photo credit: ToniVCI like to write about new and exciting passive income opportunities on PFI. I often post the status of my income streams, pointing out what worked well for me and what did not. While I tend to give updates on my success and failures at income generation, I tend to leave one very important aspect out of my posts. I rarely write about time when it comes to growing and nurturing my income streams. Time (my 1st key to creating passive income) plays a huge role in growing income-generating opportunities.
The whole concept of passive income is built around investing your time upfront with the intent that the income will eventually come in and will continue to grow into the future. 
photo credit: Lab2112Managing this upfront effort brings me to my 2nd key point, which is patience. Based on this upfront effort, a person who is interested in creating passive income must have patience. I know that I have been frustrated many times in the past when working on growing my streams. However, anytime I get frustrated about something that went wrong, I think back to this point. As an avid runner, I like to think of it as my 1/2 marathon training compared to a 40-yd dash. I am a long distance runner and like to pace myself. Creating passive income is the same way. You must be patient and pace yourself for the long term. It is not a get rich quick thing – or to fellow runners – a 40-yd dash. It is important to remember that you probably won’t earn much income when you first start out, but over time the income will come in.
As I stated above, you must invest a lot of your time and hard work upfront in order to be successful in generating passive income. The key here is that by investing your hard work upfront, overtime you will spend less and less time on growing your stream while your earnings increase. One of my downfalls is that I want to start and grow as many new income streams as I can right now. That of course takes time and effort upfront. I would love to be able to spend all my time right now growing all sorts of income streams. The problem is that I also have a job that is taking up several hours in my day. As the economy is tight, my company has a hiring freeze on right now. As a result, I have been working 12 hours per day for my job. My boss and I are trying to do the work of 5 people right now, which is starting to take its toll. Throw in at least 2 hours per day (Mon-Fri) dedicated to maintaining and writing for PFI, and that leaves about 10 hours for spending time with my family, sleeping, eating, and creating passive income. This comes to my 3rd key point of this post – time management. Because I have so few hours in the day to dedicate to creating passive income streams, I must use any available hour or minute to my advantage.
My family is very important to me. Parts of my goals for creating all of these passive income streams is to allow me to either completely stop working someday or to scale back on the type of career that I have. I am willing to work hard right now for the next few years so that someday, I will have all the time in the world.
Do you feel it is worth spending time upfront to create passive income with the hopes of getting that time back in the future?
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I am actually struggling with this right now. In fact, I just finished writing a post I am going to put up tomorrow about life/work balance. Mine is more non-passive income, but it amounts to the same thing – weighing my personal time against the drive to make my life better now and in the future.
I know exactly how you feel. I am starting to see some progress with my passive income streams but between work and family, I don’t have the time I’d like to devote to it.
And to answer your question I think it is worth it to work now in order to reap the rewards later. We just can’t let things get too out of whack in the meantime.
Dawn – I couldn’t agree more. The hardest thing for me is giving up some time with my kids to work on these things to allow myself more time with them in the future.
Julie – I agree, in the end, the time know is well worth it. When I see the income potential it motivates me to keep moving on.
PFI — Since building residual income streams is all I do at this point (I let all my freelance writing clients go once I replaced my monthly income with residuals) it’s not a dilemma for me in the same way. I have a certain number of hours per day that I work, and it matches the number I worked before I was building residual income. I work form home, so that’s another factor for me.
I would take it a step further and say it may be worth a sacrifice in income now to build passive income streams that will pay down the road. That is, sacrifice income in the short term by working less, rather than cutting time with the family, if at all possible.
Great post. I definitely agree that it does take time upfront, which could also mean sacrifice, as WriterGig had stated. I can tell you from my own experience that it can be very well worth the sacrifice, although I know that each persons “sacrifice” will be a little different.
For me, it was spending time with my girlfriend (now fiancee), but she was great in supporting me and understanding that I needed the time to get everything done. Oh, and another sacrifice was sleep. Heh.
Looking forward to your next post!
WriterGig – Unfortunately, I don’t have the option of working less right now. I am salaried and all my extra time is being donated to the company I work for.
Pat – I think that is an excellent point. Having the support around you helps. Fortunately, my wife supports my extra time I spend creating passive income because she can see how it can help us in the future.
This is a great article, because it shows the importance of Kaizen and of Long Term Perspective, two critical success factors in building passive income. And, it shows that you also need to keep your main values in mind while doing these things: for me: God, family, fun. I don’t want to sacrifice those values in pursuit of the marathon.
Steve’s last blog post..A Key Success Factor to Render Your Weaknesses Irrelevant
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I still think it would be ok for Peoples working hard for getting money – in real life as well as here in the internet. It won´t fly to you without doing anything.