How I've lived off passive income since I was 21 (I turn 31 next month)

I have to thank my Dad for teaching me about the power of passive income when I was around 13-14 years old. He worked his ass off for years and years until one day he was offered to take over the company he was working for. It was a car audio business and eventually he transitioned into selling pagers then cell phones. He ended up running about 30 Verizon stores in the Midwest with his brother.    

I grew up playing basketball and skateboarding as a kid and starting playing drums in junior high. I decided I wanted to start a band and live life as a rock star when I was 14. I was on a mission to find some other guys with the same dream and get to work. I happened to find a couple guys the next year and we started jamming in a commercial businesses basement that we rented out for $250/month. We couldn’t make any noise during the day so we met every night at 7pm. We were writing original music from day one and thanks to the lead singer/songwriter, the songs were actually not half bad. We started playing shows in 9th grade, recorded a couple ep’s during high school and by the time we were seniors we had a pretty big local following. It got to the point where most of the major labels at the time started to notice us and we started taking meetings with them. Epic Records flew us out to New York a couple times to showcase. We met with Capitol, Warner Bros, Interscope etc etc. Long story short we put out our first album in 2005 and sold out our cd release show at the Troubadour in Hollywood. We then toured the album for a couple years and put out our 2nd album in 2009. After the 2nd album we had been doing this for 9 years already and personalities started to clash and the band started to deteriorate. We ended up calling it quits around 2011.    

Nural

By this point I had put out 2 albums, toured the world and pretty much tasted the dream I set out for when I was 14. I was burned out on the whole music thing and had no idea what I wanted to do next. But going back a few years, I skipped the part about how I started my first business when I was 21. All the money the band made went right back into the band via gas tank, merchandise, managers etc. I was sick and tired of being broke and paying for gas with spare change so I decided to do something about it. While the band was doing it’s thing, I started a merchandise distribution company called Merch Revolution. We basically built online stores for other bands merchandise and shipped out the orders to their fans. I remember being in New Jersey recording our 2nd album and Merch Revolution was having its busiest month ever with hundreds of orders. It was a cool feeling being on one side of the country recording an album, and having a business on the other side of the country doing well.    

I also skipped the part about getting the idea for my 2nd business when I was 22. Merch Revolution was my first source of passive income once all the systems were set up and I got the idea for my 2nd business while taking a look at Merch Revolution’s bank account. I noticed that once a month, my bank was deducted a certain amount for my credit card fees. That’s when a light bulb went off in my head.

 I looked at that deduction and realized that is one of the most gangster business models of all time. This company charged me once a month a certain percentage of all my credit card transactions and I barely knew what company it was. So I decided I wanted to start a company that did exactly that. Turns out, you don’t need any degree or any pre requisites to get into that business. So I found and ISO (Independent Sales Organization) that hired me as an independent contractor on commission only. The reason I took the job was because the commission was residual. Once I closed a deal, I got paid on that deal month after month for as long as the merchant stayed with our company. I was super excited about this residual opportunity and hit the streets hard going door to door talking to business owners with no sales experience whatsoever. I made every mistake there is to make and learned and got better day-by-day. Within 6 months to a year I built up 1-2k/month in residuals. 2 years later I decided to start my own ISO and scale the business across the country. In 2010 I partnered with my dad and we started Pacific Island Payment Solutions. Since then we’ve been training sales guys and we’re helping merchants in 12 states so far.    

I’m not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I do feel wealthy. Not the financial kind of wealthy but I’m healthy and I’ve been in complete control of my time my entire life. After you can pay your bills with passive income you realize that time is the ultimate limited resource. The moral of the story is that working hard is key, but working smart is king. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of passive income since I was young and now I wake up in a reality where my hard work paid off.   

#steem #hardwork #residualincome #passiveincome #life #love #happy #money #basicincome