025: Jonathan DeYoe – Earning More Income & Creating Liquidity: The Keys to Achieving Financial Independence

Jonathan DeYoe: Welcome back to the Mindful Money podcast. Now, uh, you may wonder why we are spending an entire season on earning more income. The reason is actually pretty simple. Financial independence begins with saving and investing. Financial independence requires a pool of assets that spins off an income that covers your living expenses. And the only way you’ll ever be financially independent is by building this pool of assets. Earning is the first of three steps, the second being saving, the third being owning equity that everyone can take to improve their finances and reach financial independence. That’s why we’ve spent so much time on earning so far this season. We’ve talked about getting your life and your income back on track after trauma. We’ve talked about getting into college, one of the best ways to increase your income. We’ve talked about paths to entrepreneurship, resetting your mindset and creating a roadmap, as well as hybrid professionalism. Rather than interview someone on a particular topic today, I wanted to go a little bit more general. I wanted to discuss what I view as four core ways. From right where you are, you can accelerate your saving and investing efforts by earning more. And I want to talk about two ways you can create liquidity that will also help you accelerate that, uh, saving and investing. So let’s get on to those four core ways really quick. So perhaps the most obvious is ask for a raise at the current job. Is getting a raise as easy as asking? No? But that’s where it has to start. You can’t wait to get noticed that you’re doing great work or uncover what you need to do to earn more. Worst case scenario. Best case scenario, you ask, you get a raise. Probably a small one, but that’s where the conversation is beginning. You’re allowed to ask for more. You’re allowed to ask for even more. And hint, you’re, uh, allowed to ask for even more. If somebody says no or they hesitate in any way, follow up with this question, what would I need to do to earn more? Write it down, do the thing. Report that it’s done. Ask again if it doesn’t work, repeat companies want to do more. Business bosses want to hit their metrics. Not all employers are great at setting and resetting expectations. They’re not all great at recognizing what their people are doing. Sometimes you have to ask. Sometimes you may even have to press. You always want to be nice, you always want to be polite, but you can never be afraid to ask. Now, there’s this story of a father and daughter talking, and the father is saying to his daughter, you’ve been working so hard in school, and I know you have a need for a vehicle. Here’s a jeep. I got this jeep many, many years ago. It’s pretty old now, but it still runs. It should serve you well. Before I give it to you, would you take it down to the used car lot and see how much they’re going to offer you for it? And this daughter does that. And then she comes back, says to her dad, they offer me $1,000 because the jeep’s pretty worn out. Dad says, okay, now I want you to take it down to the pawn shop and do the same thing she does is asked when she returns. She says, uh, pawn shop only offered me $100 for this old, beat up, uh, jeep because it’s really old and it’s falling apart. Father nods his head, asks his daughter to go to a jeep club now and ask them about the jeep. And she does. She takes the jeep down to the jeep club and returns with a huge smile on her face. Dad, she says, people in the jeep club offer me $100,000 for it. It’s an iconic jeep sought out by collectors. The father’s lesson was simple. The right place values you the right way. If you’re not valued, just means you’re in the wrong place. Anger is pointless. Those who know your value are those who appreciate you seek them. Never stay in a place where no one sees your value. When you ask for a raise, the worst thing that can happen is you get a flat no. And every time you get a flat no, it feels like a, uh, hell no. But in a way, this is good too. Now, you know they don’t or can’t see you. They don’t or can’t see the value you bring to the table. If you see the value and they don’t, it’s not personal, it’s just not the right place. Look for a new place where they see your value. And now it should go without saying, but I’m not going to let it. You have to be worth the raise before you ask. So just real quick, would you give you a raise? Are you putting in the time? Is the time you’re putting in productive? Do you know what’s expected of you? Are you providing it? Are you getting better at it? Are you learning new skills on the job? Have you identified how to go above and beyond? Are you going above and beyond? Are you preparing for that next job up the ladder? If you can honestly say that you’re doing all these things and they still don’t appreciate you, you’re in the wrong place. This leads very easily to the second possibility. You’re not going to get a raise. So what do you do? You find a new job with higher pay, so asking for a raise might not work. You learn, you know it’s not a good fit and you start looking someplace else. The very first thing to do or actually not do, don’t quit yet. It’s always easier to find a new job when you have a job. Clean up your resume, update your LinkedIn profile. Start sending out some feelers to people you know. If you’re young or relatively new to the workforce, reach out to mentors and other adults you trust. Ask your parents for introductions. Get some advice from, um, folks that might be able to open some doors for you. Let them know you’re looking for a new opportunity. At this point, I’d be very careful posting the fact publicly on social media or something like that, that you’re looking a fellow employee or your employer might actually see it. So be careful doing that. When you’re ready, you want to start researching job boards. The best place to start, in my opinion, are indeed.com and monster.com. These are great general purpose boards. You can find a lot of remote jobs at, uh, flexjobs.com. You can find a lot of startup jobs at Angel Co. You can find hourly work@snagagob.com and managementjobs@theladders.com so you want to look very carefully at the qualifications for jobs that you’re finding interesting. Are there things you don’t currently know but could learn quickly or could learn pretty easily? Are you looking for jobs you qualify for? Are you building your own learning plan? As you’re looking for these jobs? You can. While you’re looking for jobs, see what the qualification requirements are, see where that you might run a little bit short and write down some skills that you could learn that might lead you to a higher income. Then go to Khan Academy or udemy or LinkedIn learning or skillshare and start learning and building those skills. This learning, lifelong learning isn’t a sometimes thing. It’s an always thing. This is something you want to be thinking about doing forever. Now, if you know how to do a thing, make sure you say you know it. In today’s job market, you don’t necessarily need a certificate to prove competency. Obviously don’t lie because they may test you on it. And, uh, be careful even stretching the truth, because if they give you a problem you can’t solve, it will easily show that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Finally, just before you apply for any job, visit Glassdoor to research companies and compensation. You want to know the salary ranges, the types of jobs you’re applying for in the geographies in which you’re applying. A financial planner in San Francisco gets paid differently than a financial planner in South Dakota or Iowa. If you need additional income but, uh, aren’t ready to apply for an entirely new gig, the next option is a second job or a part time job. The challenge here is that adding a second job is totally schedule dependent. If we work eight to 10 hours a day, there’s always going to be time for another thing. But there may not be time for another job. If your regular job is Monday to Friday, you have weekends, you can work a job. If you, uh, regularly work either an early a. M. Or late p. M. Shift, then you can put something into that opposite shift. However, if you’ve got unpredictable hours or, uh, your employer wants you to stay late or unexpectedly sometimes, then this may not be an option for you unless you’re at the same time. I’m going to go through a search for the second job that you’re looking for a new job at the same time you’re looking for the second job. Now, your second job doesn’t have to be anything special or permanent or consistent. You can take part time temporary work as needed, or you can look for something that’s more part time permanent, that may actually have an opportunity to become your future gig, your future transition employment. In terms of how you do it, you can actually use some of the same job resources we listed above to find that part time work as well. There are lots of reasons you may want to earn just a little bit more money. Maybe you’ve got some credit card debt that would help you pay off. Maybe you want to save more towards a specific spending goal. Maybe you want to get there more quickly. Maybe you just want a little bit extra cushion in your life. Maybe build that emergency fund. Or, uh, maybe you just want to add to that long term compounding savings program that you have and let the compounding work its magic. Before you take extra part time work, be sure you know your boundaries. The worst thing you can do is take away from that family time or that personal rejuvenation time, both of which are incredibly important for both your long term health and happiness. And then after having done that, if you don’t spend the money wisely, don’t use it to pay off the debt, don’t use it. That just creates problems. You don’t want to do that and waste the resource. This sort of brings us to the doorstep of what I believe is one of the best things you can do to increase your income. So let’s talk about side hustle gig work. Let’s talk about your own small business. This is a personal bias. I wear it proudly. Uh, while it is totally possible to build wealth as an employee, I believe both the lessons you’re going to learn and the foundation you can build by starting a side hustle that you own will be a huge difference maker in the creating of your personal financial independence. For me, if the choice is between part time work or figuring out a side hustle, starting my own gig, I’m going to choose my own gig or my own side hustle. Every single day and twice on Sunday. A side hustle gives you the chance to make a little bit of money, while at the same time building a business. And building a business, especially today, can itself become multiple income streams. So the very best side hustle small business efforts begin with your personal interests. You take something that you’re already good at or something that you really enjoy doing, something you’re going to do anyways. Think long and hard about how others might benefit from your doing the thing you love for them. Uh, some great resources for side hustles can be found at side, um, hustle Nation, the penny hoarder, Chris Gillibo, and millennial money. And I’m going to list a whole bunch more in the show notes for the show as well. You’ll find coaching. You’ll find side hustle ideas. You’ll find success stories. You’ll find technical support. You’ll find the hurdles you’re going to run into. You’re going to find ways to overcome those hurdles. The beauty of a side hustle is that it doesn’t depend on anyone else’s schedule. You may be an early riser, get a couple of work hours of work in before you go to your day job. Or you may work early and then come home early and have lots of time in the afternoon, evening that you can work on a side hustle, work on a small business instead of watching television or binging Netflix. If you come to think of it, you could probably cancel the, uh, streaming services and use that time to create an income stream instead of paying a bill that’s allowed. The challenge with a side hustle is always and everywhere going to be learning curve. If you’re going to run a profitable side hustle, you’ve got to learn a whole new set of skills. You’ve got to build a product or service. You’ve got to price it, you’ve got to market it, you got to sell it. You’ve got to deal with customers, some inevitably unhappy. You need to do a business plan. You need to, uh, manage expenses. You need to learn how to pay quarterly taxes. Also from a business perspective, and this is so important, you’ve got to know when to persist through the difficulty, the hardship, the pain, and when to pivot. There will be difficulty and hardship and pain. This is a decision you’ll have to make many, many times. Do I, uh, push through? Do I pivot? You’ve got to be patient with yourself. You got to be patient with lots of different people. You got to be patient with all the issues that come up, because there’s going to be many. Your learning has to expand from the skill set. You need to do the work to include the skill set of running a business. It’s not rocket science. There’s lots of resources. Just name a few. There’s something called score. You can google score. There’s people that have run businesses in the past now work for this nonprofit called score, and they’ll give you some advice on how to start and run your business. There’s the small business Administration, SBA. There’s a variety of local and state resources you can find on your state’s websites or through Google. And most large us banks and know regional banks have small business education opportunities and events. If you’re at all motivated by financial independence, it’s essential to have some kind of a side hustle or knowledge of maybe setting up, uh, your own gig. I can’t begin to express how big a deal I think starting your own business can be. Even when it fails, the lessons you learn are going to open doors. They’re going to enable you to do the next thing more successfully. A few examples of this Thomas Edison is famous for saying, I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve been successful finding 10,000 ways that don’t work. And he’s the guy, in case you didn’t catch it, is the guy invented the light bulb. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in the mid 80s before he came back to save the company a decade later. Bill Gates first business attempt with Paul Allen, the partner he started he ran Microsoft with for so many years, was Trafo data. You might have driven down the road, local road, and seen those black wires counting cars. That was their first business. It failed. This is Bill Gates. J. K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by twelve publishers. She tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried. Twelve times. The 13th time was the charm. And she finally got picked up. Can you imagine? Actually one of the publishers that passed on that gold mine, the Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney, the man who founded it, was at one point living on dog food and uh, unable to pay rent. And he was being told by studios that he lacked creativity. This is the guy know invented Mickey Mouse, lacked creativity. Even Jeff Bezos has made enormous and costly mistakes while he was launching Amazon. There’s something, before we sort of conclude in this section, there’s something very important to be careful of when you’re talking about a side hustle or starting your own business. Taking the thing that you love and turning it into an income stream isn’t always a great idea. I think it’s worth the risk, but it’s not always a great idea. You may find that the thing you love is loved because it’s just an occasional thing. Doing it all the time may just take all the fun out of it. Also, doing the thing you love for a hyper, nitpicky, critical customer is another good way to push the joy right out of it. So in my eyes, it’s still worth it, still worth a try, but it’s always better to go in with your eyes open. So that’s kind of the four ways you can earn more. You can get a raise at your current job, you can get a new job, you can have a side hustle, or you can get a second job. Now, I want to move into a thing. I want to spend a, uh, relatively short amount of time on creating liquidity. If you need cash for any reason, including to invest and get ahead on some of your goals, you don’t necessarily have to earn more. You can also, shocker, spend less. So, do you know where every penny goes? Is every penny you’re spending spent to serve your greater well being? In almost every budget I’ve ever seen, there are a few required budget categories that you don’t really have a choice about. I mean, the size you have a choice about. You don’t have to live in a great three bedroom place. You may live two door room in a two bedroom place, right? But you got to pay rent, you got to eat. You don’t have to eat organic food, but you got to eat. And today, a cell phone is pretty necessary for any kind of work you’re going to do. But there’s also a bunch of other items that are totally not required. Streaming services, gym membership, organic food. We mentioned a minute ago, personal services. Somebody massages, alternative medicines. There’s a lot of things that we do and spend money on that aren’t necessities so much. And if you really want to put more towards savings, spending less is key. Maybe cutting back on some of these makes a ton of sense. Even the very best budgets leak. I am, um, always surprised when I look at my own bank statements or credit card statements, which doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I often discover something I find monthly charges I wasn’t aware of. I discover one of my kids has gone on an app purchasing rampage. Or I sometimes discover that I’m paying for a bundled service that I only use part of the bundle in. This actually happened to me recently. So my family gets our cell phones, our Internet access, and our home phone. Don’t ask. We have a gate, and that has to be tied to the home phone. So we have to have a home phone. Anyway, we get those three, and we get a modem, and we get a router through our telecom carrier. And, uh, when we signed up, the modem lease was included in the bundle for $10 a month. A couple of years into the lease, we replaced the modem with a new modem that we purchased, but we just put the old modem to the side, and we didn’t even realize that we remember that we were paying this lease rate on it. And about three years passed until we did realize that, oh, my God, we’re paying $10 a month for this modem that we aren’t using and have not been using for 36 months. And we ended up saying, okay, how do we get out of this? We called the company, and they said we got to return the modem. So when we returned the modem, we realized we get an additional 150 back in equipment charge that was being just held because we had the modem. If we would have thrown the modem away, we wouldn’t have gotten $150. And we did spend $10 a month for 36 months unnecessarily. So all in, that was $500. When we turned it in, we got $150 back, even though there was no value to the modem. Like, the modem was old and it wasn’t even value as parts anymore anyway. I’ve never gone through a budget with anyone without finding something that they were spending money on, and it’s not me judging it. But then they realized, we’re saying, you know what? This really isn’t adding anything to my quality of life. So go through the credit card statements and bank statements and look at those regular monthly charges. See what’s included in, um, them. See what’s not necessary. If you’re doubling up on anything, can you cut a streaming service? Can you find cheaper car insurance? Can you pay for a reduced gym membership? Or YouTube has hundreds, thousands? I don’t know if I’d say millions. But they’ve got workout routines you can just do. You just hit play on a YouTube video for 30 minutes, and you’ve got a workout you can do in your living room. $50 a week in savings at 7% interest is $34,000. After ten years, it’s almost a quarter million dollars after 30 years. Little things become big things in time. And calling the little things requires a regular effort. Reducing your regular spending frees up cash for saving. At the same time, there’s stuff. One way to create a little bit of additional liquidity is to reduce the amount of stuff that we have now. I’m not talking about reducing or minimizing your lifestyle. I want you to have fun. Do things you enjoy, enjoy your life. But don’t just put it on autopilot without reviewing it occasionally. Go back and take a look at the volume. Can you minimize? Can you sell anything? At the very least, we can all hit the pause button before we buy something new. We have a lot of stuff. Not we my family, but we as a society. Not that my family has any lack of stuff. Every time I listen to, um, a real estate investor talk about storage as a growth industry, I’m baffled at how this can still be the case. Everyone I know already has more stuff than they need. Sure, stuff wears out, needs to be replaced or repaired. The repairing. How often does that really happen nowadays? And yes, styles change. You got to replace your wardrobe or pieces of it from time to time. I visited my parents over the summer. My dad took me past their two double storage units. This is in addition to their two car garage that only fits one car because of the stuff. And the two car garage behind one of the rental units that’s filled with tools. The two storage units are filled. Filled with building materials. My dad has some rentals, so it makes sense for him to have some building materials. This is a lot of building materials. And he pays like, $80 a month for these two storage units when he also has a two car garage and another two car garage that he has access to. He’s paid this $80 a month for decades, and it’s filled with stuff that will never justify the ongoing expense. So all these building materials, wood, bricks, blocks, buckets of nails, siding, pavers, used stoves, refrigerators, tools, chunks of furnaces, space heaters, shop vacs, even heavy metal shelving that’s holding it all. All of this stuff has value. A homeowner doing work on their own house may want just the siding or just the pavers. A builder with a constant need for materials might take the whole thing off of his hands, kind of at a discount. But then he gets to stop paying his $80 monthly fee to the storage units. We are all absolutely brainwashed to believe that next thing is going to be additive to our happiness. My kids started by being showered with unnecessary gifts for birthdays and Christmas. If it wasn’t for Kate, this would still be going on. My wife, this would still be going on in a much heavier force than it is now. But we all but force them to tie their happiness to the receipt of stuff. Oh, it’s your birthday. We celebrate you by giving you things. Now, I’ve certainly been guilty of this my entire life. I often blame the origin of this issue on growing up in a poor household. I didn’t get the things I wanted, so it’s as if I’m making up for lost time and making sure my kids don’t feel the same lack that I felt. And I’ve got no one to blame for this but myself. My acquisition of stuff still plays a role in my life. I remember I must have been 1516 years old, getting ready to go on a church trip. I bought an expensive camera that I never learned how to use. I bought a Rolex with an early career bonus, the majority of which I used to pay off student loans. So I’m smart sometimes with the money. I wore that watch religiously right up until I didn’t, and it’s been in my closet now for probably eight years. I bought an expensive road bike. Didn’t use that much, so I sold it. A couple of years later, I bought the same bike again. Obviously, when you sell, it’s at a discounted value. So I paid twice for the same bike, and I proceeded not to use it again. I started sea kayaking, got really excited about it. So I bought all the paraphernalia, everything but the kayak. And then I didn’t stick with it. I joined a golf club once, and this totally shocked my wife because she could count on her on a hand the number of times I’d golfed since she’d known me. I leased a mercedes once. I’d like to say that I’ve learned my lesson. I don’t do it anymore. But I literally bought a rowing machine last year that sits right next to me here in my office, totally unused for a number of months now. I’m just as guilty as anyone at this. And if anything, the more money I make and have socked away, the worse I’ve gotten at not buying stuff. I’m definitely not holding myself out as the example here, at least not the positive example. Maybe I’m an example of how not to do it. I’ve gotten sucked into buying stuff. I’ve not thought purchases through. And I regret a lot of these purchases afterwards. For some reason I don’t learn. Now, I could get really upset with myself, and I feel some people noding along with me saying how appropriate that would be. But I want you to say, look in your own closet. Because regardless, uh, of how I treat myself on this issue, or how you treat yourself on this issue, or how often I discuss this with my therapist, or how often you discuss your, uh, retail therapy with your therapist, it speaks to how incredibly thorny and difficult and deeply held our belief in the value of things really is. I may blame myself, you may blame yourself. And it’s not all our fault, because we are literally wired for it. Dopamine is the culprit, the neurotransmitter dopamine is a part of our pleasure center and it surges when you are considering buying something new. The acquisition of a thing is viewed by the brain as a reward. And we get a little dopamine hit when we anticipate a reward, when the thing we are considering or anticipating or thinking about buying or the thing we just want, when we see it go on sale, we get a little additional hit of dopamine. Now, if you put that into the context of today’s know, your Amazon echo, your cell phone, these things are all listening for what you are considering buying and then they are serving you ads to buy those things. We are hilariously outmanned and outgunned in our battle with retail therapy. So if I was strapped for cash and had plenty of time, I would sell the bike, the rowing machine, the camera, the watch, the kayaking gear, and I would buy an index fund. S and P 500 Russell 3000, all country world index. Doesn’t matter. I would sell the thing that’s sitting there gathering nothing. And I would buy something that would create dividends. I could reinvest. So take those guilty reminders out of the closet and turn them into wealth producing assets. And when you’re ready to do that, the equivalent of, take the equivalent of your equivalent of my camera, watch, bike, rowing machine and sell them in a digital marketplace. So a couple options. You’ve got eBay, you’ve got bonanza, you’ve got Craigslist, you’ve got Facebook marketplace, you’ve got offerup. Um, you’ve got poshmark, you’ve got etsy. You can reach buyers all over the globe with almost any one of these things. And in most instances, they’re actually going to pay for shipping at the same time. So this option, reducing stuff, selling things, is available to anyone that has anything that can be sold. No need to feel any shame about this. Just realize the truth and take some action upon it. Do something about it. Okay, so we’ve been talking about ways to earn and ways to create liquidity. There’s one more sort of bonus thing topic that I wanted to cover today in the search for financial independence. So I want to talk about reinvesting passive income. Financial independence, as we talked about at the outset, is the result of your assets producing passive income that covers all of your expenses. Everything else I’ve mentioned is a source of active income or liquidity. It takes an effort to discover and pursue to produce active income. You are trading time and effort for money. Passive income is income that comes to you through no effort of your own. Don’t have to spend any time or expend any energy for passive income. Rental, real estate, passive product sales, these are both kind of passive, not entirely passive. Royalties from books you’ve already created or products you’ve already created, or music you’ve created. Dividends on stocks, distributions on private businesses that you’ve, investments you’ve made in private businesses. These are all excellent sources of entirely passive income. The very first investment you make, you create your first opportunity to realize passive income. Now, when you receive your first rental payment or that first stock dividend, you’ve got choices. You could take the cash, put in your checking account, spend it on stuff, or you can reinvest current passive income to increase the size of future passive income. Uh, compounding is that 8th wonder of the world. It’s what happens when you gather and save your rents until you have another down payment or when you reinvest your dividends to buy more stock. The earlier you get started compounding, the higher the probability of your reaching financial wealth that lasts beyond your life and benefits family and community. So I hope this helps get you started increasing your saving and investing, earning more, saving more, getting more into investments, and getting you closer to that financial independence. We’ve introduced seven different ways to increase the amount you’re putting towards your saving and investing. Don’t have to do them all, certainly couldn’t hurt to do them all. But I would certainly start by looking at do I ask for a raise or do I seek a new job? And maybe after I consider that, I think about can I add a part time income or can I create a side hustle or a gig of some sort? Do I do both of those things? Can I do, uh, a part time gig while I build a side gig? Can I do a part time job while I have a side hustle that I’m trying to get going? And whatever you do, you definitely want to get into the habit of reinvesting any and all passive income until your passive income covers your entire expense structure. Where you start comes from knowing where you are on the path. Maybe you have a great job, recently, got a raise, then you’re going to start with a, uh, side gig or a part time job. Maybe you have tons of stuff that you could sell for some quick liquidity and a quick financial boost. And maybe you’ve been thinking about starting a side hustle already. You’re halfway there, wherever you are. Stop letting the world determine the outcome. Make a choice, make a plan, and take some action. Now I’m going to include all the links to the resources we talked about that I mentioned earlier, and a whole bunch of other resources, blogs, podcasts that talk about earning more, saving more, and investing more. And that’s going to be in the show notes. And then I look forward to having a conversation next week with basically one of the founders of the podcasting industry and hope to introduce you to some of his work. So thanks for coming, and we’ll see you next week.