Most of us did not see it coming, you wake up one day and realize you are trapped in the rat race. All your life you focus on getting a good education and a good job because this is what you have been conditioned to do by society. At first, it seems like you made it, but as time goes by you realize you are stuck in a loop.
The Endless Loop of the Rat Race
You get up in the morning and force yourself to go to work, once your work day is finally over you come back home and are too tired to work on any of the projects you wanted to work on, so you decide to mindlessly watch TV or Netflix. After the couple of hours you had left for yourself have passed, you go to bed as usual thinking about the things you want to do tomorrow after work. Then the next day is exactly the same.
Eventually you get to the weekend. This is great because the weekend is actually what you live for at this point. You can finally relax until Sunday afternoon arrives remembering you that another week will be starting soon and you will have to go through five other days of doing something you don’t enjoy so that you can pay the bills and have two other days for yourself.
Most people go through this same loop their whole life because we are programed to see this life as normal and necessary. Then you wake up one day and realize you built all your life around your work and didn’t do all those thing you dreamed to do when you were younger. But it doesn’t have to be that way…
Taking back the control of your life
The key to escaping the Rat Race is reaching financial independence. To reach financial independence you need passive income sources. Once your passive income streams bring in enough money to cover your normal expenses, you are basically “retired”. At this point you can start spending your time doing things you really enjoy doing. You no longer have to build your whole life around a job. Want to go live in another country for a little while before moving again? No problem. Want to see how it is to live in different places all over the world? No problem. You are no longer trapped since your passive income stream will earn you money no matter where you are in the world.
Definition of passive income from Wikipedia:
“Passive income is income resulting from cash flow received on a regular basis, requiring minimal to no effort by the recipient to maintain it.”
The first thing you should be doing is learning the different ways you can create passive income streams. Some can be created by investing nothing else then your time and some can be created using money. Generally if you want to reach financial independence as soon as possible, you will want to invest both your money and your time in order to get there faster.
The beautiful thing when you reach financial independence is that once your passive income streams bring in more money then you need to cover your expenses, you can reinvest the extra money and consistently grow your passive income. You can see it as a snow ball you push down a hill, once your snow ball is set up and you gave it the initial push, it just keep growing exponentially by itself. This is why, as we hear often, the rich keep getting richer.
If you are not sure where to start, here are some different ideas to generate passive income streams you could start today:
Investing time:
- Write an E-book and self-publish it on Amazon Kindle
- Selling Pictures and Photos Online
- Create an online Drop Shipping store
- Create and sell an online course
- Make YouTube or Dailymotion videos
- Get a second job and invest the extra money you make in dividend stocks
Investing Money:
- Dividend stocks
- Rental properties
- Invest in Crowdfunded Real Estate
- Peer-to-Peer Lending
- Buy or start a vending machine business
- Buy ATM machines and reach out to local business owners to place them in good locations
- Buy a paying parking lot
A regular person like yourself can retire early and live your life exactly how you want to, supported by the results of your passive income building process. We have been conditioned to think that this is impossible and does not happen to ordinary people. Yet, with strong passive income sources, you will be able to do precisely this – retire from a job and begin a much better new chapter in your life. The money generated by these sources will offer you the freedom and it is up to you to decide how you want to use it.
