“There’s a sucker born every minute.”
– David Hannum
I was standing in line at Walgreens, patiently waiting to purchase some trail mix. There were half a dozen old people in front of me. One was arguing with the cashier about a coupon or something. The line wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
In an attempt to kill time, I decided to mentally calculate how much it would cost me to buy a bag of trail mix every day for one year. Usually I’ll buy a package of store brand trail mix on days when I don’t have any leftovers to eat for lunch. However, I decided to calculate my problem as if I bought it 365 days out of the year.
The trail mix cost something like four dollars a bag. Buying it every day would have cost me $1,460. That’s serious money.
In my home state of Iowa minimum wage is $7.25. You’d have to spend slightly over a month’s worth of income just to afford your daily lunch.
According to a quick Orbitz search, a round trip flight to Mexico and sixteen night stay in a nice hotel room would only cost $1,636. That’s a mere $176 difference.
For $1,460 you could easily launch a side business. For that kind of money you could even outsource the entire process. To provide an example, I could easily find an inexpensive web designer to build me an affiliate site. I could then go on Fiverr and pay someone $5 a pop to write posts for me. SEO would cost nothing either.
For $1,460 I could hire ghost writers to put out a slew of eBooks for me. It’s possible to have a brief eBook written, edited, and formatted for less than $100. There’s your passive income stream.
Investments, vacations, and robust savings accounts aren’t hard to obtain. The funds are often right under your nose.