What if a credit card company came along and changed things up to help protect consumers? What are some of the things they would have to do to keep their cardholder’s identity safe?

For starters they would have to remove information like card holder names and account number from the card, right?

Sound crazy, doesn’t it?

Well there is a new credit card company that is doing that very thing.

Revolution Card is a new credit card that leaves the account number and card holder name off of the card.

I think they may very well be on to something. Sounds a little like the PayPal of credit cards.

For those of you unfamiliar with PayPal, it is a system that makes money transactions via email. The person you send or get money from only sees your email address. Your financial information is theoretically much more protected because you can change the email address associated with your account.

In the same way the Revolution Card uses a pin number for each transaction. And they even allow you to create temporary pin numbers. That can be a useful feature for one time purchases, dealing with unfamiliar merchants, and when working online.

I suspect we will be seeing much more of Revolution Card in the future.

Thanks to Valeria Maltoni who shared about this in Fast Company.

You make a purchase with your credit card for $171.76. Even before the bill comes due you cut a check to the credit card company for that amount because you believe in paying off the balance in full every month.

Due to your convoluted but very effective personal accounting system you mail in a whole bunch of checks for individual purchases when you pay your bill. However when the credit card company processes your payment, their electronic check scanners mistakenly process that particular check for $5,171.76.

Then your bank’s electronic check scanner makes the exact same mistake and as a result overdraws your account.

Oh, and because the credit card company processes payments made on the same day largest to smallest a whole bunch of the other checks written for that payment bounce.

Fees galore!

How do you fix it?

After your initial panic you start looking at the evidence. A quick glance at the digital image of the check in question shows that it is obviously a mistake by the machine readers.

You better start making calls right away or this will get worse fast.

Now the question is this: How many phone calls and how long do you think it will take to get this obvious mistake by the machines resolved and the fees removed from your account?

Difference in Service

To resolve the problem on the bank’s end it took one phone call and a follow-up call. “Yep. Its obvious what happened was a mistake not of your making. We’ll fix your account here and get rid of all those fees we applied to your account.”

Unfortunately with the credit card company it took a bit more effort. OK, it was a lot more effort.

Before the whole thing was resolved Gorgeous had logged 9 phone calls to the credit card company and it took over a month. Every single time she called she had to explain the entire problem all over again to the rep who answered the phone. Then she’d have to insist on speaking with a manager and explain the entire history of the event up to that point once more before she could get them to inch one step closer to resolving the problem.

Finally, last night she was able to get it resolved, our balance is corrected and all the extra fees that were applied to the account because of the mistake have been removed.

Lessons Learned

1. Keep your calm – Gorgeous did an amazing job staying calm on this whole thing. Sure there were some tears early on. But I’m confident had I been on the phone there would have been a fair amount of shouting. From my experience, shouting at the rep on the phone really doesn’t do much but lower their job satisfaction. It rarely gets you closer to the resolution you need to see with your account.

2. Watch your account closely – Gorgeous is very particular about tracking all the details of our various accounts. Through this whole thing she was checking the accounts affected online daily. Keeping an eye on things will help you detect problems early and keep them from getting worse.

3. Be persistent – A big problem like this one will rarely be resolved with one phone call. Keep at it and take good notes along the way. If the financial institutions are clearly in the wrong, they will make it right. Eventually. But you have to keep on them and double check that they actually do what they say they will. (Sometimes they don’t quite get to it.)

The bottom line is if you don’t watch your finances, no one will. We live in a less than perfect world. Credit card companies and banks make mistakes just like we do.

By paying close attention you might just save yourself thousands of dollars like Gorgeous did for us.

The first pass over the numbers was exciting. In theory we’d be increasing our net worth considerably, lots more equity the moment we signed the papers.

When we looked at the property it was just the sort of thing Gorgeous and I’d been talking about. And in the right location too.

We’d already been talking about refinancing anyway, so why not just pull some of the equity out of our house, use it as a down payment on this good deal? Then we could rent our our current house and we’d come out way ahead at the end of the day.

In theory.

But the thing about theories is they don’t always play out as expected when put to the test. Like Yogi Berra said,

In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

When I was finally able to pull together actual numbers (instead of the probably “about” numbers we’d been theorizing over) it was immediately obvious.

That won’t work for us.

Too much into the negative cash flow. And right now we don’t need any negative cash flow! (I mean who really does?)

Putting on the Brakes

So I had to make a bunch of calls and tell the folks involved that it wasn’t going to work for us.

They were professionals and tried to offer up options. “What if we did this…”

We’d already thought through all the options they came up with. No dice.

Those calls weren’t easy to make. It wasn’t fun to tell people, “Well the truth is we really can’t swing this one right now.” More correctly we weren’t willing to put ourselves into an untenable situation just because it was a good deal.

I mean someone would have loaned us the money. I just want to be sure I can pay it back!

Some Food for Thought

So here are some things to think about.

How do you respond when the reality doesn’t match the theory?

Are you willing to make a course correction when things aren’t working out as expected?

Can you cast aside a project you are emotionally attached to when the evidence indicates it isn’t the good idea you thought it was?

I promise making that correction won’t be easy. And it is no fun calling folks to tell them, “I was wrong.”

But we were never promised life would be easy. I can’t find that written anywhere.

Can you do the right thing even when it’s hard?

Ads are a reality in the publishing business. And a blog is simply a web publishing platform. And there are plenty of publications that run advertisement free.

So, should you consider advertisements on your business blog as a potential additional revenue source?

Before you answer lets look at a couple things.

Different Types of Ads

There are three broad general categories of advertisements that you can put up on your blog.

Contextual Ads

Contextual ads are the easiest form of ads for a publisher to put in place. Typically all that has to happen is to sign up with a contextual ad program. After your blog is approved you simply drop a script into your template and the ads show up automatically.

They are called contextual ads because the ad supplier takes a look at your content scanning for keywords and funnels ads to your site based on the keywords they find. That way the advertisements are (theoretically) always relevant to what you’ve written and in theory produce higher click-through rates and more money for both the ad network and for you as the publisher. With contextual ads you generally get paid whenever someone clicks on the ad.

Google AdSense is the biggest player in this category, but there are probably dozens of others as well including offerings by Yahoo! and MSN.

Affiliate Ads

Affiliate ads are also fairly easy to put on your blog too. Basically with an affiliate program you are advertising a particular product or service and get paid a percentage when someone actually makes a purchase as a result of clicking through from the link on your site.

There are probably even more affiliate programs than contextual ad programs out there. One of the biggies is Amazon.com. I do from time to time recommend a book and I’ll put up an Amazon.com affiliate link to make it easy for folks to buy the book if they want. When I do I try to make it obvious with one of their balloon pop-outs that clicking on the link will redirect folks to Amazon.com. But that is just one of probably hundreds of affiliate programs out there.

Direct Ads

The third category is what I’ll call direct advertising. Basically with direct ads you as the publisher get to do all the leg work. You have to find the advertiser, negotiate a rate, and place the ad on your site, ensure they actually pay you for your ad space, etc.

I say you are responsible for this, but of course there are services set up that can help you sort through all of it and do the negotiations for you for a share of the ad revenue. Text Link Ads is one example of a program like this.

The advantage of direct ads is that you have the control over what ads appear on your blog. From a business blogging perspective that is a huge thing.

There is a bunch of overlap in the different types of advertising. For example Amazon.com now offers some contextual advertising. And AdSense offers affiliate links to earn money referring folks to their contextual ad program.

The reasons in favor of advertising on your blog are obvious. Ads generate revenue. You are already putting in the effort to publish the blog. So why not earn some easy extra money for your efforts?

Not So Fast

Before you rush out and sign up with some advertising programs take a moment to think about the down side.

Do you really want to be referring your potential customers to someone else’s site? If advertising is about finding customers, do you want to get paid pennies to help find business for other businesses?

And what about contextual ads that end up advertising for your direct competition? Do you want that on your company site?

Would that be good for your business?

Of course that is just the argument that some businesses use against having any outbound links on their blog. There is a mindset that persists especially among traditional web development folks, that the best thing is to have your site be a dead end that traps folks in.

I strongly disagree with that view from an outbound link perspective. The more value your blog adds to the reader, the more likely they are to come back. And outbound links are one way to add value.

Does the same reasoning apply to advertisements?

Which is the Right Way to Go?

I’ve talked before about how I’ve chosen to skip the advertisements so far (for the most point) and instead earn primarily indirect income. I’ve had my reasons for not significantly “monetizing” SuccessCREEations. I have occasionally had a sponsor blog with some direct ads that were worth my time. And I just mentioned the Amazon.com thing.

But I’m at the point where I am actually considering placing ads here at SuccessCREEations in a bit of a more prominent way.

I’m curious to hear what your views are about blog advertising. Do you think it is a good idea or a bad one for a business blog?

Leave a comment and we’ll talk it through.

Trevor shared with us 5 reasons he blogs. But he added a footnote to his last reason. Here’s what he said:

I need the money. (What money? Show me the money)

I’ve been thinking about that for a while and I’ve come to the conclusion that earning money blogging is both much simpler and much harder than most of us think.

Let me explain.

Income Categories

The way I see it there are two sets of categories that blogging related income will probably fall into. Our income can either be Direct or Indirect. And it can be either Active or Passive.

Direct Income – This is money that is generated directly by the blog or the act of blogging itself. It might be income from an affiliate program such as Google’s AdSense, or maybe Amazon.com. It might come from getting paid to write through something like PayPerPost or Bloggers For Hire. Maybe you have direct sponsorship on your blog, or are running a different ad program such as TextLink Ads. Or it could even result from sales of our own products that happen either right on your blog or because your blog referred them to the product.

Indirect Income – This is money that comes to you as a result of your blogging, not directly from the blog itself. It is harder to quantify and describe. Part of the reason is that the opportunities are truly endless and limited only by the imagination. Maybe your blogging positions you as an expert in a particular niche and people start turning to you as an authoritative source of information on your subject. This can turn into paid writing assignments, speaking engagements, consulting opportunities, or maybe even a book deal. Or maybe you end up rubbing elbows and building relationships with folks (it’s called networking) who connect you with an opportunity that you never would have been exposed to but for your blogging.

Active Income – This is money that happens once as a result of doing something. For example, with PayPerPost, you write a post, you get paid for one post. Or with Bloggers For Hire you agree to write for a specific blog and they pay you monthly for your efforts. Active income is easy to get your mind around because there is an obvious cause and effect interaction happening.

Passive Income – This is money that seems to happen on its own. You do the action once and you keep getting paid over and over. The most common example is AdSenense. You put the code in your blog template once and you keep getting paid every time someone clicks on an add. The money just rolls in (doesn’t it?) But you might write an e-book that you offer for sale on your site. You do the work of writing it once and get paid over each time someone buys your book.

How The Income Categories Relate

Now I am personally of the opinion that Passive income is generally more desirable than Active income and that Indirect income is generally more desirable than Direct income. I see the them as having more total income potential even though they don’t pay as much up front.

I kind of see it like this chart here.

All of the different potential income sources fall somewhere on that grid. And I know there are some direct or active sources that produce a great deal of income. I happen to think they are the exception more than the rule, though I may be wrong on that.

My Approach

All that said, my approach has been to not get too bothered by some of the different income sources that folks seem to be clamoring to.

I don’t have AdSense ads here on SuccessCREEations. I do have them over at my personal blog and I haven’t seen much of a return over there. In fact it’s been so long since I checked my account that I forgot my password this morning. I know part of that is my fault. I haven’t posted over there in about 20 forevers. But regardless, it isn’t a system that has been productive for me.

I have run sponsored ads here at SuccessCREEations from time to time. But not very often, and only for sponsors that I’m particularly well aligned with who really make it worth my while.

Instead I’ve chosen to pursue the indirect income route. I do consulting that is a direct result of my blogging here at SuccessCREEations. And that consulting provides a nice income stream.

I am also starting to pick up a few paid writing gigs that never would have happened if I wasn’t blogging already.

Basically my approach has been to get several smaller income streams up and running rather than trying to find that “one thing” that would provide me with enough to quit my day job.

How I Got Here

I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you I’m making millions at this blogging thing. (At least not yet!)

I still have a rather demanding full time job that is completely unrelated to my blogging so I’m not bringing in a full time income from my various streams, yet.

However I am headed in the right direction and I have a plan to get to a full time income doing work I love rather than work I was trained to do. (Yes. I have a plan. Don’t act so shocked.)

My approach may drive some of you nuts. But here’s how I’d sum it up.

I keep doing what I enjoy doing, i.e. writing. I do it without getting compensated because I really like doing it. All the while I engage the bloggosphere, work at building relationships with other people out there and keep my eyes open for opportunities that come my way.

I haven’t tried to force any particular way to work for me. I just keep doing what I love knowing I want to earn a bunch of money at this eventually. And let the income portion of it work itself out.

My relationship with Successful-Blog started just that way. I linked to one of Liz’s posts. She noticed and called me an SOB. I was shocked (didn’t know what an SOB was) and started hanging out over there and commenting when I thought of something interesting to say.

That led to emails and more dialog. My day job sent me to Chicago (where Liz lives) and we got a chance to meet in person. She asked me if I’d consider volunteering a post or two a week over there. Um, Yeah!

Remember the part where I really enjoy writing anyway?

Well Liz is just one of those folks that I happen to get along with really well. I’m sure she’s got tons of folks like that around her, but I’m cut from slightly coarser cloth. So when the idea of SOBCon started kicking around I knew I wanted to be part of it.

And as a result of that I’m meeting tons of wonderful people and there’s no telling what opportunities are heading my way now.

My Point

What’s my point?

My point is that you were uniquely wired with your particular passions, interests, skills, and abilities. Don’t for a minute think that you have to earn your income using the method that some expert is selling for a few hundred dollars. Guess what. That expert is probably earning far more telling people how to earn money then he ever did actually using the system he is selling.

And don’t get deceived and think that all the money has already been made. We haven’t even scratched the surface yet.

Follow your own passions. Keep your eyes open for opportunities. And believe the income will come to you. You will be amazed how easy it seems once you stop trying to force it using the way someone else is wired.

We’ve talked to other financial folks in the past, but so far none have inspired the confidence the way the lady we are currently working with has.

The whole thing yesterday got me thinking about what kinds of people we look to for advice. What advice are we willing to listen to and what advice do we discard?

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it.”

Well I’m not at either extreme. I am not foolish enough to discard advice and I’m not yet wise enough not to need any!

No, I subscribe to the proverb that says, “Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise.”

But how do you determine which advice is good and which adviser is spewing rubbish?

In his book, Permission Marketing, marketing guru Seth Godin has something to say on the subject.

Were does trust come from?

This is what every marketer wants to know. Without trust, marketers know that there are no sales. Trust means the prospect believes not only that the product being sold will actually solve his problems, but that if for some reason it doesn’t, the company will make good on its reputation of performance.

We happily pay a premium to buy our jewelry from a fancy store instead of from a shady character on the street. Why? Because we trust the store to sell us the real deal, while the guy with the watches in a briefcase represents substantial risks.

Corporations pay consultants billions of dollars for their advice, when they could probably find similar advice down the street at the local community college. Why the premium? Because Bain and McKinsey and the like are trusted advisers. They’ve built enough of a track record, and enough confidence, that they can command substantial premium.

That makes sense. Longevity and a proven track record are definitely points in an adviser’s favor.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons I am willing to listen to our current financial adviser. She’s got a track record 25 years long working with clients that have much larger portfolios than we have.

I snicker when I think of using the term portfolio to describe our current financial situation. It is really more like a folder at the moment than a portfolio. And a thin folder at that!

But that’s the point of looking to the advice of a financial adviser in the first place. We are not content to continue on indefinitely with the current non-plan plan. We want to build to something beyond just one thin folder at some point.

I think we’ve found a good one. But the question remains. How do you find your trusted advisers?

The part that I’m struggling with is the whole part about where my passion really lies. That may sound pretty dumb to most of you. But the truth is I am good at a bunch of different things. I enjoy a variety of stuff. And I tend to get passionate about things for relatively short bursts of time before I move onto the next thing.

I think my whole struggle drives my wife a bit nuts.

I can imagine her thinking, “Here we go again,” whenever I get on the topic. I mean just last night we had another one of those “I don’t know what I want be when I grow up” conversations. Oh, and I’m nearly 40. Sheesh!

The good news is there are some folks who are offering up some practical ideas and techniques to get through a barrier like mine. I thought I’d share a couple links that I’ve found that help me out since I’m struggling here. Who knows? Maybe some of you are struggling with this too.

So here are the links:

By far the most practical advice that lays out a step by step process to work through this that I’ve ever seen was laid out by Brian Kim in his post back in July called How to Find What You Love to Do. I just found the post a couple days ago and I am working through the steps he laid out now (I’ll let you know how it goes.)

Tony Clark over at Success From the Nest has some practical ideas on how to find something worth working for. Click through the link to the post at Lifehack on Why Work? It is definitely worth the time to read those questions and ponder them.

Oh, and it looks like Chris Johnston had an epiphany with his post The Paycheck vs The Life. Congratulations Chris! That’s the sort of thing we all could use in our own lives.

Ultimately we will achieve much more success when we work at something we are truly passionate about. Passion has the power to overcome any obstacle that life throws up in our way. Passion can fuel us to work harder than we ever thought we would and still leave us feeling like we hardly worked at all.

So many of the masses of mediocrity stay at jobs they hate just to get a pay check instead of doing the things they are most passionate about and were created to do. And then they wonder why they don’t ever see success.

Find your passion. Pour your all into it. Achieve ridiculous success!

Enjoy!

How we choose to make use of those hours is one of the many things that differentiates us.

For example are we going to use that gift of time to pay interest by borrowing on our revolving credit cards? Or are we going to earn interest on some sort of investment program?

The choice is ours.

Compound Interest. We’ve all heard the term.

But did you know that time has the biggest impact of the three main variables associated with savings, time, amount stashed away, and interest rate?

For example a little playing around with a simple Compound Interest Calculator reveals some interesting results.

Let’s assume that we decide to commit to save $250 each and every month, no matter what happens. For the sake of discussion, lets assume that we are just getting started and don’t have any other seed money to put into our account. If we assume we can find a place to stick it which will earn 10% interest per year and we can build our account for 30 years we will end up with over $542,000 in our account.

Let’s see what happens when we start playing with the variables.

If we cut the amount of time by 1/3 and say we’ll only stay on our program for 20 years then we’ll end up with only $189K.

If we instead reduce the amount we save each month by 1/3 so that we only end up stashing away $2,000 per year (about $167 per month) instead of $3,000 we’ll end up with $361K.

If we stick with our program but only get 1/3 lower interest rate on our account, say 6.66%, we’ll end up with $284K.

You can see that time is the biggest factor in accumulating wealth. Slow and steady wins this race.

Another way to look at it is this. To get the same results with only 20 years you have to save about $720 each and every month. With the lower interest rate you will have to save about $480 per month for the same results. And if you just can’t scrape together the $250 a month to meet your savings goal, it would take you just a little over 4 years longer to get to the same place.

Now imagine the difference is paying the mortgage company interest. The longer the term of the loan, the more money the bank makes from you and the less you get to put toward your savings. A 5.3%, thirty year note on a $175K mortgage will end up paying almost double for the house with just under $175K in interest.

That is simplistic, I know. But the principle holds. There is a proverb that says “The borrower is servant to the lender.”

The question is which side of the equation do you want to be on? Borrower or Lender? Servant or Master?

Each one of us gets to choose.

Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity…

We live in an instant messaging microwave oven society. There is a prevailing mentality that success is a result of luck. In our lottery culture, people who work hard are often seen as “suckers” who don’t know the score.

But hard work alone will not lead to success. The masses of mediocrity are full of folks work themselves almost to the bone, but never seem to achieve success. The proverb above points out that the path to prosperity is a two step process.

Good Planning

The first step to prosperity is good planning. An adage I was taught early on in my career is this: If we fail to plan, then we plan to fail. We’ve got to invest some effort in developing a road map of where we want to go and how we intend to get there.

Embarking on a journey is a great analogy because it involves many of the same general concepts that our success plan would require. Imagine if someone decided to take a trip completely without a plan. If, when they walk through the front door of their house to leave on their trip they have not even thought about where they want to go, what method of transportation they are going to use to get there, how long they are going to stay, what they are going to do when they get there, or when they are going to return, then odds are they aren’t going to have a very successful trip.

Here is are some things we should include in our plans to make them as good as possible so that we ultimately get to our prosperity point:

• What we want to achieve.
• How long do we expect it to take.
• What resources are will we need to allocate.
• What structure should we apply to make it happen.
• Which action steps will be required to accomplish our goals.
• What is the best order for those action steps.

There is one thing to keep in mind when making our plans. Remember that a plan is simply a guideline. It is not a set of inviolate rules.

Many people resist planning because they feel it will stifle their creativity or ability to adapt on the fly. And it is true a ridged, inflexible plan may very well have that kind of effect.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. When I was in the Navy, one of the jobs I has was as the Schedules Officer for the squadron. Part of my responsibility was to write the daily flight schedule. It was my job to assign the various flight crew to the planes and figure out which missions to send which planes and aircrew on. I had to weigh out things like training needs of each of the aircrew, mission needs our squadron was assigned, which aircrew were available to fly, which planes were operational, and much more.

Every day I had to sort out the next day’s flight schedule. My running joke was that I had no idea what was going to happen the next day, you know, not being God and all. But I was fairly certain what was not going to happen: what I had written on the schedule. Invariably someone would get sick, a plane would break down, a mission would get scrubbed, or something else would be changed.

The flight schedule, our squadron’s plan, was simply a standard to deviate from. We knew that going in.

But imagine what it would have been like if we didn’t take the time to write the schedule. No one, from the airplane mechanics, the weapons techs, the aircrew, or even the other squadrons in the air wing would have a clue what our intentions were. How would we make sure all our aircrew got the training that they needed? How successful would we have been at achieving our mission?

It would have been chaos.

Instead, partly as a result of good planning, our squadron achieved excellence awards and was recognized as a highly successful organization.

But all the planning in the world will accomplish nothing unless the second part of the equation is factored in.

Hard Work

The recognition we received was only partly due to our superior planning. Another huge factor was that all of the people from the Commanding Officer on down worked incredibly hard to ensure we did the best job we possibly could.

Hard work is a lost value in our entitlement society today. So many folks seem to have this mistaken idea that they are somehow entitled to success and prosperity. Somehow there is this twisted mindset that life owes them prosperity. One of the easiest ways to sell a book these days is to promise a new way to get right quickly with no effort at all required. People will buy the book in droves. Most times the only one who actually gets rich is the author of the book!

People desperately want to get rich without putting forth any effort. I’ve got news for them.

The world doesn’t work that way.

It takes hard work consistently applied over an extended period of time to achieve any kind of lasting prosperity. That reality is unpopular today. I doubt I could sell many books with that message! But unpopularity doesn’t make it any less true.

Are you interested in what the rest of the proverb says? Check it out.

Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty.

If we insist on chasing after the next new fad, jumping from one get rich quick scheme to another, we will end up broke.

But if we instead invest some concentrated effort to develop a good plan (knowing that it is flexible if we need to change it) and commit to working the plan as hard as we can, stick with it for the long haul, then we will know prosperity.

I had seen the writing on the wall a few months before the end and talked to my wife about looking for another job before it got to that point. We decided to stick it out. We had our reasons.

In the end we all lost our jobs. I was the operations manager so I was literally the last one out the door at 10 PM on that Friday night. The company was to be bought out by a competitor so we were told to come back on Monday and there’d just be a different name sign out front. However I got a call first thing Saturday morning from my boss telling me that negotiations had fallen apart during the night and Monday we’d all be cleaning out our desks.

He later told me that day of making calls was the worst day of his life. I believe it.

All of us who worked there walked out with nothing. We had folks who’d worked for the company 30+ years. Their pensions disappeared over night. It was very bad.

Fortunately for my wife and I we already knew the number one reason the wealthy continue to build their wealth while the rest of the vast masses of mediocrity just barely scrape by pay check to pay check while their credit card debt slowly grows out of hand.

And what is that one thing the wealthy do differently?

Multiple Streams of Income

The wealthy develop multiple streams of income. They don’t rely on any one source of income to meet their needs. They have different businesses, investments, tax shelters, savings programs, all of which provide a portion of the money they have coming in every month.

That one principle is completely different that what most of us were taught about money when we were growing up. Conventional wisdom says that we need to get a good education with as many paper credentials and degrees as we can so that we can be qualified for the best jobs. And that, we’re told, is how we are to become rich and successful.

Yet the conventional wisdom fails us here. Folks who only have one income source live in danger of something happening to interrupt that income. Then they are left scrambling.

And the rich already know it. They’ve rejected conventional wisdom in favor of multiple income streams.

Robert Kiyosaki is an advocate of multiple income streams. And Robert G. Allen has built a career out of teaching regular folks about multiple streams of income.

And I’ve experienced the benefits of this concept first hand.

Principle in Action

When the company I worked for folded and I was left out in the cold, we made it through in large part because we had other avenues of income already coming into our budget. When I did our taxes at the end of that year we managed to survive a 65% income reduction without incurring any additional debt. How did we do it?

First we took steps to adjust out budget. Fortunately our cars were both already paid for. We reduced what adjustable expenses we could, like cutting off the cable TV.

But there was a portion of our budget which we couldn’t easily adjust. For example our mortgage payment was there every month and there was no easy way to reduce it. The good news in our case was that one of our income streams was an MLM sideline my wife had that brought in enough to cover our mortgage.

Now a lot of people knock MLM and I understand why. A lot of the techniques that are taught to the MLM sales forces out there are designed to turn the typical MLMer into an obnoxious jerk. My wife chose not to go down that path with her business.

Some would say her choice to not become a jerk, (*ahem*) I mean, to not apply some of the more aggressive techniques that are taught out there, may have limited her success. I can see their point.

It is true she’s not earning millions from her business. But having a source of income already in place that covered our mortgage when my job disappeared seemed pretty successful to me at the time.

The bottom line is there are no guarantees in this world when in the area of income. No source is absolutely reliable. Long gone is the era when the average employee can expect to work for the same company for 30+ years and have a good pension to live on when they retire. Even if you do manage to stay with a company that long, the odds are you may end up like my former coworkers, left with not so much as a thank you for all your service.

The truly wealthy don’t struggle with that because they have their income spread out over numerous sources. If one tanks or disappears they can still lean on the others.

Multiple streams of income is the number one reason the rich keep getting richer.