J.C.’s Money Blog

Creating wealth (or even just an income to get by) is about resource allocation. That is in fact the essence of economics, the systems by which resources are allocated. For corporations the two main resources are labor and capital. Labor has a cost in terms of wages, and capital has a cost (opportunity cost when you have money or cost of debt when you don’t).

My capital is essentially 0 (some cash for safety, and some retirement funds for 40 years from now, but luckily no debt). I cannot create a scheme to generate wealth through capital without taking on the added risk of borrowing money, or acquiring capitial through other means.

This leaves me like most everyone else, my main resource to allocate is my time. (I would like to change this to capital expediantly, but so does everyone else.) So the key to transforming me into a capital based venture from a time based venture is to get the most out of time as possible.

At my corporate job, I make about $30 per hour, when benefits are included.

My expectation is that my income streams will be:
Pillar 1: $96/hour (sports website)
Pillar 2: $80/hour (finance website)
Pillar 3: $19/hour (blog)

After the leg work of the initial setup of each of the sites.

Pillar 1 seems to be the best, but I don’t think it will scale well. The audience I am after is limited, so the law of diminishing returns should set in there to make additional effort yield much less per hour.

Pillar 2 is robust and highly scaleable. At nearly three times my corporate rate, it seems to be the most solid idea.

Pillar 3 doesn’t have very good returns, but may be very good in helping organize and plan the other 2. While the pay is much worse than my corporate job, it is also much more enjoyable! In reading other personal finance blogs, the amount of income generated is much higher, but also the time spent they claim to spend is significantly higher. I think ~$20 an hour is a reasonable estimate.