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Nick Loper
You probably already know that Airbnb can help you earn some extra cash when you're not using your home. Maybe you're traveling for work, you're taking an extended vacation, or you're just snowboarding someplace warmer. But here's where it gets interesting. You don't have to do all the work yourself. You can tap into Airbnb's co host network. This is a team of local pros who handle the nitty gritty so you can focus on what matters most. Think of it like outsourcing for your side hustle. These professional co hosts help with everything from creating a killer listing that stands out to guest communication and even on the ground support. You provide the space, they handle the details, and you get paid. Personally, I'm a fan of income streams that don't require constant oversight. When I'm traveling for work, I'm at a conference or a mastermind, or if I'm on vacation, I'm trying to be present with my family. Here's a way to add an extra income stream without having to be glued to my phone the whole time. When you're ready to get started, see how much your space could be worth and get connected with an awesome co host@airbnb.com host. Here are three ways to get out of the Rat Race Now Getting out of the rat race is simple but not necessarily easy to escape. All you need is monthly income from a source other than your job that exceeds your monthly expenses. Simple, but not always easy. I'm Nick Loper. You're listening to the Side Hustle show where we've been making day jobs optional since 2013. In this episode, I'm breaking down those three most common rat race escape routes, including the one at the end that got me out, the pros and cons of each, and how to choose the right path for you. So remember, that freedom equation is non job income that is exceeding your monthly expenses. The three most common ways to generate that income are traditional investments, real estate, and entrepreneurship. These are in contrast to, and probably more realistic than the other paths that some people bank on, like an unexpected inheritance, a lonely Nigerian prince, or winning the lottery. But what's maybe even more surprising is most people don't really seem to have much of a plan at all. They're just going through life day to day with the assumption and hope that someday they'll retire. But it doesn't really work that way. And if you're not steering your own ship, I'm not sure you're going to ever get to where you want to go. The first step in escaping the rat race is to figure out your actual monthly expenses. What is your lifestyle cost? This isn't going to be a lecture on extreme frugality, but at the very least, spending with intention has got to be a part of your rat race escape math. I mean, why set the bar unnecessarily high? And if you've never calculated how much you actually spend on a monthly basis, it's worth taking a minute to figure that out. This was an exercise that my wife and I did last year. We kind of had this off site retreat. We went through Monarch Money and we're like, well, in our mind we had a typical monthly budget, kind of like bare bones. Well, we know how much the mortgage is, we know how much we roughly spend on utilities and groceries. But why is the credit card bill always so much higher? It's like, well, we bought plane tickets or we had this repair charge, it was always higher than what it was. So we looked at, well, how much do we actually spend on a monthly basis? And the number is going to be different for everybody. It might be $3,000, it might be $10,000. But how much does your lifestyle cost? That's the income that you need to generate. That's your rat race freedom number. So how do real people achieve it? The first way is to save your way out with traditional investments. This is probably the most commonly prescribed path to retirement, whether early or not. And this is stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, stuff like that, paper assets. And this is how retirement has worked for generations, right? Amass a big enough nest egg during your working years and then slowly draw down those savings after you stop working. The problem is, if you're listening to this, you probably don't want to wait decades until you've saved enough. Now, the fire movement, the financial independence retire early movement has an alternative for you and argues that retirement isn't an age you don't have to wait till you're 65. It's a number. It is 25 times your annual expenses in savings. This is from the Trinity study, I think was like late 90s. They did back testing on a bunch of 30 year scenarios in the market and said, hey, you know, 95 times out of 100, if your starting nest egg is 25 times your expenses, you're unlikely to run out of money at least 95% of the time. And this is not set in stone. Like if the market has a series of bad years, you could adjust your expenses downwards to hopefully make it last a little bit longer. So what does that look like in real numbers? If you're spending $40,000 a year, you could theoretically leave the rat race behind. Once you got a million dollars in traditional investments, you live off dividends and share price appreciation for decades. Under that scenario, if you spend $100,000 a year, you need two and a half million. Now, there are a few advantages to this kind of traditional investment, this traditional path to retirement. One is that these so called paper assets are accessible to just about everyone. You can even invest right from your phone with any number of different brokerage apps. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs. They're highly liquid, meaning you can buy and sell them quickly if you need to. And over the long run, they've performed historically well. Like projecting 7 to 9% annualized returns would be realistic there. The biggest drawback is trying to get out of the rat race with traditional investing. Either takes a lot of time to let compounding do its thing, or a lot of money now. Now, despite enthusiasm from the fire community, which I would consider myself a part of, I like that they put a milestone, an end game, a goalpost, something to reach, something that's hopefully attainable and doesn't have to be related to your age more or less. But the truth is, unless you have a really wide margin, a lot of profitability in your personal finances, that's the gap between what you earn and what you spend. There's really no shortcut to building up that nest egg. Plus, if you have unexpected expenses that pop up during retirement, your assumptions around withdrawal rates can probably go out the window for the traditional investing path. If you go way back in the archives, you'll find episode 105. This is probably from year two or three of the show. This is with Jeremy Jacobson from Go Curry Cracker, who retired in his late 30s. Thanks to this high level of personal profitability that we're talking about, we were roughly saving 70 ish percent of income for quite a while. And then I probably worked three years too long and was saving nearly 100% of income at that point. If you're just living off the dividends and interest, if you're saving that percentage of income, it really only takes about 10 ish years in order to build up enough net worth to fund your lifestyle forever. What kept you working those extra three years? Was it just the like? Can, can we really do this? There's a little bit of that, you know, maybe I'd call it fear. Nobody does this. Can we? Yeah, like I've Read stuff. But thinking you can do it and actually doing it are two very different things. That mindset shift from saving and investing and accumulation to all of a sudden drawing down, intentionally bringing your earned income to zero. That's a complete 180. And even if the math and the models and the projections that say you're going to be fine, I think it's a lot harder to pull the trigger in reality and just toss your career aside. So one thing that we're trying to do that we've seen some other friends do is as that nest egg grows, scale back some working hours. Maybe you don't jump off the cliff. Maybe you kind of start rappelling down one level at a time. Maybe that means negotiating, working part time or only four days a week, or transitioning to a role that is less demanding, doesn't require as much overtime. It's reducing your income by baby steps rather than going cold turkey all at once. So who is this traditional investing route best for? I think this is the best way to escape the rat race for high earners who live a relatively inexpensive lifestyle. If you or you and your significant other bring in, say, $300,000 a year, but you only spend 50, this is a great option. Now if you ignore taxes for a second because that always throws a wrench in any time on the air math. But you can see how it would only take five years if I'm saving. If I'm profiting $250,000 a year as a household, it would only take five years to accumulate that 1,255,000,000 that I would need to support that $50,000 a year lifestyle in retirement. So that means if your work is tolerable, I think those five years are going to fly by. And that assumes you're starting at $0 in savings today. Now, on the other hand, if you make $50,000 a year and you spend 49 of it, traditional investing is never going to get you out of the rat race. There's simply not enough savings margin there. Which brings us to option number two, which is to beat the rat race with real estate. And that's coming up right after this. Did you know there's a disease running rampant among side hustlers and new entrepreneurs? It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you gotta do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right, and struggling to let go of certain tasks. Does that sound familiar to anyone? But the good news is there is a cure. Our sponsor indeed can help you find the best candidates for the roles you need to fill and find them fast. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. Faster than ever Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed get 45% more applications. Don't let superhero syndrome hold you back. That's why for my next hire, I'm using Indeed. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed side Hustle show listeners get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com Sidehustleshow just go to indeed.com Sidehustleshow right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com Sidehustleshow terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Creating really great retail experiences is tough, especially if you've got multiple stores, teams of staff, fulfillment centers, separate workflows. It's a lot to deal with, but with Shopify Point of Sale, you can do it all without complexity. Shopify's Point of Sale system is a unified command center for your retail business, both online and in store. One thing that's really cool about Shopify POS is you can keep customers coming back with personalized experiences and collect that all important first party data to give your marketing teams a competitive edge, even if that marketing team is just you. Now how about some data to back that up? Businesses on Shopify POS see real results, including a 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales. Want more? Check out shopify.com sidehustle that's all lowercase and learn how to create the best retail experiences without complexity. Again, that's@shopify.com Sidehustle the second common rat race escape path is real estate, and for the sake of this episode, I'm going to focus on rental property investing. Real estate comes in so many different flavors and strategies, many of which we've covered on the side Hustle show before. But we're focusing on rental property investing in this one. So how real estate works to escape the rat race. It's a pretty easy to understand business model, right? You buy a house, you rent it out, and you pocket the difference between that rent and your monthly expenses. Your mortgage, your insurance, your maintenance costs, right? And lather, rinse and repeat until you got enough monthly cash flow to quit your job. This is what Dustin Heiner did, who for him, it was around 26 different properties and around $15,000 a month in reliable cash flow. He retired at age 37 and supports his family off the income from that rental property empire. So his big thing is invest with that monthly cash flow in mind and then use it to start slowly chipping away at your own living expenses again. Another argument for keeping those expenses low, because the lower they are, the less properties, the less cash flow that you're going to need. Now, rental property investing can accelerate your climb to financial independence in several important ways. First, you can take advantage of leverage. That's borrowing money. In contrast to traditional stock market investing that we talked about a minute ago, where $20,000 buys you $20,000 worth of index funds, that same $20,000 could be used as a down payment to buy $100,000 or more worth of real estate. Then you can pay down that loan balance with the rental income that you receive over the next 30 years. The next big advantage of real estate is appreciation. As you know, houses tend to cost more today than they did a generation ago. By buying those properties, you can capture this appreciation when you sell, or you can borrow against that equity in your houses to fund future acquisitions. This is another thing that Dustin talks about, Kind of like recycling that initial down payment money as equity as future down payments. And third, being a landlord comes with a bunch of different tax advantages, Tax benefits, including the ability to write off your mortgage interest and even take depreciation on the buildings that you own. And finally, real estate can be a pretty passive income stream once you have your tenants and other relative or other relevant team members in place. Yes, there's an upfront time investment, but no trading hours for dollars down the road. So what disadvantages should you be aware of? Well, home prices don't fluctuate as wildly as the stock market, but investing in physical assets, it does take more legwork. And it also means that your cash isn't as liquid. And by that, I mean you can't just push a button on your phone and sell a house when you need cash, like you could do with an index fund. And although there are some creative ways to buy houses with no money down, like we talked about in our creative financing episode with Austin Miller, really fun episode, Real estate is usually a takes money to make money option. And as a landlord, you're also going to face vacancies if the house sits empty. That erases any positive cash flow you were banking on that month. Repairs and maintenance Roofs, windows, toilets, water heaters. Nothing lasts forever. It all costs money. And if you're the owner, it comes on you. There are unexpected expenses, like our friends in California had to redo their foundation to the tune of like $90,000. There might be tenant issues that come up and why some humans think it's acceptable to trash other humans property other people's houses is beyond me. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't happen. On top of that, your local real estate market might not be a great place to invest. So you might be dealing with all of this remotely or through a third party management service. So who's real estate investing best for? The people I see having the best success with real estate are those who take a long term view and are committed to operating multiple properties. I don't think one house is going to get you there now, especially if you can buy multiple properties in one location. There are some economies of scale that might make life easier than having only one house or having houses in different cities across the country. The reason for that is that way you can have one property management company or one general contractor person that you have as your go to in that space versus having spread out in different cities all over the place. Now as your empire grows, you're also better able to absorb a vacancy here or there, or an unexpected expense for a property or two in any given month. But just like traditional investing, real estate can and does work to escape the rat race if you have the capital, the patience and the fortitude to stay the course. If the idea of accumulating a portfolio of cash flowing real estate appeals to you, check out episode 387 with Dustin Heiner. It's a super inspiring episode and one of my favorite clips is where Dustin talks about getting laid off from his government job, his supposedly safe government job, and the identity shift that happened after that.
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Dustin Heiner
I bought maybe two or three properties and I was really enjoying it. But at the same time I was working a great job. I was working for the county government and then I'm working from Monday to Friday. Just one week back after my, my fourth child was born. On Friday at 3:30 in the afternoon, I get a call from my boss's boss's boss's secretary. Like the top dog, his secretary gave me a call and said hey Dustin, the boss needs to see you, see you, come to the office. I said okay and hung up the phone. And I sat there for a second like what is, why are they calling me? And then as I'm sitting there I start to think, what could they be calling about? And, oh, my goodness, back before I left, I heard some rumors or some rumbling throughout the entire office about possible layoffs because there wasn't much money. And this was like 2009, you know, right after the crash eventually trickled down to the government. Me working for the government, I'm like, I should be fine. I have plenty of seniority. I'm doing really well. They always gotten raises. And so I get up and I start walking down the hallway to the boss's office. It feels like it's a mile long because I'm just thinking, what am I going to do if I get laid off? And as I'm walking, my feet feel like lead bricks. Like, I just. It's hard to take that next step. And each time, my heart started pumping a little more because I started realizing, my goodness, I have four kids. How am I going to feed them? How am I going to put a roof over my head? And I get to where my boss's office is. His door is closed. I turn the corner, and I see the secretary sheepishly. She looks at me and kind of grins and says, dustin, would you please have a seat? She knows exactly what's going to happen, what is happening. I don't. And she's trying to console me just by, you know, her eyes and her smile. She can't tell me. So I sit down, and as I'm sitting there, I'm feeling like a pit in my stomach, thinking, oh, my goodness, this is probably it. And I started realizing, or thinking, am I a failure as a husband? Am I a failure as a father? Even as a man, am I a failure? And as I think more and more, it's like literally 30 seconds or a minute, it's just sitting there. I start to sweat on my forehead. My hands get all clammy, and then opens the door to my boss's office, and out walks a lady with a piece of paper. She's noticeably distraught, almost crying, but she's not really not saying anything, holding this piece of paper and walking out. And my boss says, dustin, would you please come into my office? And so I get up and go in, and lo and behold, I get laid off. And who gets laid off from the government? Well, I did. I absolutely get laid off from the government. And so I take that piece of paper, I go back to my office, and I realize two things. Well, number one, I realize that I need to provide for my family. And everything that I need to do from this point forward is to be able to provide for my family, my four kids, my wife. And so I was blessed. Within maybe like a week later, I was able to find another job in the county because I had a good reputations. So I got that. That was the number that my job was to find a job. And I did that, which is the first goal. The second thing was I needed to never ever let this happen to me again. Outside forces causing me to not be able to provide for my family. So what I decided to do was that point as I'm literally sitting at my desk right after I got laid off. The second thing I realized I am now an investor even though I had two or three properties. I was just a side hustle. I realized I am now an investor Even though like 98% of my income comes from my side job. It's now my side job even though 98% of the money comes from it. My value is in what I give myself. And so what we usually say or what I would always say if somebody says, hey Dustin, what do you do basically what do you put value in? I would always say I work for the county government, doing it work of the county government. No longer did I ever say that. After that I said I am an investor in real estate rental properties. So from there I worked every single penny into another property. I was frugal. We only took one vacation a year which was driving from California to Arizona to see the in laws for Christmas. That was the only vacation we didn't eat out. And so in making that transition, this was my goal. I said no longer am I ever going to let this happen to me. And so I strove every single day, every single week to get that next property and that next property and the next property. So to actually taking that leap, honestly, it was a little hard to leave that W2 or a lot of hard to leave that stable W2 job once I had it. But once I realized I am losing money here, my value is so much more than this. And I'll be honest, now that I quit my job, it was so amazing to see how much more money I can make when I work for myself. So for everybody listening, that's my process is I had to change my value in myself. No longer am I working for the government. No, I'm an investor with a side job. Same thing with you. You're, you're a side hustle. Whatever your side hustle is, if you want to turn that into your job and you want to make take that leap, literally change your, your vision and your value of yourself. And that's what got me to where I am today.
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Nick Loper
Yeah, this is like the identity habit, this really powerful thing, that subtle shift from I'm a worker first to I'm an investor first. So I'm. I appreciate you sharing that again. That's from episode 387. Now, to be fair, for every Dustin, for every evangelist for real estate, there's an at least an equal number of burnt out landlords who buy into the leverage and tax advantages and cash flow of real estate, only to get chewed up and spit out along the way. No business is without risk. And headaches in real estate is one that often gets oversimplified and oversold. It can definitely work. It can be a great inflation hedge, great tax shelter, but. But it is real world inventory with humans involved. It's a model that I got really excited about in college, even bought my first rental property, but perhaps didn't have the intestinal fortitude to stick it out over the long run. And that's one reason that I have shied away from direct investment in recent years, instead relying on alternatives like fundrise, where you can begin adding some real estate to your portfolio for as little as $10. I'm an affiliate of and an investor in fundrise since 2015. Their model appealed to me as a way to benefit from real estate in a way that's diversified, that's totally hands off. It does not come with the leverage benefits, at least directly. Right. You know, $10 in is $10 in. But this is one that has appealed to me again, real estate, it's a long term game. So it might take, you know, eight to 10 years, like in Dustin's case, to build up that portfolio to the point where it is exceeding your expenses and helping you escape the rat race. A friend of mine put it this way, like with traditional savings and investments done right and done well, with a reasonably high personal profitability margin, it might take 15, 20 years to reach your fire number, which would still mean retiring or achieving financial independence way earlier than most, like in your early to mid-40s, which is fantastic. But with real estate, it might take eight to 10 years of concerted effort, buying a house every year or two, stacking leverage, stacking cash flow, and with our third and final rat race escape option, it might take three to five years. And that's entrepreneurship. The third way to get out of the rat race is to build your own business. If you look at the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the country, one thing should stand out to you. Most of them build their wealth through entrepreneurship. And even if you have no aspirations to build the next Amazon or Apple or Tesla or Facebook, like I don't have those aspirations either. But building a business is a realistic way to break out of the nine to five grind. That's how I was able to walk away from corporate America years before starting Side Hustle Nation. Entrepreneurship has helped, you know, probably thousands of friends, side Hustle show listeners. Side Hustle Nation readers do the same at this point. So how entrepreneurship works to escape the rat race is is pretty simple. We tend to overcomplicate it. But I'm going to try and break it down here. So a business is simply a system that solves a problem in exchange for money. It's a problem solving machine. And the good news is we're all natural born problem solvers. It's what we do all day, every day that means to come up with a business idea. What you really need to come up with is a problem so you can think of what frustrates you, what headaches or challenges that you've overcome, what other people complain to you about. Because on the other side of those problems, there might be a business idea. Now, the solution is usually going to take one of three forms. First, a service that makes that problem go away. In the example of a dirty house, you can hire a cleaning service. Number two, a product that makes that problem go away. If you've got a dirty house so you can go buy cleaning supplies and cleaning products. And number three is content that makes that problem go away. A dirty house. We can watch YouTube videos on how to organize and optimize your space. Right? And when the money from your solution starts to exceed your living expenses, that's when you can say goodbye to the rat race. I break down each of these three business models in detail with lots of examples in my book the side Hustle how to turn your spare time into $1,000 a month or more. It's free on Kindle. I'll link it up in the show notes. It is due for a refresh or an update which is on my to do list for the year. And you'll also find lots of side Hustle ideas throughout the archives for this show. I did an episode earlier this month on seven different idea generating frameworks if you might find that helpful. If you're in the idea seeking phase that is episode 650 in your archives. So what's so great about entrepreneurship? Building a business is unique of these three paths in that your primary investment is probably going to Be sweat equity. These days, you can get an enterprise off the ground for a very low startup cost. And thinking back to my own 15, 20 years here, just about everything I've started costs less than 500 bucks, at least for that initial validation and testing phase. On top of that, starting a business is a way to work on something that you care about. It's bringing an idea into the world that's exciting and rewarding in a way that collecting stock dividend payments just isn't. And in contrast to the stock market or real estate market, you've got considerably more control over the success and failure of a business that you own and the speed at which that can happen. Plus, if you intentionally build something with scale, you'll find entrepreneurship to be pretty time leveraged. By that, I mean your earning power or your effective hourly rate improves as the business grows. For example, Becky beach put a lot of time, six years into her online business before getting up the nerve to quit her day job. But she built it intentionally. With that leverage in mind, I started.
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Becky Beach
Getting 250,000 page views a month and lots of traffic to my printables. And my sales phones were doing so well, I was getting like, like 20,000 at the time. So I decided to quit my job. And that was two years ago. Like, it was hard at first because, like, I was living in fear. I didn't think I could do it. You know, I thought my business would just end the next day or something if I quit. But I just went all in and told my boss, hey, I'm going to be doing my own thing right now and I need to like, be quitting. At first he was like, oh, don't quit. You know, it's not a good idea. I don't think that's sm. So I just went ahead and did.
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Nick Loper
It anyway, and I haven't looked back since. So that's very exciting and really cool to build something up to that point where you're able to have that opportunity to have that flexibility and say, look, I've got this other thing that's working. I don't need this job. My rule was five bad meetings or something, five bad days at work until I'm out of here, something like that. So I think that makes a ton of sense. So mombeach.com of plays in the mom blog space, the personal finance space, and talk to me about what's ringing the cash register in terms of the digital products you mentioned, the printables, what's going on over there in terms of how the site is earning Revenue.
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Becky Beach
At first I was relying on ad income and affiliates alone. But when I started also making digital products, it just exploded. And since making them with AI, it's even got went further because I'm able to crank out even more. The digital products are just doing so well. Like people will just visit my blog out of the blue. Like I don't even know them really. They just come and they're just like they're just Internet randos. They come and purchase and I have all these sales funnels set up like freebie opt ins where they sign up with their email, they're redirected to a sales page that leads to my Shopify store.
- [28:15]
Nick Loper
Okay, that's interesting. I've always thought of Shopify as a physical product e commerce platform but you can use it for digital products as well. So that's the visitor flow through SEO through Pinterest. They come to your site, download some freebie and then the digital products are largely like an email based upsell after the fact.
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Becky Beach
They are because I get quite a lot of traffic and they come in, they sign up to my freebies and the freebies are like free printables. Like I have a budgeting planner and I got a home planner for people to organize their homes like specifically moms. And I just get like so many leads like every single day from these freebies. And then they're directed to a sales page because in Convertkit you can actually make them go to a sales page after they sign up to the email and I just put the sales page there and then they buy a product off my Shopify store. Because you can actually put your cart in your Shopify store right on the sales page. They can click a link and get to the cart.
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Nick Loper
Okay, okay, so give me an example of like let's talk about this budgeting planner. For example, talk to me about top of the funnels. How does somebody discover that since I ranking in Google for those types of terms.
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Becky Beach
Yes, I make user specific content people are searching for that solves problems. Say like a saving money post or a money making post. And people are searching for these problems on Google and I use long tail keywords and then I create the piece of content. I've also been utilizing ChatGPT lately to help me create content. Like I'll use it to make like a blog outline. It makes it so much faster to create content now.
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Nick Loper
So I'm trying to find an example of one of those posts but how to save money. And here's a list of ideas on how to solve this problem. And by the way, if you're trying to save money, you probably need this budgeting planner. Here's my free template. And then after somebody puts in their email for that boom sales page for something more advanced or what's on the sales page or what's the digital product?
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Becky Beach
Well, for instance, one of my posts that are new are 30 day money saving challenge. And in that post have the budgeting planner. Then when they subscribe to the planner, they start, they get it sent to their email and they're also directed to a budgeting spreadsheet.
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Nick Loper
The spreadsheet is for purchase?
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Becky Beach
Yes, like I'll have the spreadsheet for purchase. I also sell spreadsheets in my Shopify store as well.
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Nick Loper
You can learn more about Becky and her business in episode 582. But the idea is creating something once that you can sell over and over again. That's the leverage that's built into a digital product business, a content business. And of course there are other business models too. But with each of them, I think it's. It's important to think about how it might go one to many, how you might be able to leverage your specific skills and expertise to build systems and serve lots of different customers. One book I might recommend on this topic is MJ DeMarco's Millionaire Fastlane. If you can get past all this talk about fancy cars, which didn't really appeal to me at all, the underlying foundations and ideas in the book I think are really strong. That's Millionaire Fastlane. With job security in question and this shift towards a more on demand freelance workforce, it's hard for me to see the downsides in learning an entrepreneurial skill set. But still the fact remains that half of small businesses fail in their first five years. For that reason. It's important to start small, to minimize your expenses and to grow at a pace you're comfortable with. And if that failure happens to you, if you're in that 50%, you can dust yourself off and start again. Building a business can be labor intensive. And that's why many entrepreneurs find themselves in the trap of working in the business rather than on it. They feel like, well, I just built myself a job and only this one has an even more demanding boss that's even harder to walk away from. So that's the question that you have to ask. What if this works? If the business I'm starting works, what does success look like? And maybe you can find somebody who's walked that path. They're three to five years ahead of you. What does their day to day look like? Do they have the income that they desire? Do they have some freedom and flexibility in their life? Or are they still stuck working 60 hour weeks? Are they super stressed all the time? What's the end game and is that going to be a win from you? If you build with intention from the start, I think it's easier over the long run. Certain models are faster and easier to see initial results with, but can be harder to scale and remove yourself from delivery over time. I think freelancing is probably the prime example of this Freelancing your skills Totally viable Side Hustle one that I recommend all the time, but it can be tough. Not impossible, but hard to get out of trading time for money if clients are used to hiring your special skills and expertise. Again, hard to get out of, but not impossible if that's an ultimate goal of yours. Some people just love doing the work and that's totally fine. So who is this third path best for? Who is the entrepreneurship path best for? I believe it is the most realistic rat race escape path for most people, but especially for those who don't have the golden handcuffs of a great paying job, that's harder to walk away from and might be more apt to take. Path number one, the traditional saving and investment path. People who aren't afraid of failure. You're probably going to get punched in the face along the way in this entrepreneurship path and are a little impatient. Definitely the fastest path if it works. And so it's like, well, that's where it combines this. Well, I'm not afraid of failure and I'm impatient. I don't want to wait 20 years to do this traditional savings path. So entrepreneurship appealed to me because I couldn't fathom the reality of working a corporate job for the next 30 years. There had to be a better way. And there was. And I think there is for you too. And of course, if the entrepreneurship path is for you, there are hundreds of side Hustle show episodes to choose from. You can pretty much scroll through and pick the ones that sound most interesting to you. They're all great. I learn so much from each and every guest. If there's a specific topic that you'd like me to cover in the future, be sure to reach out and let me know. Nickidehustlenation.com is my direct email and if you're not sure where to start, I encourage you to hit up Hustle Show. This is where you can answer a few short multiple choice questions. You can do it on your phone and the system will build you a personalized playlist based on where you're at, what you're interested in, where you want to go again. Hustle show for your custom curated Side Hustle show playlist. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend to fire off that text message with your fellow friend who wants to get out of the rat race and help spread the word. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.