The 1 important thing I spent my $10000 in Medium earnings on
One of the best parts of generating side hustle income is that it gives you the freedom to spend on things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
Now I’ve never been one for trinkets — I want to compound my side business earnings into life-changing gains by buying assets that pay me for holding them.
That can look a lot of different ways.
Maybe you put your earnings into tools like Photoshop and Premiere Pro to build a YouTube channel like me.
Or you just go for straight-up passive income that doesn’t require anything at all from you.
My strategy
In my case, I want to be as tax efficient as possible.
Making $10,000+ the way I have from Medium is fun — but it would be less fun if I knew the tax man was about to take away half!
In Canada, we have two tools that allow you to shelter your income from taxes.
The one I use is called a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP), which I believe is a lot like an IRA in America.
Every dime I make from Medium goes immediately into my RRSP, and once it’s in there, I buy high-quality, blue chip stocks.
You can read a bit about my strategy for picking stocks here, but it really doesn’t need to be that complex.
Even zero-risk, fixed-income instruments are paying 5% right now due to high interest rates.
Many of those stocks pay me dividends to hold them.
Now that’s real passive income, unlike YouTube or Medium, which actually require a lot of work.
You must ALWAYS be adding revenue streams
What’s the rationale for doing that?
Security, really.
You need to be building on as many platforms and investing in as many passive income streams as you can manage.
As an online creator, you just never know what’s coming around the bend.
Take my work on Medium, for example.
Up until August 2023, I was consistently earning between $50-$70 per day.
The new Medium Partner Program crushed my earnings overnight, bringing me down to around $15 a day for the equivalent number of views and reads.
Was that a huge letdown?
Absolutely. No question.
But it would have been much more of a letdown had I not been monetized on YouTube the day before the MPP changes or received a bunch of dividends that week — dividends that were the result of investing money when Medium was paying me a lot more.
Never stand pat
The point of all this is, don’t spend your money on garbage.
Physical goods are fleeting.
Wasting money only leads to a quick high, with plenty of remorse soon to follow.
The views in this article are the personal views of the author. The author is not a financial advisor. This commentary is provided for general informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice. It does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities referred to. Consult your financial advisor prior to making money decisions.
Good advice as I have come to expect. 😀