#MakingIt #InvestmentTips #FinancialAdvice
Hey there! It sounds like you’re in a bit of a tough spot right now, but the good news is that you’ve got some options to work with. Let’s break it down and see if we can come up with a plan to turn that 20k into a living for you.
First off, it’s great to hear that you already have a full-time job and an eBay store bringing in about 48k yearly. That’s a solid foundation to work from, and the fact that your photography business is starting to take off is even better news. It shows that you’ve got some marketable skills and potential for growth.
Now, as for your options for turning that 20k into a living, there are a few different paths you could consider:
1. Investing in a Business or Franchise: This could be a good option if you’re looking for a more stable income stream. With your job and eBay store bringing in some income already, adding a franchise or established business to the mix could provide the extra boost you need to hit that 55k mark. Just be sure to do your due diligence and thoroughly research any opportunities before diving in.
2. Real Estate: While it’s unfortunate to hear that the down payment rates are causing issues with your real estate plans, there may still be opportunities out there. You mentioned the idea of investing in a duplex or a trailer house on a lot – these could be viable options, especially if you do your homework and find properties in up-and-coming areas with potential for appreciation.
3. Flipping: Flipping properties can be a risky business, but if you know someone who’s doing well with it, it’s worth looking into. Keep in mind that it can require a significant time and financial investment, but the potential payoff could be worth it if you find the right opportunities.
4. Building on Your Current Ventures: It sounds like your remote job and eBay store are already showing promise, and your photography business is on the rise. Consider how you can continue to grow and expand these ventures, whether it’s through additional marketing efforts, expanding your product line on eBay, or seeking out more photography gigs.
As for your dilemma with deciding between your current job and pursuing plumbing as a more consistent option, it’s a tough call. On one hand, sticking with what you know and what’s currently providing income is a safe bet. On the other hand, taking a risk to further develop your photography business could lead to even greater success down the line.
Ultimately, the decision should come down to where you see the most potential for growth and fulfillment. It may be worth weighing the potential long-term benefits of investing your time and energy into your photography business versus the stability of a consistent plumbing job.
Remember, it’s okay to take calculated risks and make informed decisions. It’s clear that you’re driven and willing to put in the hard work, so trust your instincts and do what feels right for your future. And don’t feel like you have to figure it all out at once – take it one step at a time and keep an eye on the bigger picture.
Best of luck as you navigate these decisions, and keep pushing forward – you’ve already shown that you’ve got the determination to make it happen. We’re rooting for you! 🌟
I’d get a job for a year, catch your breath, get your life right and then reevaluate.
If you have a solid photography portfolio, I’d try to get a job at a marketing agency.
After you settle in, come back here and ask this same question.
Make home made food and deliver it
Get a job in the trades, open up your own company after 5-8 years in it, become a millionaire, invest in properties. Not the most sexy way to do it, but I have friends that weren’t the college type at all who thrive in it. Welding especially can get you 6 figures in 3ish years if you’re serious about it. My friends who work hard with it have so much high-paying work offered to them that they have to turn down $80/hr+ jobs often.
$12k a year in photography is below a minimum wage job, it’s a very competitive field with a lot of talented people going for a limited pie. Make money by choosing a less competitive, more lucrative field.
You need consistent, solid cashflow to be able to do any of the things you listed. You have the right goals, but you got to figure out how to start making a lot more. There’s classes for trades at local community colleges to you. Learn something that pays well 3 years in like welding, electrician, etc to build up cash, and do photography and other hustles on the side. It’s not glamorous, but it’s close to guaranteed to work.
Take that 20 and get a rental house and tools. Join ibew and they should start you at least 20hr. Your willingness to out work anyone will be tested when you are 90 days into working 7 10s, an hour from home but you will be making bank and learning a skill you can turn into a business.
For now, just keep it in a secure deposit and monitor the housing price. It will be beneficial to make a purchase when the market price is low.
With 20k just move to a third world country and try again? That’s plenty money to last a year well in Sri Lanka
Get a job, srsly, u have no real skill, no real advantage, no real mentor, and no real education
It’s okay, I was there too, I studied for a few years, till I got a mentor and made connections, then things got easier, but I had to do super boring study first
YouTube guys made it yes, but that was in an upmarket that lasted more than a decade.
Hot hand fallacy has to kick in,
Try learning It skills, good guys are hard to come buy, my manager told me half the prospects fail simple drug test
You are like a year late into flipping man. Flipping was great when interest rates were low and you could easily borrow money and sit on the property waiting for it to appreciate.
Right now the interest rates are 8% a year, can your property even appreciate that much or more to cover the interest and other costs? I doubt so. Also no free money fueling the price increases.
I don’t even know how you want to flip property with nothing but 20k.
Just focus on your career atm.
Consider starting small, maybe with a little fixer-upper project. You’ll learn the ropes without risking it all.
On weekends go to dog parks and offer to photograph their dogs in front of a backdrop,also onclude action photos where you throw a treat and the dog catches it.
Look into a franchise you love.
What skills have you picked up in your job? Could you open an ecommerce store or find a product to import and sell on eBay?
What about studying for a series 7 license and working with stocks? No degree required. Branch out on your own after a awhile. Financial advisor. Watch the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness.” The license is a bear but with flash cards and 100 practice tests, it’s doable.
My old roommate cleared 6 figures pretty easily doing visitors for mostly car dealerships. He mostly needed a good camera and decent GPU for rendering.
Then he got into drone videography and makes significantly more doing cooler stuff
$12,000 a year just doing photos. Dang. Time to open a corporation 😅
Only fans
Bro!? Ur a Plummer!? Follow this! If you have time for other things great, but honestly, I know plummers making well over 85k a year!
Tradesman skills are always in demand. Find a city with lots of construction.
Stick with the photography, sounds like a lot of effort is paying off even if you can’t live on that strictly!
Im just reading The E Myth from Gerber I think you would find it useful aswell. It helps to answer your questions but in a smart way.
My advice (someone who did it with $25k) is to take whatever skill you are absolutely best at, move to a country with incredibly low costs of living but lots of foreign investment that is difficult to live (that keeps other people away) and start a consultancy doing your thing and training other locals to do it as well for a small monthly salary and build a brand in that country being the best at your thing, then save all the professional fees, take advantage of the US tax foreign income exclusion and eventually sell the business.
Edit: for me it was VN and Myanmar in 2013
Down payment rates are hitting 8% – you mean interest rates?
Looking at it as your “last shot” is definitely the wrong approach. This sounds more like your first shot at it, and it definitely won’t be the last leg of your journey.
You listed 2 skills, photography and plumbing. Lean into those. There’s no reason you couldn’t double down on both and make a real living. It doesn’t sound like you are a licensed plumber, but you can sell your services as a handyman. A successful handyman business will easily reach 6 figures if you’re actually willing to outwork anyone, and your photography would supplement that nicely.
Learn to advertise. Advertising successfully with paid ads will print you money. Everything on how to run ads is available online if you do your research.
You’ve got to run the numbers man. Just throwing out random ideas without doing the research and running the numbers to make sure it makes financial sense is dangerous. Get out and talk to people actually doing what you want to do. Build your financial projections, a business plan, marketing plan, and go through the motions of analyzing break even, etc. for every potential business you are sort of serious about, you need to at least build out some basic framework of a plan. Then you have something to work off of and build goals to hit and understand if realistic or not. It also lets you think deeper about potential pivots, customer segments you can target (i.e product photography, real estate photography, restaurant, portrait, selling landscape prints at the craft fair, etc).
YouTube has all the info you need. Keep your job until you have a solid plan with a real understanding of timelines and projections. Then you’ll know when you need to step away from work and focus full time to hit those specific goals.
I’d start by reaching out to successful photographers who are in your area and offer a coffee and ask if you can pick their brain about how they managed to build up their business to the point that they were financially capable of leaving a day job.
At the end of the day, if you aren’t planning for success, you are planning for failure. So make a plan for whatever it is you want to do. YouTube P&L statements, financial projections, etc. visit your local SBA and see if they can help you as well. Work with them to solidify your plan and once you understand that part, build one for each business and run it by them or anyone in their network that might be able to provide insight.
Every single one of your ideas is advertised to death by some guru who makes people think that you can get rich quick. These are all possible avenues but not with $20,000, if you’re in the US.
What part of this makes you “in a bad way”?
Message me on IG. Have you thought about buying a tiny home and renting it out? We’re having a tiny home conference the 30th if interested
You could expand into real estate photography and photogrammetry.
If you’ve been browsing real estate, then you know how shitty the pictures can be and how there’s zero “flow” through the house. Is this the first floor? Second floor bedroom? What’s the layout?
Photogrammetry is interesting as well. With the right drone you can do volumetric measurements for construction companies, 3d models of commercial spaces. A 3d camera like a matterport will do interior.
This is all stuff you can do on a contract basis on your own schedule. Go to your local real estate association to get an idea of what they need before investing. See if you have a market to offer services to. If not residential real estate, check with commercial real estate. Sometimes construction wants walk-through 3d during the construction process so a remote foreman or inspection can be performed to check/validate and catalog work completed.
There’s lots of room to expand your current skillet into a broader range of services.
Learn some skills. Don’t be lazy.
you should start playing online poker
Just reading how you write, I have a hard time believing you don’t have the smarts for college. Average people can do just fine in college, or at many of them anyway.
Not enough money saved yet. Really best bet to invest it under a good financial advisor right now, keep working and growing your photography business on the side. In a few years re-evaluate
*”I’ll outwork anyone…”*
*”I don’t know if Everything I’ve built is headed somewhere good…”*
You need a change in your mindset to prosperity mindset first. Then money and right opportunities come to you knocking.
Start here:
The Science of Getting Rich By Wallace Wattles Unabridged with Commentary
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8EFUBnu4Lo&list=PLKv1KCSKwOo8M7wX4D348BfA2Auj_h0MP&index=116](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8EFUBnu4Lo&list=PLKv1KCSKwOo8M7wX4D348BfA2Auj_h0MP&index=116)
1. Make a habit of listening to audio-books from this playlist REGULARLY while you drive, jog, eat or whatever your comfortable time.
2. Have patience. It takes time to reprogram your childhood programming and make it to new level.
Once you learn how to program your subconscious to the end result that you want. You follow your intuition and accept the offers that will feel right and they will be successful for you and will be on the path to the end result you have envisioned.
Good Luck!
>Do I buy a business? A franchise? Do I invest in a duplex that breaks even and bet my life on appreciation?
You need something that has a low barrier to entry. No college degree or high startup cost. Learning a trade is always a good option. Pluming and electrical are always in need and if you’re the owner very high earning. I know a guy who got out of prison with nothing in 2019. He now owns a million dollar home in NY. He starred a painting company. Owns 4 vehicles and 12 employees now.
>Is the economy bad why times are so tough
No. The economy in America is actually doing amazing!! Less inflation than most of the world and we had about 11 straight years of amazing economy (jobs, real estate prices, stocks, etc). It’s expected to pull back after everything rising so much. Look at the stock and real estate market in 2010 and you’ll understand. We’re in a great economy!! But the republicans constantly give away billions and billions to the most wealthy Americans – look at trumps tax cuts, the cuts to regular Americans have already expired, only ones left are for billionaires (gains, if you’re actually curious, look it up). Want better economy – vote blue
> Anyone ever buy a business, or in a terrible real estate market start the snowball to wealth with one property?
Yes tons of people. I bought my first property in 2010 when everyone was selling and crying that Obama ruined the economy – how wrong they were lol. I’ve already taken out more $ than I paid for that one..AND I lived there for free for years. It’s all about timing and getting a good deal
>I need to learn flipping don’t I?
Much more than just that you need to understand values, construction, building, design trends and more. It’s not easy. Nothing is easy.
>Update I do have a full time job remotely, and an eBay store. All things combined doing about 48k yearly. The problem is my job said I’ve got a promotion coming, to a still remote roll that would work well for my photography, and I made the full 10k nearly this summer when I started getting jobs. Already booking out next summer so it’s looking like I can expect photography to double. It’s hard because I don’t know if Everything I’ve built is headed somewhere good, and if I’d be messing it up by cutting My run short, but trust me plumbing has been my option b as I like the consistency. It’s just really hard to call it because it’s a good safe bet, but a big part of me is still wondering if I’d just hold till next summer if it all
Most successful people leverage something they’re interested in – like the photography. I’d probably focus on that and think of ways to scale it. Can you market and promote yourself better. Is your photography businesses on all the socials..etc.
Or think of something more lucrative and pivot. No shame in that..
Best of luck you got this!
I would buy a duplex to quad, whatever you can find affordable in your area, rent out the other unit(s), and then get a roommate for your unit. You’d be surprised how high of interest rates that combination can overcome.
I would buy on an FHA loan with 3.5% down, using 75% of the other rental unit income to help you qualify. In your leases, you will put in expected rental increases of around 3% per year, or whatever your local area is good for. On your taxes, you will depreciate 75% of the building over time to help reduce your tax burden. Finally, you will also have appreciation to help get you the cream on the crop.
I’m happy to help you run some numbers if you want.
I’ve been there when I was in my early 20’s! I went the get-rich-slow route. My 2cent’s:
* Cut costs and save $$ – not just about making $$, but saving it as well
* Find work that is a good ROI on your time (what’s your hourly rate). If you are in the US putting in 60+ hours a week to make $48k, you might have better options.
* If you are interested in flipping (or other profession that has high risk), work for someone that does it. Learn on their dime.
* Set daily/weekly/monthly goals that are measurable and achievable. Stay focused.
This is going to sound like weird advice but take a look at your writing. Do you see how dense it is? That’s stressful.
There’s no white space for the eyes to rest.
It’s an intimidating wall of text.
Communication is important in business, including written communication.
Next time you post, grab the bottom right corner of the text box and drag it down. That will give you a bigger area to write in, make the whole post visible at once.
It may help.
On the photography front, any experience with product photography? A simple light box is easy to make, and you can pick up a Cowboy Studios strobe set off Amazon for pretty cheap.
A job plus freelance photography work until you get into an agency might be the way to go.
Good luck!
First things first. You are a step ahead of 80% of the population by not going to college. Instead of incurring a $300+ a month recurring debt for the next 15 – 30 years of your life to study and make $40,000 a year when entry level trades pay the more or same, Congratulations!
The problem with today’s society is that everyone wants to work from home, work at their convenience (UBER, DoorDash etc.) and not do some of the hard jobs. You have experience with a trade that most people do not want to do. Take some of your money and invest in yourself by getting the certifications you need in plumbing. After you get some certifications replace your savings and continue to build it. Yes the economy sucks! It always sucks because it either puts you in the positions that the sky is falling or your at a FOMO place. When its the in between its forgotten about. The positive side to the current economy is that you can find above average savings accounts or even CDs that will pay above 4%. Yes that’s not great but its not to bad if that’s all you got.
While you’re working for a contractor doing plumbing, keep a running list of all the things they are doing wrong and how you could make a plumbing business better.
When you’re in a good spot where you feel comfortable with your plumbing skills, take that list and find your competitive advantage over the other guys and take your business to the top.
While doing that if you’re still interested in real estate investing, I am sure if you are doing residential plumbing, you will have access to properties and people that the outside public will not have. Build those connections while you work. Interact with others that are successful and stay away from the people that bring you down.
If you stay on a good path and work hard you should have no problem. This is not a “last shot at making it” it is a new door that has endless doors. By the way if you enjoy photography, keep it as a hobby. When you turn a hobby into a business it might not be as enjoyable anymore.
Go to Thailand
Don’t know what to say except looks like you have a lot good going for you
Also sounds like you want to make money “easy”
The easiest way to make money is to dump all your existing money in the S&P500 and wait. Maybe years, maybe decades. Your money will eventually double or triple.
The recession is about to be either called or start. So maybe hold off on plans until end of next year if you’re looking for “safe” (though the best products are made in a recession it doesn’t look like you are looking to make a new product but provide a personal service trading time for money which will get hammered in a recession)
keep your 20K
don’t be desperately looking for a quick win – there are endless people ready to talk you into believing some story and take your money
I suggest learning a trade like plumbing or electric, which will pay well and be a secure future
Something I’ve been doing recently is making a point to double down on my businesses. I’ve got weaponized ADHD and get distracted very easily. I routinely come up with 2 or 3 or 10 new things I want to try out, to learn, etc. I now make a point to stop those trains of thought at the station, and use that time instead to work on my businesses. Write a new blog, do some networking on LinkedIn (engaging relevant posts, groups, connecting with folks in similar roles), do some research/reinforce my knowledge on topics related to my businesses, and so on. Don’t try 10 things at once. Get one to a really, really good place, then… keep working on it. Not changing what works, but reinforcing the foundational stuff. Seek out your challenges with your business and target the weaknesses.
The point of all that: double down, nah triple down, on your photography business if that’s the business you want to succeed. If you’ve got a W2 job for steady income, and it’s remote as you said which gives you tons of flexibility, you’re in a good spot. The housing situation sucks for sure, but go with whatever you’re going to be most comfortable with as you grind out the business. Everyone’s situation is different – go with what works best for you and remind yourself it’s temporary. Come up with a plan for the next 12, 24, 36 months, and execute.
Tough times don’t last…
You need 20% to buy real estate without pmi. Also 2 years of solid W2 income proving you have plenty of money to afford a mortgage.
If you had that then the 8% interest rates is irrelevant as snowballing real estate means you’ll be buying and selling so will just be getting new rates when you get new houses. Also I don’t think anyone’s holding off buying/selling houses because of rates anymore… this is kinda the new norm.
Real estate isn’t really a job it’s more of a retirement strategy. You’ll likely be pumping cash remodeling and not get that cash for years then when you do you’re buying a more expensive home.
If you’re set then duplexes or quadplexes are a perfect entry as you can get a normal home loan and insurance and tax rate if you live in one and rent others out… also can remodel 1 then rent, them remodel the other ones, and if you get a quadplex by the time you get the 4 done you’re making enough passive income to support yourself.
You don’t need to be smart to go to college tbh, just be able to study and be a bit organized