Three of the most important facts to internalize when it comes to thinking about your income is firstly understanding that your time is your most valuable resource since you only have a certain amount of time in a year to dedicate to work, so increasing your yearly income will first stem from focusing on income generation that pays a larger amount per hour.
Secondly, millionaires on average have seven income outlets, many of which are passive income, meaning that rich people get and stay rich by making money in their sleep and by doing lots of things.
Lastly, always defer to investing in yourself and your own skills rather than outsourcing skills, not only does this cut costs but it increases your personal value in the long run. With that being said these are four of the best income generating skills you can add to your resume.
1. Virtual Wholesaling
Many people have aspirations of getting into real estate, but one of the most often stated comments from Gen Z and Millennials is that real estate takes a lot of money; money they do not have.
Virtual wholesaling is the happy medium, where young people can get into real estate without putting up any capital or credit, but still make large amounts of money.
Virtual wholesaling is the principle of finding houses far below their value, getting a 30 day right to buy the house for X price, adding anywhere from $5-15K to the price usually, and then finding a buyer within the timeframe who would typically want to fix it up and flip it for real value.
This easy income outlet allows people to only need hard work to get started in real estate and still make thousands of dollars per deal.
Additionally, the skills and networks established through this business are extremely valuable if you want to make the jump to the broader real estate industry.
Best of all, as the name “virtual wholesaling” implies, it can be done entirely over the computer.
2. Import/Export
Buying products from overseas in bulk is a tremendous way to get cheap pricing that many businesses simply do not have either because they do not understand or want to deal with the process of importing or because they do not want to buy any given product in such high quantities.
This opens an opportunity to buy products from China via sites such as Alibaba and Aliexpress and then resell them either to other sellers or direct to consumers.
A few areas of concern here are to make sure you test out the quality of the manufacturers before placing any large orders. Chinese manufacturers have little in terms of customer service and so if you receive a batch of 2,000 products and half of them are broken, you take the hit.
Additionally, it is best to understand how you will go about selling off the units before placing the order. The last thing you want is to have a bunch of boxes lying around your house that you cannot get your money back out of.
3. Domain Investing
Facebook famously purchased the domain facebook.com for a few hundred thousand dollars and Genius paid a few million for their genius.com. As trends rise and fall, domains fluctuate in valuation (similar to real estate in trendy neighborhoods).
This means that if you can spot trends of rising industries or keywords and then buy up domains in those fields, host content on them, boost the SEO, and then find a buyer, you have the opportunity to see drastic increases in valuation.
This is a fairly long term investment and requires a good amount of work and risk tolerance but if you hit gold once it can pay huge dividends.
4. Value Investing
While most look at the stock market as a place of enormous risk, there is a reason Wall Street and many funds therein are able to turn around consistent profits year-over-year regardless of the economy. This lies in a principle called value investing.
Value investing assumes that from day to day a share of a company does not actually fluctuate in price, since the company is not making drastically more or less money day-to-day and even if it did that information is not public knowledge.
Looking at stocks in terms of a set value instead of rising and falling market trends, allows investors see which stocks are drastically undervalued due to market conditions.
These stocks trading below their true value can then be purchased and with decent level of security know that the price will increase.
Of course the big question is then how to accurately identify what a stock is actually worth and this can only be achieved with a good amount of research, education on the principles of value investing, and overall tracking of company financial performance.