I spent half my day today reading about passive income. Probably about six hours worth of reading, a half hour of which was actually useful. The reason I spent that much time reading about it is because money is tight, work is stressful, and passive income sounds and feels like a great way out of that cycle.
Truth be told, after putting in the work to generate that passive income, it probably is a great way out. The problem, of course, is that you need to put in a lot of work up front, or have a lot of money to invest up front. Like most people, I don’t have a lot of money to invest up front, and putting in a lot of time and work is never the most appealing way to go. It makes sense of course; if it were easy and simple, everyone would do it.
I do have a small amount of passive income that I earn. Triple digits over the course of a single year. It’s a nice little extra, and I’m happy I have it, but it’s definitely not paying the bills. I’ll probably write more about that in the future, but for now, I’ve already sidetracked myself a bit.
As I mentioned earlier, feeling trapped in a job (that’s honestly not so bad for a job, but it’s still someplace I have to be 40+ hours a week) got me to reading more about how it may be possible to more easily generate passive income. While it’s definitely possible and doable, nothing I’ve read has provided anything easy, though a few MLM schemes have certainly billed themselves as easy. But I let the feeling of being trapped in a job direct me straight into another trap; I wasted a bunch of my free time today reading about things that aren’t going to help me in the future, because I was trying to chase the easy money. As I said, I did get a good half hour or so of useful information I may use (and write about) in the future, but that other five and a half hours was time I could have spent better relaxing.
The whole point of setting up streams of passive income is to have more free time, not less. I basically just went counter to my goal today by spending a bunch of time reading information I won’t actually use instead of using the time to either relax or work on something that will actually get me closer to my goals.
So why am I writing all of this down? Because it’s a reminder to me, and anyone else who reads this, that it pays to be discerning about what you do with your time. We all want more time to do the things we want to do. While it is good to learn more about whatever you can learn more about, it’s also important not to fall into the trap of reading information as a substitute for actually doing something, whether that something is working toward a goal you have, or just enjoying the free time you do have available.
