Poor
Man Survival
Self
Reliance tools for independent minded people…
ISSN
2161-5543
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is
of you.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Developing Multiple Sources of Income-Survival,
Off-Grid Money
A wise man once told me every person and
family should develop several circles of income that should generate at least
$250 per month. With an unreliable
economy it is not difficult to understand that philosophy…just ask the 400 of
workers at Nabisco who just laid off their employees at their Oreo plant and
shipped those jobs to Mexico or 2000 shift workers a Detroit plant from Ford whose jobs were also shipped to Mexico!
According to a recently-released Pew Report, one-third of
all Americans don’t make enough money to even cover the basic necessities. ONE
THIRD! The Pew Charitable Trust, announced that household spending went
up by 14 percent in a decade ending at 2014, but median household income went
down 13 percent.
Even top-level US officials admit the obvious problem:
Americans are broke. According to Federal Reserve official William Dudley,
America is no longer the top country for achieving the "American Dream"
which is fast becoming a nightmare.
In 1970, 61% of Americans could be called middle class.
Today it's just 43%.
According to Challenger,
Gray & Christmas, job cut announcements by big companies in the United
States were up 32 percent during the first quarter of 2016 compared to the
first quarter of 2015, and it appears that the job losses are going to continue
to mount as we roll into the second quarter. For instance, late last week Intel
announced that it is going to be laying off 12,000 workers…
Developing alternative sources
of income can help you become more self reliant and less dependent on
others. It can also enable you to enjoy
some of the finer things in life or to become more prepared if that is one of
your goals. Owning a full or part time
business is one of the few legal tax loopholes you can still take advantage of.
The so-called gig economy
such as found on fiverr.com [I make extensive use of such services for the
various websites I own] is becoming a popular way for people to offer services
on the side to supplement their income.
However, some areas of ‘free
enterprise’ may be illegal in your state.
For example, Wisconsin and New Jersey prohibit the sale of home baked
goods. In Wisconsin, selling cupcakes
from home could land you a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail.
According to the
Foundation for Economic Education, “The
ban is purely political. Commercial food
producers like the Wisconsin Bakers Association are lobbying against a ‘Cookie
Bill’ – which would allow the limited sale of home-baked goods – in order to
protect themselves from competition.”
You’ve probably heard news
reports from taxi companies complaining about Uber drivers as well saying
they’re not safe or they don’t pay city license fees and so on. It is true.
High regulatory costs in New York City might cost a cabbie as much as a
million dollars which is an unreasonable cost and drives up fares for customers
and discourages people from doing business in New York [In the 1980s I used to
fly to NYC nearly every month…I finally got tired of the high cost of
conducting business in that city and stopped going].
Government regulation,
which has increased under President Obama, adds an average of 25% to the cost
of everything we purchase and has caused America to drop to 13th
place in terms of international Entrepreneurial startups…our tax system has
further hurt our business startup status while Hong Kong has virtually no taxes
and a vibrant business community.
There are plenty of
examples of petty bureaucrats who have raided the homes of Girl Scouts for
selling cookies from their homes without a permit or operating lemonade stands
without expensive city permits. This
kind of flatworm crap is what is ruining America and you need to either operate
under the radar by not using or displaying signage or attracting noticeable
traffic or ensure you are in compliance [the bureaucrat’s favorite word].
It’s estimated that 50% of
those operating a part time business such as renting a room inside their home
on a short term basis [listing them on Craigslist or Airbnb] are illegal but
are rarely prosecuted.
Uber and Airbnb*
Web-based businesses such
as Uber and Airbnb are known as the sharing economy and I’ve written about them
before and each have tens of millions of users and many retirees are signing
up. Last year Uber launched a
partnership with the AARPs Life
Reimagined to encourage over 40s to become drivers. Airbnb says older hosts are among the most,
with hosts 60 and older earning 7.5 percent more than five-star reviews than
younger ones. The company, which
explicitly touts itself as a way for seniors to earn money, says its senior
hosts earn slightly less than $6,000 a year taking guests for an average of
slightly fewer than 60 days per year.
The big challenge in this
country is that we have more laws than any other country in the world and no
one can keep up with them and if you keep a low profile your odds improve but
when in doubt, consult a lawyer.
Flipping
When I was younger [and in better health] I moved to a
rural area, which was economically depressed.
Fixer-up type homes were pretty easy to buy and my father-in-law and I
put in sweat equity and sold all of them on a lease-option basis where the
buyer got credit for their down payment for each money they paid in a timely
fashion until they built up a sufficient down payment at which time I
accompanied them to friendly banker and helped them get a mortgage.
In one case I substituted my VA Certificate of
Eligibility for another veteran’s and gave him some cash to buy out his
equity. He was unemployed and could no
longer make his payments so he walked away happy. I paid off my VA loan early and was free to
use it again on a future home purchase.
We made some very good money doing this and most of it
was done on a handshake – even the mortgage I got from the banker! That would be difficult today and creative
financing deals are harder to come by now.
In recent years I have applied that same practice to
flipping domains and websites periodically and have made some decent money
although that market has slowed down.
There are several places to advertise domain names
including eBay and even on the registrar I use NameCheap. At any given time I have nearly a dozen
domains for sale and right now we have one which includes three domains, a logo
and a mini-business plan geared toward connecting college kids and the 50 plus
market to do odd jobs as seniors always need work done for them. I got the idea when I was recuperating from
open heart surgery and from our storage business [yes, another business we’re
involved with] where folks always ask us if we know of people who could assist
them. There is a growing demand for
this kind of business as our nation ages. * The primary domain is called Your Personal
Gopher. It includes my personal assistance!
[You can learn more about that our ecommerce
site…RetroGuy.net]
Side Gigs
I know many of us have a knack for chatting and problem
solving and if you have those skills and can type 30 words a minute and can
provide online customer service via text chats [believe it or not, I do not
know how to text] you can make up to $15 an hour as a chat agent.
Just head to these sites:
MyLivePro.com, Needle.com, Convergys.com, and ModSquad.com to sign
up. Plus hundreds of firms from Amazon
to Zappos, rely on live chat agents. You
can visit their sites or search for ‘live chat agent jobs’ on Indeed.com or
Monster.com or other jobs sites.
Get Paid to take
reservations…The Active Network hires people to work from home helping with
campground reservation requests throughout its season [May through September]
and it pays about $8 per hour. Go to: ActiveNetwork.com/careers/open-positions.
Also, search engines like Yahoo and Google rely on people
just like you to track results that come up in searches…sort of like mystery
shopping for search engines: You get
paid to type in a bunch of questions and report on what results come up. Go to:
LeapForce.com and LionBridge.com to get started.
Become an online ‘genie’ with your online researching
skills off at AskWonder.com, a service where people can go to get their
questions answered on just about any topic.
You can earn up to $2,000 a month providing detailed answers by
researching on the web. Learn more
at: AskWonder.com/researcher
Free Legal Resources
Depending on where you live there are free legal
resources available and you might check with the Small Business Administration
[the SBA is online too…I was a SBDC volunteer counselor for them for
years]. If for some reason you have a
case which warrants serious social or political implications you might try
contacting your elected representatives at the state or federal level or if you
are fighting a coercive government agency, consider going to the Institute for
Justice [703-682-9320 or www.ij.org]
These folks assist people whose rights have been violated
by government bureaucrats. According to
their site:
You
have the right to earn an honest living this is called economic liberty and it
is protected by the Constitution. But
often entrepreneurs face burdensome, arbitrary and anti-competitive laws that
make it difficult, if not impossible, to earn an honest living in the
occupation of their choosing.
The Institute offers an Entrepreneur’s Survival Guide and an Eminent Domain Abuse Survival Guide as
free downloads.
The Rutherford Inst. [one of my
personal favorites] 434-978-3888; www.rutherford.org defends civil liberties including the rights of small businesses and
offers legal assistance to individuals whose Constitutional rights have come
attack by government.
Friends, you need to do
whatever you can to restore order to your financial home, take control, go off
the financial grid if necessary. I plan
to re-introduce more of these kinds of resources on a weekly basis and
encourage you to share and support this effort.
Make a purchase, even if it is a small one such as the CD ROM I offer
below…it is an investment that is less than the price of a meal at a fast food
restaurant!
Yours for better living,
Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
Additional Resources
Based on
presentations I made to US Veterans & others who wanted to start their own
business…priced at only $5 ppd.
Escaping the Rat Race with
Your Own Business
- Three steps to new business
success
- 10 business ideas with zero
startup costs
- Release the inner entrepreneur
inside you
- 45 ways to make a living without a
job
- Business on a shoestring budget
- Escape the Rat Race
- Being a Frugal Entrepreneur
- Let’s Make Money Online
- 18 Low-Cost Marketing Ideas
- Ultimate Kick-Ass Guide to
Starting a Business
- Online Business Resource Guide
Take a look at RealWaysToEarnMoneyOnline.com to find advice on ways
to supplement
Strange Ways People Make Money Online (Daily Finance): "The Internet is a great place to launch entrepreneurial efforts. People have made money by creating useful products and functional websites, while others have found ways to make money in creative and interesting, yet strange, ways."
It's
definitely not the time to hunker down and hope for the best. It's time to
find or build a second source of income before you need it. Read
more.
|
Odd Jobs…Making
Money Even in a Bad Economy
· SurvivalBlog.com
Find a variety
of self reliance books and other items at our storefront-free shipping on
everything.
If you enjoy the
resources we present, help support our efforts by making a purchase…
Books, Art, Video – the saucy, the odd, the retro,
even the practical…
A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow
Planet Production
3 comments:
No question about it that America is losing its place and American workers are losing the American Dream despite what Obama might say...people need better jobs to afford all the costs our government forces down our collective throats!
there are very few people who don't require a second source of income nowadays-the cost of living is too damn high thanks to the fricking government-very useful post!
Even with the “recovery” we have supposedly experienced, 47 percent of all Americans could not even pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money from somewhere or selling something.
And things are not going to be getting any better for the economy moving forward. The despair and desperation that we have seen so far are nothing compared to what is coming.
Post a Comment