Question – How would your life change if you had an additional $1,829 each month?

Welcome to another edition of my quarterly alternative income report – the place where I do a stock-take of all the income that I was able to generate which was outside of my increasingly irritating 9-to-6 job.

It is now one more day before the Lunar New Year (when I wrote this blog post). Although it isn’t a major event for me (just needed to visit my parents and in-laws), I do enjoy having the chance to take a much-needed break over the long weekend. Even better, I earned myself an off-day because day #2 of the holidays fell on a Saturday!

I’m not too sure why, but the Lunar New Year has always been closely associated with the idea of money and getting rich –

• Gong Xi Fa Cai ~!
• Huat Ah ~!
• Etc

I suppose this would be a nice time to write about alternative income – yes?

Last month, I wrote an annual net-worth update and in the blog post, I noted that moving forward, it is going to be more important for me to focus on the generation of alternative income instead of net-worth growth.

When net-worth becomes substantial, it is then imperative (of vital importance i.e. critical) for me to know how to generate constant and stable cash-flow.

Right – now would be a good time to talk about something painfully obvious that you might be thinking about. Don’t personal finance bloggers seem like a bunch of self-congratulating, circle-jerking assholes?

It ain’t about bragging rights to me because I’m pretty sure $10 NTUC vouchers (2014) and $12,142 net worth (2015) are not worth showing off. Everyone has a different agenda. It’s the journey that matters, so you can interpret it however you want. Well, now that’s out of the way .. let’s continue!

Because cash-flow is what that’s going to buy myself time consistently in order to –

• do the things I’m passionate about
• learn more about the topics I’m interested in
• read more books
• spend more time with my family
• etc

And now, my full year alternative income chart is finally ready for the big reveal 🙂

What are my alternative income streams?

To summarize, my alternative income streams consists of –

1. Cash (or equivalent) – Interest
2. Investment – Dividends
3. Blog – Ad revenue
4. Blog – Affiliate sales revenue
5. Crypto – Lending / staking / etc
6. Others

Most of the above have already been elaborated in my previous alternative income reports so for this blog post, I will spare you the details for once and skip over the boring parts.

If you are new to my blog or this is the first time you stumbled upon my alternative income reports, please check out this blog post which I felt was rather detailed and 90% of it is gonna be the same.

Indeed, my humble blog does enjoy a steady stream of visitors but I’m well aware of the fact that I’m probably not the kind of blogger who can pull in thousands of dollars a month from this blog alone, even though I can optimize it very well.

For cash or investment-related dividends, a few percentage point is probably a good estimate and therefore a function of portfolio size – the bigger the portfolio, the larger the passive income.

A neat $200,000 fully-invested into assets yielding 6% per year would bring in a tidy $1,000 monthly – not too bad, right?

Instead, what I would do today is to focus on the elephant in the room – crypto income.

Income generated from crypto activities has a lot of potential at the moment, especially given the fact that when I started deep-diving in Q3, the rally hasn’t even begun yet. Right now, we’re in the middle of the full-blown bull market.

Total earnings for 2020 – fourth quarter (S$5,487)

In what I would describe as a tough pandemic year, I made certain decisions that increased the level of alternative income that I was able to generate. For the entire year for 2020, I was able to generate a grand total of $13,934 or $1,161 per month.

Specific to the last three months of 2020, this was again THE QUARTER that crushed even the performance for Q3. Crazy to recall that when I started back in 2013, I making a few cents a day on Google Adsense.

• October 2020 – S$1,708 
• November 2020 – S$1,590
• December 2020 – S$2,188

I am well aware that this is equivalent to the entire take-home salary of some folks. If you’re thinking this is quite an obscene amount of money, do remember that I did not say this is passive income. It is definitely not.

This is alternative income that is generated by expending my time and efforts. If and when I do take a step back from my regular job, I’m gonna continue doing this or even ramp up my efforts.

At a pool villa, that is.

In 2020, I’m truly thankful to be able to maintain my keen (and skeptical) interest in new things plus the ability to stay relentless resourceful. Despite my depleting energy and stamina.

In 2021, I hope to be able to keep up the same attitude that has served me well. The number for January 2021 has already exceed December 2020 so that’s a good thing too.

There is no spoon-feeding because wolves are out there. There is no one else I know in real life who is doing this. Self-learning is a real thing – mistakes were made, school fees were paid.

Passive income 🔥 pic.twitter.com/2Fj4tRdeFY

— Kevin | Turtle Investor (@turtle_investor) February 7, 2021

And yes, many people can potentially do this too. Plenty of people I chatted with have already taken the first step.

Everybody counts.
I love messages like these from folks who read my blog 😍#CryptoStories pic.twitter.com/7TjDycmp8w

— Kevin | Turtle Investor (@turtle_investor) February 9, 2021

I am a nobody – nothing but an average investor. Take your time – there is no need to rush. Good luck and Godspeed.