Money is What You Make of It, Not How Much You Make

Because I write a lot about money and opine a lot about money, I tend to get all of the usual types of responses that are almost entirely, in my opinion, generic, and all easily debunked or argued against. The rich are all greedy and just want to hoard the money. Workers are exploited with low wages. You can't get ahead in the world if you don't make a lot of money. You can't live on the kinds of wages most companies provide.

My favorite one is, I can't afford to save, therefore how can I invest?

In part I say easily debunked or argued against because, like most people, I started at the bottom. Not the top. Yet despite that it has not stopped me from being financially secure, getting ahead, or being able to take advantage of the myriad wealth building opportunities everyone has no matter where they exist financially.

Yes. There are limits. But what the real limit is, is how little people recognize what the real opportunities are, how accessible they are to everyone, and what opportunities are afforded us by what the rich have created to have a shot at joining their ranks on some level.

I am not going to say it is easy. By no means. But nothing that is worth doing in life ever is. It's hard because it is supposed to be. It is hard because the challenge is what drives us forward despite what limitations we have or what hurdles we have to overcome.

I took my first job working for Dominoes Pizza at 14 years old putting circulars on doorknobs advertising pizzas to potentially hungry customers. They paid me $2.85 an hour. That was in 1987. In 1992 I went into the United States Navy and, according to my Social Security statement, by the time I got out in 1996 I was making $13,418 a year.

I started investing shortly before I left the navy. And granted, my expenses were low because I lived on the ship during the time and most of my food was paid for. I started investing with roughly a few hundred dollars. 

But I had a mindset. Live on 80% of your income and sock away the 20% you don't need. When I left the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) in April of 1996 I had a total savings stash worth only around $3k. That was from money saved as well as money earned from investments.

Even 10 years later, according to my Social Security statement, I was only earning $36,951. But during that time I had real expenses. I bought my first investment property when I was 26 in 1999. Most of the downpayment and my ability to do that was based on proceeds, dividends and gains earned on saved money in the stock market.

I continued to save and invest at rates of 20% or greater, acted frugally, and continued to invest and learn about various strategies in the stock market. 

Never once did I ever think of the rich people I worked for as greedy. Never once did I allow myself to feel exploited. Never once did I complain about low wages, and certainly I was mostly always paid low wages.

I worked for big companies like Quad Graphics, Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola, Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation, and Nestlé. I even did a short stint as a pest control guy for a small company called Batzner Pest Management in New Berlin, Wisconsin.

My best year was at Coca-Cola, working in mid-level management and earned $60k. After Coca-Cola I took pay cuts to take on new challenges, and my last full year at Batzner I only made about $36k. The key here is that no matter how much money I made or didn't make, I never deviated from the plan. I never made an excuse to stop saving or to make changes to my investment goals and strategies.

The one thing that remained static was my thinking that it never matters how much you make, but rather it matters what you do with it.

More importantly, throughout my earning career one thing I never changed was my lifestyle. If I made $60k in my best year at Coca-Cola or $36k in my best year at Batzner Pest Management, I was living the same way, saving the same way, and investing the same way.

I even took time off frequently between jobs. In fact, between Nestlé and Batzner, I took nearly two years off.

Because of my investments, my bottom line changed little. My money was making money for me, and while it may not have been a period where I was necessarily getting ahead at the same rate as before the hiatus, I was still not going backwards.

And because despite the lack of new income coming in from a job, my money was still earning an income, and my lifestyle did not change much.

I will admit I did have to make some adjustments. But not unlike adjustments I had to make after I left Coca-Cola and took major pay cuts to do that. I was always viewing money not as a crutch or a limitation, but rather as an opportunity. 

If I look at my entire lifetime to date W-2 wages, from 1989 to 2022, according to my Social Security statement, my lifetime earnings to date are roughly $975k. Breaking that down that's roughly an average annual earnings of $29,546 a year.

I won't tell you what's in the "bank" now. But I can tell you it is an impressive amount of money considering what I ever had to work with. And that amount that's there now could never have been achieved if I had accepted for myself, the generic responses I get now when I talk about money or opine about it.

I lived on paltry wages and saved and invested them. I held a long-standing belief that opportunity is there for anyone who wants to take the time to learn about them, understand them, and exploit them as opposed to ever telling myself that I was the one being exploited.

In other words, rather than make excuses, I took action. I never once was able to allow myself to be convinced I was the underdog and doomed to poverty by the system or by circumstances not necessarily in my control.

I instead made my own circumstances and controlled my own fate and dictated my own financial future. I took hard the stance, no one can stop me from achieving what I want, because I have seen others before me do it. I always saw the possibilities. 

In no way was my desire to ever become a victim of circumstance or blame others for financial issues I may have had along the way. My financial existence was mine in the making, and mine to determine. If I took a job that paid a wage I didn't like, it was never once thought to be the responsibility of my employer to kick more money into my paycheck. It was my responsibility to kick more money into my paycheck by making decisions to increase my wages or wealth through finding a better job or making decisions about money I was already making to increase its value or worth.

When I write about or opine about money, I am doing so from a point of view of someone who never made much money but was able to build wealth anyway. It's part of the reason I am so strongly opinionated about it. It's why I get a little hot under the collar when someone says to me, "Yeah, you just say that because you have money."

You're just another rich guy lecturing the poor.

But I wasn't always that guy. I was the other guy. The guy who averaged under $30k a year who got somewhere despite it. Do you want to call $30k a year a decent wage? Hardly. And again, I lost ground several of those years, taking time off between jobs. Living off investments and making no income. And despite low wages and year-long hiatuses, still made my way through it. Still walked away with more money than I left off with.

The bottom line is that if you want to be a victim, that's a choice. If you want to allow yourself to be limited financially by circumstance, that's your choice. If you don't want to participate in the opportunities everyone has to get ahead, that's also your choice.

But it's not the rich guy's fault. It's not the cheap boss' fault. It's not societies fault. It's not the government's fault. It's not wage disparity's fault. It's not rich business owners or shareholder's fault.

It's yours.

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Share Your Wares And Make Money

YOU HAVE A TALENT OR TWO, AND YOU WANT TO SHARE THEM. I think that's mostly just a part of human nature. If you write a song and can play an instrument, and can even sing a little bit, you want someone out there to be able to listen.

AND THESE DAYS IT IS EVEN EASIER THAN EVER TO DO THAT.

Back in my early days on the Internet, having a strong interest back then in the horror fiction industry I set out to start a monthly online horror fiction magazine, and to my surprise it actually became quite successful.

WELL, WHEN I SAY IT WAS SUCCESSFUL, I MEAN IT WAS POPULAR.

This was the early 90's and AOL was primarily the "go-to" when it came to anything online. Anyone could create a website and put it out there for all too see. The problem back then was monetizing the whole thing.

FrightNet Online Magazine was what it was called, and featured fiction from some great horror names like T.M. Wright, Douglas Clegg, Michael Laimo, and others. I eventually went on to publish a short story anthology called Dark Whispers. I went by the name Ivan S. Graves doing the magazine and the anthology.

Several times I have considered restarting the magazine since nowadays monetizing is quite a bit easier, and even creating subscription based content is much easier now than it was when FrightNet Online Magazine had its day. But running the site was actually quite time consuming, and while I thoroughly enjoyed what I did, I am not sure I have the time these days to do it, nor do I particularly feel up to it.

BUT I STILL WANT TO MAKE MONEY ON SIDE GIGS, AND PROBABLY SO DO YOU. It is a large part, besides enjoying writing, that I started this blog several years ago, writing about things I like to talk about like politics and money. And it is still hard to actually make money even with all of the affiliate programs and Google AdSense and all of that sort of thing.

THAT IS STILL THE CASE EVEN IF YOU GET GENERALLY GOOD TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG.

So I decided to pursue another avenue. I also like to write music and do play the guitar, and depending on who you talk to, I am not terrible at singing either. Like many things, including my style of writing, my music is my own brand—it's different. And if you were to listen to my last album, Pink Flamingoes, or my iTunes single All You Are, you will certainly see that.

Does the music effort earn enough to pay the bills? Not hardly. The truth is that the hardest part of any of these ventures is getting your wares out for people to take a look at.

You don't have the marketing backing that some bloggers can afford, or that the music industry will provide its stars, and when it comes to music in particular, it is nearly impossible to get radio airplay. Still, the point here is that there are multiple ways to get it all out there. Sharing on places like Facebook or Twitter is of course one place to do it. But for music there are also places like Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Although the latter does not pay anything, it is just a place to share and perhaps in some way introduce what you do to people who may be interested in checking a bit further and who may be interested in buying a bit of what you do.

One of the keys, I think, is to keep plugging along despite it all. You never know, one day something may click and then the sky is the limit. It's tough, but you have to keep doing it. Keep playing around with what you are writing about, and keep on changing how you format it all.

Like this blog, for example. Recently I decided to try something a bit different in the manner in which I was writing it. Using more "breaks" and boldface type and italics to set things apart and hopefully keep the reader reading. And, increasing the frequency of posts. The more you add to your blog, the more content obviously is generated, and the better the ranking your blog overall will get when it comes time to being catalogued and indexed.

I recently read an article about a 28 year-old retiree who made a little over $62,000 in the first year of blogging, and if nothing else it served to make me think that if nothing else, at least it is POSSIBLE to actually make something significant doing all of these things. Especially if you are able to do multiple things such as blogging, making music, and maybe even starting up a magazine like I did.

Going back to the thought of restarting FrightNet still intrigues me if for no other reason than based on what I know right now, it could actually be the one thing, the one online endeavor, that might actually stand a chance of making the kind of revenue that that 28-year old retiree makes. Or more even. And certainly it could serve as another platform for some of my other stuff—which would of course have to be relevant to what I was doing there. I could, for example, market a song like 102 Idle Stones, Voices, or No. 130 Melancholy in D from Pink Flamingoes which do have a bit of a horror slant, or a song like What I Want on my Bandcamp which is certainly dark and sinister in nature.

The main point of this post really comes down to one thing for me. Do what you love, share what you love, and hopefully someone will love what you do. If that happens, if people actually find that they love what you do, someone may actually one day pay you for it.

As I said before, you just have to keep on doing it. Not everything is going to be gold and one can't expect overnight success. Just like when you play the lottery, sometimes you even have to accept that no matter how often you play, you may never actually win...

BUT YOU CANNOT WIN IF YOU DO NOT PLAY!

There is a ton of content out there, and there a ton of people out there all vying for attention. It's a tough field, and its tough to get the attention. It takes time like all things ultimately do. You have to have a lot of patience, and no matter the immediate or even long term outcome, you have to believe that what you are doing is still worth doing. No matter what happens. No matter who pays attention and who does not. No matter if you make money or you do not.