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Take Control of Your Financial Future: Views on Jobs, Money & Business

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You’ve probably seen a lot of talk about side hustles on the internet these days. I even have a third of this website devote to it. Anyone that isn’t already doing it is likely to wonder if it is worthwhile or just some kind of scheme to take their money. This post is going to help to clear all of that up for you.

Money has a special relationship that seems to connect to anything man-made in this world. Everything you want and even need to survive costs money. To earn it, you go to work at a job to get a regular paycheck. For many people, that is where their financial world ends, but there is another side that you don’t want to miss – business. In fact, by working a job, you’re involved in a business. You’re just not the person running it or earning all of the profits.

This kind of “normal” life of graduating college, going to work, and sticking out your career with one company can indeed work. However, it’s also cleverly designed to help make sure you stay in your current place. After all, if you don’t need a job anymore, the companies will run out of workers. This means it’s important to them that you end up trapped in a vicious cycle.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the almighty dollar, it’s place in your life, and your financial future. I’m also going to talk about side hustles including what they are and why you should bother to create one for yourself. In fact, running your own business is actually key to finding success and breaking out of the dollar cycle.

The Almighty Dollar

In a capitalist society, money seems to rule all. When you have it, opportunities will be available to you that simply don’t exist otherwise. Someone that grows up with rich parents will have provided with an education and connections that are very unlikely to be obtained by the kids of a poor couple.

I believe that most people realize this fact of life. Big corporations can be seen as evil beings that suck the life and cash away from good people, while we’re also completely dependent upon them. We need them for work, for a paycheck, for the things we enjoy and even for the things that keep us alive. However, I don’t think most people realize that you can actually do something about this situation. You don’t have to live your life just barely getting by and struggling for the bare minimum.

The real secret living in this world, when it comes to money, is that you can’t sit back defeated and cry about the way things work. You have to learn how to play the game and play it better than others. You have to take control of your own life and your financial future. I’m going to be talking to you about how you can achieve that in the rest of this article.

The Expected Path

First let me talk about the normal path in life. This is necessary to see the real problem. Growing up, you likely saw one or both parents going off to work each day. Money was possibly a daily struggle for your family. Parents often talk endlessly about money and/or going to college to their children. All throughout school, teachers will talk about college. When you’re in high school, you take SATs and ACTs to be able to qualify and even stand out on an application to attend a University. You meet with a guidance counselor multiple times that wants to assess your future career choices and help you apply for schools. Even your parents, family and friends pressure you growing up with the repeated question of “What do you want to do when you grow up?”.

Some and possibly all of what I just described above to you should sound familiar. Money and working a job to earn it have always been at the center of your world for as long as you can remember until you’re an adult. After you finish school and move out, you’re thrown to the wolves and expected to figure it out all by yourself in many cases. Sometimes you can spend a good chunk of your life just trying to get your head above water so you’re not living paycheck to paycheck. If you’re able to get married, have kids, and buy a house, you likely end up spending your entire life paying off debt from student loans, a mortgage and even helping to pay for your kids to go to school to repeat the cycle all over again.

This “expected path” in life that I’m talking about does manage to work for a lot of people, but it is still often a daily struggle for most. This path in life makes it feel like you have a chance to get ahead by working hard. However, you never seem to quite make it there. Then you retire, and your kids and grandkids go through the same thing in their lives. In my opinion, this situation actually works out best for the businesses that get to make a profit from your hard work for your entire adult life. While those corporations are rolling in billions of dollars of extra cash, you worry about paying for groceries.

Living an Employee Lifestyle

By working a job for your entire career, you’re helping to put a lot of money into the hands of a select few. They’ll limit your pay to maximize their profits, and also raise their prices at the same time to make as much as possible from customers. This squeezes average employees financially, making it very difficult to break free. Unfortunately, this is actually necessary for our economy to continue to function the way it does, but it doesn’t mean every single person has to be trapped in that cycle as an employee.

When you’re starting out as an adult and getting your first job, especially fresh out of college, you’ll often have big dreams for your life. You imagine all of the things you want to do and places you want to visit. When you think about your future career, you imagine doing something important, making a lot of money, and living a dream lifestyle. While that does end up happening for a small percentage of people, that’s actually not the way life goes for most people.

Going to college to get a decent paying job puts you in debt before you even start to earn a paycheck. Then you start at the bottom earning a horrible income while running yourself ragged with the hopes of getting a promotion one day. As you progress through life, your expenses always manage to keep pace with raises that you receive. At the end of your career, you try to plan to have enough money to barely get by for the rest of your retirement years.

Breaking Money Cycles

This money cycle that traps most people can be broken. A small percentage of people can break out of it by working a job. However, I truly believe that in a capitalist economy that the only true winners are the business owners. You have to stop trading your time for money to be able to increase your earnings well beyond your expenses. Business owners do so well because they’re essentially collecting a portion of the paychecks from all of their customers.

Now I’m not telling you to run out today, quit your job, and start a business. Maybe that’s your eventual goal, but you have to build up to it. That’s one of the bad things about the money cycle we’re all stuck in – you have responsibilities already. You usually have to keep working to be able to pay them.

To truly break free from this cycle, you need to work hard. Sometimes really hard. However, I’ve been able to get through it myself by knowing that I’m finally working for myself. My efforts aren’t going to make someone else rich. If they make anyone rich, it will be me this time. Convince yourself of the same thing. Work hard for yourself just like you did at your first job fresh out of college.

Start a Side Hustle

When you’re forced to keep working a 9-to-5 job to pay the bills but want to make a big change with your financial circumstances, you have to do it in your spare time. This is where the term “side hustle” came from. It’s how you make extra money on the side of your normal job. At the very least, having a side hustle can provide a supplemental income that can really help you get ahead with your finances. Why wait for your boss to give you a big raise when you can do it yourself?

Once you start working for yourself and making money doing it, you may be able to easily calculate that you could make a much higher annual revenue if you work for yourself full-time. Wait until you are successful part-time and confident that you can scale it to full-time with the same success before you take the leap to quit your job though. It can also be helpful to have some savings built up before you take that leap, since you may run into some hiccups in the beginning.

Ready to take action with your financial future and motivated to start a side hustle now? Take a look at a few additional resources below to help you get started…

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About Ryan Stevenson

After spending a decade in poverty, I built an online business that changed everything for my family. My financial situation improved overnight. More than 13 years later, I'm still self-employed full-time and own my own home. My goal is to help others by sharing the knowledge that I learned over the years to improve my personal finances, save for retirement and make extra money running online side hustles.

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