Diversify Your Income Quotes

Examples for warm-market prospects: “When you told me you (hate your job, need more money, wanted to find a new house, etc.), were you serious or were you just kidding around? (They’ll almost always tell you they were serious.) Great! I think I’ve found a way for you to (get it/solve the problem/make that happen).” This is for situations where you know an area of their dissatisfaction, need or desire. “I think I’ve found a way for us to really boost our cash flow.” “When I thought of people who could make an absolute fortune with a business I’ve found, I thought of you.” “Are you still looking for a job (or a different job)? I found a way for both of us to start a great business without all the risks.” “Let me ask you a question, off the record. If there was a business you could start working part-time from your home that could replace your full-time income, would that interest you?” Examples for cold-market prospects: “Have you ever thought of diversifying your income?” “Do you keep your career options open?” “Do you plan on doing what you’re doing now for the rest of your career?” You can follow these cold market scripts or any variation with the following: “I have something that might interest you. Now’s not the time to get into it but…

It’s crazy to me how many people stop side hustling in this way once they get a full-time job. Side hustling—what I define as any way you make money outside of your full-time job—is a relatively simple way to become an entrepreneur and diversify your income streams without taking the risk of leaving your full-time job.

By diversifying your income streams, consistently looking for new ways to make more money, and investing as much money as possible, you are giving yourself more control over your financial destiny and protecting yourself in the event something disrupts one of your income streams.

The 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing are: 1. Accumulate & Compound Capital: Consistently save and invest to grow your capital base over time, leveraging the power of compound interest. 2. Utilize Capital: Actively deploy your capital into productive investments that generate returns, rather than letting it sit idle. 3. Retain Maximum & Gradiented Liquidity: Maintain a balance between liquid assets (easily accessible cash) and less liquid investments, ensuring you can meet immediate needs while still investing for the long term. 4. Actively Manage Passive: While focusing on passive income sources, actively monitor and adjust your investments to optimize returns and mitigate risks. 5. Prioritize Long-Term Growth: Focus on investments that offer potential for significant growth over the long term, even if they don't provide immediate high yields. 6. Prioritize Consistent Yields: Balance your portfolio with investments that provide reliable, consistent income to support your financial needs. 7. Add Net Value to all Stakeholders: Invest in ways that benefit not only yourself but also the broader community, environment, and all parties involved. 8. Provide Authentic Data: Be transparent and honest in your financial reporting, providing accurate information to all stakeholders. 9. Collect & Utilize Authentic Data: Base your investment decisions on reliable, verified data rather than speculation or rumors. 10. Diversify Holistically: Diversify your investments across different asset classes, industries, and geographical regions to reduce risk and maximize potential returns. 11. Harvest Yields Equitably: Distribute profits fairly among all stakeholders, ensuring everyone benefits from the investment's success. 12. Reinvest Yields in Most Profitable Assets: Continuously evaluate your portfolio and reinvest profits into the most promising opportunities to further compound your growth.

If your position or job is on the liability side of the balance sheet, you can be looked at as a risk rather than an asset to your employer. Another reason to be an entrepreneur." - Chris Lutz, Modular Career Design

Any feeling of security is only in your head. Anything could happen at any time. As long as you are strictly someone’s employee at one company, you’re a liability on the balance sheet. I say that as a business owner. We cannot trust any government to provide us with what we need, nor is that its responsibility. We cannot trust most employers either. Insulate yourself with multiple incomes either from different companies or by working for yourself in addition to one main source of income. Diversify and protect yourself." - Chris Lutz, Modular Career Design

If your company has any credible strategy for providing equity-based returns with muted volatility, you have not just a value proposition, but one of the most important value propositions of our time.... What's the concept in an operating real estate REIT? Operating real estate (as distinct from net leases or mortgages, which are other financing concepts) has the potential to produce equity-like long-term returns, but isan extremely powerful diversifier, in that real estate correlates positively with inflation while stocks and bonds correlate negatively with it. Inflation, with it attendant higher interest rates, chokes off new supply of real estate: new expensive to build, to expensive to finance at prevailing market rents. When new supply dwindles, normal growth absorbs the available space and puts upward pressure on rents, increasing cash flows to the owners... until rents get to a point where new construction pencils out again. (Meanwhile, in an inflation/interest rate flareup of any consequence, stocks and bonds are usually getting hit, and sometimes hit hard.) This, to me, is a trifecta of a conceptual value proposition: (a) the potential for the equity-like long-term returns investors need, (b) historically correlated positively with inflation, unlike all financial assets, and (c) just when you think this story can't get better, with 90% of available income paid out currently to income-starved investors.... What's the concept for variable life insurance? It's certainly the least expensive long-term form of life insurance, in that, as the investment portion grows, it extinguishes the insurance company's exposure. (As Ben Baldwin gnomically and brilliantly observes, 'All insurance is term insurance.') It may also be, in a given situation, the cheapest way of funding an estate tax liability, leaving the maximum legacy to one's heirs. And, of course, if the ownership is vested in an insurance trust, one may (under current law at this writing) be bequeathing wealth without income or estate taxation. As long as there is an estate tax - any estate tax - there will be a financial planning issue in the life of every affluent household/family: how do you want the heirs to pay it? And it seems likely that, conceptually, VUL will always be an answer.... Small cap equities? The concept is, clearly, higher returns with - and precisely because of - their higher volatility.

High-yield bonds—which Graham calls “second-grade” or “lower-grade” and today are called “junk bonds”—get a brisk thumbs-down from Graham. In his day, it was too costly and cumbersome for an individual investor to diversify away the risks of default.;1 (To learn how bad a default can be, and how carelessly even “sophisticated” professional bond investors can buy into one, see the sidebar on p. 146.) Today, however, more than 130 mutual funds specialize in junk bonds. These funds buy junk by the cartload; they hold dozens of different bonds. That mitigates Graham’s complaints about the difficulty of diversifying. (However, his bias against high-yield preferred stock remains valid, since there remains no cheap and widely available way to spread their risks.) Since 1978, an annual average of 4.4% of the junk-bond market has gone into default—but, even after those defaults, junk bonds have still produced an annualized return of 10.5%, versus 8.6% for 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds.2 Unfortunately, most junk-bond funds charge high fees and do a poor job of preserving the original principal amount of your investment. A junk fund could be appropriate if you are retired, are looking for extra monthly income to supplement your pension, and can tolerate temporary tumbles in value. If you work at a bank or other financial company, a sharp rise in interest rates could limit your raise or even threaten your job security—so a junk fund, which tends to outper-forms most other bond funds when interest rates rise, might make sense as a counterweight in your 401(k). A junk-bond fund, though, is only a minor option—not an obligation—for the intelligent investor.