The mystery man...
We've all seen the Facebook ads. "One man quit his job to travel the world; still earns $1000 a day."
Undoubtedly you've clicked through at least one of these ads, getting a glimpse of this mystery man's Instagram feed saturated with him posing atop breath-taking landscapes.
And I'm sure you've seen/heard a bunch more of these stories. People starting online businesses that seemingly bring in a whole lot of income without the need to input an equivalent amount of working hours.
Studies have shown that people can live a 'happy' life with an income of $50-75k a year. It's also been suggested that most people can live 'freely' for just $10k a month.
How does one live freely?
For an average person to bring in $120,000 in annual income, essentially one of two things need to happen: 1.) they double the amount of hours worked. If they're currently making $60,000 at 40 hours a week, they would need to work 80 hours to bring in the $120,000. Of course that would lead to burn-out very quickly, so most people tend to follow path #2: work your way up over a period of many, many years. The national average raise is 2.9%, so let's do the math.
If you were to get a great job out of school and start with a salary of $50,000 at the age of 23, it would take you 30 years and 7 months to hit $120,000. You could live 'freely' around the age of 53.. right around the age of retirement. And this doesn't include adjustment for inflation.
You can see that to live freely, you either have to work really hard or wait a long time. Neither are ideal scenarios.
That's where the idea of passive income comes in. It flips those first two paths upside-down, and tries to offer a third, much shorter path.
Its premise is to put in the hard work at the beginning, and reap the rewards as you go along. This is done by creating products/and or automation systems.
You create systems that provide income on work that was committed previously.
That's how these Facebook-famous travelers are apparently living the lifestyle shown off in their Instagram photos.
The experiment
But is it really possible to create substantial 'passive' income online? Possible for someone like you and I; average every-day people?
That's what I'm going to put to the test. I want to see if it's possible to generate a full-time income without putting in the full-time hours.
How it's going to work
For this experiment, I've decided to join a mastermind group. And it wasn't cheap. At all. But if I'm going to do this, I want to learn from the very best; people who have done this before. By replicating their methods, my hope is that it'll exponentially shorten my path to success.
This group functions much like a course, with head instructors and a number of students. The instructors put out a new core module each week, and the community of students complete their 'assignments.'
So that's what I'll be doing. I'll be going through the modules, going through the checklists. Then each week, I will post my progress updates here. My highs and lows for the week, and any income I earn (or don't earn).
Ready?
I must say, I'm both excited and a little nervous. I'm excited because I want to see what results of this experiment. I'm nervous because I'll be putting it in front of you to see. If I fail, you'll see me fail.
Are you ready to follow along?
Click below to get updates as I go along!
