
Most of us, we work in our entire lives as an employee. We rely solely on our salary (active income). At times we work extra jobs and take overtime hours.
What if for some unforeseen circumstances you lost your job, got ill or injured and unable to work, do you have other sources of income coming in?
Building Other Sources of Income
Earlier in life understanding that working as an employee (active income) isn’t enough to live comfortably and prepare yourself for retirement. It was always at the back of my mind looking for other sources of income.
Agricultural Farmland
While working in the middle east we invested and bought piece of land ( farmland). The farmland generate income from fruit bearing trees, coco lumber, bamboo, and rice field. This provided us some income twice or three times a year.
For this reason, it gives us additional income while we are still working overseas as we don’t have to use the proceeds of the farm unless in extreme emergency or when we go home on vacation.
Rental Property
As I continue to mature with my growing family, I was looking for other investment opportunities and the one thing that caught my attention is passive income through rental properties. We remember that we have a small piece of a lot that we bought a few years ago while we’re still working in the middle east. This was located in a prime location in close proximity to schools and other business establishments.
We talked and crunched the numbers if this was possible. Despite, no prior experience with real estate business, we decided to proceed and make it happen. After getting finance, planning, obtaining necessary permits, and after almost two years of construction our rental property has completed and now fully operational. As a result, this also has provided us some passive income through rents while we still continue to work.
Stock Market
During this period, I was also trying to educate myself about investing in stock market. At first, I was a trader (doing day and swing trading) but I wasn’t so successful and happy with the results as there was no predictable income or cash flow. At times, I earned some profits but other times I was breaking even on my investments.
For this reason, I continue to join and participate in investment forums and learned from other investors. That’s when I focus on dividend income investing. Dividend income investing is partnering and buying shares of solid and growing companies that pays dividend regularly either monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annually.
Thus, I learned to develop my own strategy, researched these companies, and understanding the company’s financial health through reading and digging it’s financial statements. Therefore, I can say for certain that investing in stock market is not as difficult as it seems.
On the whole, understanding solid fundamentals for searching dividend stock, consistent, discipline investing, and exercising due diligence are some of the key elements to building wealth through dividend stocks.
Our goal is to patiently and consistently continue to invest in dividend growth companies and to live off it’s dividend income without harvesting the capital.
We are trying to achieve this without relying on our pension. If, we are lucky and reach pensionable age then income from pensions would be a huge bonus.
MY Final Thoughts
Building multiple sources of income is our ultimate goal during our working years. In so doing, time will come that we can decide when to stop working and do something that we are very passionate about. Whether it’s traveling, do farming, spending time with family, and serving the community.
What other sources of income that supplement your salary? I would like to hear what other passive income streams you have been building for retirement.
Let me know in the comment section below.
Very inspiring blog posts Rommel. I appreciate your sincere efforts to guide people like me , with restricted income and pension funds , think ahead and Prepare for comfortable retirement.
Thank you visiting my site Deepa and appreciate your kind words. We all work hard so hard but we forgot to plan for our future. Pay yourself first and invest. There is no other way around it.