Changing the Ratio, Get Paid When You're Not Working

We all understand the concept of getting paid while you're working and for many of us that's where we put 100% of our efforts - into getting paid while we're working. But what about getting paid when you're not working?

What? Getting paid when you're not working! If you have a savings account which generates interest, that's already where you're getting paid when you're not working!

What other things could you be doing to get paid while you're not working? Although the market is not at its best right now (although the prices are low!), how about dividends from stocks? Where you have knowledge that others want to have, how about a book or ebook? If you have a blog, why not put some contextually relevant ads on the site? What about rentals - space (a spare room), stuff, property?

I think of it like this, if you get paid while you're working you are getting a 1 to 1 return on your investment - one hour's pay for one hour's work - and your return will never be higher than that. If you do something that results in you getting paid when you're not working, the return can be much, much higher. But what if you spent a few hours or a few days writing a How to Do X ebook and finding an audience that wanted to learn how to do X, then that ebook written once could earn you income over and over and over - sometimes hundreds or thousands of times over, for that single time investment. A rental property does the same thing, you spend time finding and fixing it up and, except for annual tenant marketing, you keep earning income on that initial time investment - over and over again!

An interesting exercise is to assess what percentage of your income comes from things that you get paid for when you're not working, those income generators that take a set period of time to put in place, but then chug along in the background bringing in income for you. What percentage of your income is money paid for working and what percentage is money paid when you're not working? (We'll talk in a future post about losing money and income stealers.)

It's an interesting shift in perspective and if you focus on driving the up % of income generated from when you're not working, what happens? All of sudden you have choices about what you can do, you have also reduced your risk - all of your apples aren't in just one basket anymore (the basket that can lay you off, make you redundant or fire you!). If more of your income comes from 'not working' activities, then once the set up activities are done, you've gone from a 1 to 1 return on your time investment to something much larger.

Might be worth a concentrated effort to put some of your efforts into getting paid when you're not working!