What Are Your Sources Of Income?

I have written before about the legs to your business and the importance of having multiple areas that you get your business from.  But this is about OTHER sources of income.

Gary and I just had the luxury of spending the entire weekend just the two of us!  We have been away from the kids for 1 night before, but never both of us for 2 nights.  I would love to tell you about all of the things that we did, but really we went for some long walks, ate at some fantastic restaurants and did a whole lot of nothing.  We even took naps, something that unfortunately children never fully appreciate until it is much too late in life!

In one of our chats, while on a walk ,we were talking about income and given that we are both paid on commission (Gary is a manufacturers sales rep for consumer electronics) how do we plan for future things when we never know what our incomes will be?  So we started talking about the idea that it is really about determining your monthly expenses and then finding multiple ways to cover them simultaneously.  Let’s say that your basic monthly expenses run you $6,000 a month.  Certainly you would want to be making more to cover savings and investments, but also your goal is to figure out how many ways you can bring in that $6,000 a month.  At the moment it is a combined effort for Gary and I to cover our monthly ‘nut’ but the goal is that each of us regularly brings in enough money to cover the expenses so there is 2 sources.  The other is that we currently have some rental properties and have made purchasing more properties a priority.  When we have enough rental income to cover our monthly expenses that will be a third source.  There are many ways to approach it and I am not at all advising that you get another job or anything like that.  But weather it is rental property or investments that pay out regularly, make it a priority to find something.  Many of us are paying for past financial sins with the changes in the market these last 2 years.  Be prepared for the next time it happens.  Sorry to be a downer here, but it will happen again at some point, hopefully in the VERY distant future.  Next time if you have multiple income sources you will not be as stressed when one takes a beating.