Income to Pay Your Expenses

“The #1 business for those who want to create new wealth is educating consumers about products and services that will improve their lives.“ – Paul Zane Pilzer

Crush Your Expenses

In the game of milestones, you are in control of your starting point and the baggage you take with you on your journey.  This will effect you throughout the journey in different aspects from speed of your vehicle to handling, fuel consumption and effectiveness of how you handle obstacles and roadblocks in your way.  

The Spending Plan

The goal of the spending plan is to create positive cash flow to support our lifestyle. First we must list all of our expenditures. Expenditures are a little different from just expenses, they are everything you spend which can include debt repayment, investment, gifts and charitable contributions to name a few.

Start by categorizing your expenditures into three categories of

  1. Housing (Home),
  2. Transportation (Auto) and
  3. Shopping (Shop) which is everything else you spend including food at home, eating out, clothing and entertainment.

As a reference, the average American family spends roughly

  • $25,000 a year on housing,
  • $10,000 a year on transportation and
  • $15,000 a year on everything else of their take home pay.

A good resource to see the average American expenditures is the Consumer Expenditure Survey that is compiled every year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics or BLS.

Once all of your expenditures are listed, you can start to visualize where all of your income goes and cut a little fat out of the budget. One realization most people will have is that more than half their gross income goes to debt, tax and insurance expenditures and that is the best place to try to reduce before cutting lifestyle expenditures.

Now that you have your expenditures listed and a good grasp on where your money goes, we can start to customize and pick specific marketing platforms to pay those expenditures.

Marketing Platforms

Marketing platforms connect customer and product or service providers like a rider and driver, guest and host or shopper and merchant. For the product or service provider, this a great deal, because they don’t have to focus on building the business and getting the Customer, they just need to provide the product or service and get paid.

Three Types of Marketing Platforms

There are more than three types of marketing platforms, especially when you get into the business side of things with Business to Business (B2B) marketing platforms.

For right now these are what is need to really crush your expenses.

  1. Home (Room Sharing)
  2. Auto (Ride Sharing)
  3. Shop (Profit Sharing)

Home

Reduce or even eliminate your housing expenditures. Major players include Airbnb, VRBO and some hacks you can use to get started. Just renting a room out has a big impact and can cut your housing expenses dramatically. It’s a win-win for the roommate also because they would be saving a tremendous amount over renting an apartment and all the bills that go along with it.

Auto

Reduce or even eliminate your transportation expenditures. The majority of this is Livery and Delivery, including companies like:

Shop

Reduce or even eliminate your personal shopping expenditures by building passive income online. These affiliate programs are a little different from the room and ride sharing apps and encompass an entire ecosystem of sales, marketing and compensation structures including affiliate marketing, referral marketing and network marketing companies. This marketing platform, connects advertisers with affiliates and the affiliate, through search, social media, blogging and email marketing connect the end user to complete the sale.

Top opportunities include:

What’s Next?

With the spending plan in place and expenditures categorized, it’s time to customize a strategy that will work for each individual. I’ve rented a room, drove for Uber and Lyft with each achieving what I expected them to. I didn’t work a job for three years and that was my objective. In full disclosure, I did have a fire in the condo and my car was totaled. Such is life and we have risk with everything we do… It’s just part of life and things we must get through. Maybe a story for a future blog post… lol

In hindsight, I could have positioned myself better. When you are renting property you need to have enough cushion for repairs and the same goes for repairs for your vehicle when a driver. With Uber and Lyft, I believe they are better as part-time gigs, maybe before and after a part-time job. I did meet a driver that pays for his Tesla with one trip before work and one trip after every day plus a few hours on Saturday. That comes out to 50 trips a month, estimated $750/mo or $9,000/yr. I think that is the ideal solution when it comes to the ride sharing apps… just enough to pay all transportation expenditures. Removing that from the budget is a big deal.

On the affiliate side of things, I have tried different aspects dating back to the early 2000s, maybe late 90s and some worked while some didn’t. Cash back apps work, you won’t become wealthy doing them but they can be a part of the mix. I believe I earned $2,500 over a few years, most of which has been invested in other businesses, I call this seed capital and it is important.

I’ve always steered towards referral and network marketing because I felt if I have to do it all myself, I might as well get a job. There has to be that multiplier effect. I do wish I found WealthyAffiliate earlier in my journey, they would have saved me a lot of time researching and figuring things out, but than again, back than it was all new to everyone.

Mindset

Mindset is important, maybe the most important tool you bring to the game. This is a long journey that you can earn a substantial amount with. Things don’t always go as planned and you may need to continually test and make adjustments. That path must be continued, like Thomas Edison’s 1,000 attempts to invent the light bulb were 1,000 steps to his success and he changed the world.

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