all your materials from homeschooling. And every month you create different workshops and different downloadables and different things that they can use. You could also do. Afrotech has a community. It's called Afro Tech Insider. It's so great. We have weekly workshops that are for our Afro Tech community. We have over 800 members. They also get special events. We do happy hours all over the country. They get special access at Afro Tech Conference. They get considered earlier to be a speaker at the conference. So so many different things behind the scenes that they get access to. And most importantly, they get access to each other, which is amazing and it helps them build their own networks. So figure out how you can build a community, a membership and you know, don't just have followers on Instagram or followers on LinkedIn. Like figure out how you can get a subset of them into one place. St. Patreon School. There's so many different platforms for this, but I absolutely love it and I highly recommend. The math is also very simple. Let's say you have a hundred members at $25 per month. That's $2,500 a month. So it's not a small amount of money just from a hundred people. You need to be reinvesting some of that cash back into the community. But it really is a great way to have a sustainable monthly recurring revenue coming in and you're providing value for people. The next one is to create a digital product. And I don't mean just like a cute little ebook on Etsy. We are way past those days. If you have a really specific skill, figure out a way to create a tool or some sort of product that offering that is online. So with AI, you can build all These crazy little micro sites. So let's say, for example, you're an amazing fashion stylist. Okay, well, is there a way that you can create some sort of digital product or digital tool? You can code it using cloud code or lovable and actually build out a tool that someone can use to help them with their closet organization, or auditing their closet and auditing their products, or how to upload your first stuff on Poshmark, whatever it may be, that is your skills or a way for you to digitize it and actually sell it. I'm not necessarily saying like create a course because I think courses are hit or miss depending on who you are. But if you're able to solve a problem for someone in a digital way, in a way that you don't have to be the one who delivers it every single time, and you can do work for them, that is absolutely game changer. Let me give you some other examples. Let's say you have a set. Let's say you're a graphic designer and you have some incredible ways to use AI to create these really hyper realistic images. Whether it's like digital headshots or digital product shots or whatever it may be. You can actually sell your prompts to people who don't have the time or the skill to create those prompts. Like, I would probably pay someone if they were really good at creating headshot prompts and keeping that character same time and time again on Midjourney or Nano Banana Pro. I would probably pay like 15 to $30 for that. So if you have that, let me know in the comments. But that's kind of my point. It really just depends on who you are and what you're good at. There is an opportunity to sell that skill to someone else. You just have to sit with yourself and decide, like, how can I actually put this into a product or a system that doesn't require me to deliver that service physically, mentally, literally every single time the next one. And I talk about this a lot, but I feel so passionately about this, you guys, which is you need to build your affiliate business. If you are recommending products or services, or you are literally telling people like, oh, I got this here, I got this thing there. And you're not linking to an affiliate link in 2026. What are you doing? Here's the thing. There are so many platforms that are designed to pay people to organically quote, unquote, market their product or service. So why would you make this company richer and not get an affiliate link for it? Okay, so whether you are a mom blogger or you are a producer, a director, a writer. I want to know what tools you're using as an expert and, and make sure that you have links to those things. Amazon has the lowest possible affiliate amount and affiliate shares on Amazon. You could do like to know it. You could do shop my. You could do. There's some B2B platforms for affiliate links. Do the research, ask AI, ask Claude, ask ChatGPT. Let them do the research for you if you want. But make sure you are organizing your links and you are being clear about hey, you can buy this from my link and get that 15 to 20% commission. You're leaving money on the table. And once you set up this like library or this kind of like collection of links for yourself, then you can sell those on repeat. So just give it a try. Give it a try. I know it might feel a little cringe, but I promise you that it works. And sometimes you even get free PR from it. Like I get probably 5 to 10 boxes a month from like really incredible brands that I actually use because I have driven business to them. So just something to consider, but it's a great way to have passive income for not really changing much of your behavior. And last but not least is some sort of like digital coaching or a way for people to quote, unquote, pick your brain. This is the year that we stop letting people pick our brain for free. Okay? If you don't want to call it one on ones or digital coaching, literally, you can make it so simple, you guys, you could just offer in your stories and say, hey, next week I'm opening up for three to four weeks. I'm going to do a monthly call with a small group of people and we're going to walk through solving this specific problem and then DME if you're interested in and let the people DM you. Okay? Let the people DM you. Market it like a couple times in your stories. I promise you someone will sign up and just make a link on Stripe or PayPal. Keep it simple. You don't need Kajabi, you don't need all these platforms. Just direct payment link, okay. And a zoom link when we have the call. Create a Google Calendar reminder for the next three weeks. This is what we're doing. And I promise you this works every single time. I haven't done large group coaching in many, many years. I ran1 for four weeks with some amazing, amazing people for accelerating their AI usage. It was so much fun. I gained a lot of value from it. And we Had a good time. And then I was able to take those videos and reframe them into my AI Mastery workshops, which now is available for people to buy. YouTube could buy it if you want. So make sure that you're thinking about what value and problem you could solve for someone. But consider literally allowing yourself to become an online teacher. It is such a rewarding experience. And it's something that also just pays a lot of dividends over time because you start to get really good at your own intellectual property, your own frameworks, and you start to build up this collection of your work and your thoughts. That is really valuable if you ever want to use it for writing a book or doing a podcast or any sort of other extension of yourself in the future. This is really, really helpful work. The other thing you could do is you could offer what I call office hours. Sometimes I do this if I have a few weeks where I'm not traveling, where you can just open up your calend and say, like, hey, for this price, I will sit on a call with you for 30 minutes or an hour, and these are the kind of questions you can ask me, or these are the kind of problems I can help you solve. So, like, I have literally paid people to help me with a few different things. I had someone. I paid someone to help me plan my wedding that I actually never had. I paid someone as an interior designer. So I paid someone much better. I made someone to show them my kitchen so that they, as an interior designer, was very, very expensive. I could not afford for them to, like, actually do the whole project. But I was like, what do you think I should do? Because even just 30 minutes with a really, really qualified expert is like 10 hours with somebody else. Because they're so good that it's just second nature to them. They can actually sit there and be like, boom, bam, bing. These are the things I would do. This is what I wouldn't do. I would absolutely not do the thing that you're thinking about. It's no different than if somebody calls me and is like, hey, I want to grow my business, and this is what I'm thinking. Or like, hey, I need to go from this revenue to this revenue. Here's what I'm thinking. I can immediately tell them, no, that's not going to work. Like, that's actually a really good idea. You should do this. And this is how I would get it done. So think about what that looks like for you. Think about what kind of skills you bring to the table and consider opening up your calendar. It's not totally passive because you're obviously meeting with people, but you can charge anywhere between a hundred dollars to $500 for an hour just depending on how big or how much expertise you have. So just consider it, because if you do that a couple times a month, that's a hundred dollars. Three, four times a month, that's another $400. You've got your stocks paying you your affiliate links. I don't know. I don't know, friends. This sounds like a good gig to me. Our goal on our goal with Work Smart is for you to work smarter, not harder, and for you to figure out how to accelerate your wealth and take all of this money and all this extra income to invest it in assets that are growing while you sleep. So you might take the money from these different side hustles and put it into your dividend stocks, put it into your index funds and that is growing while you sleep. And that is how you're going to get ahead. That's how you're going to have your freedom number. We talk a lot about fire, financial independence, retiring early, and making sure that you know what your freedom number is so that you can be building towards that number over time. Let me know if you have any other questions. My DMs are always open to you and I will see you next episode.