Millennial Invests Side Income For Passive Profits

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

In today's story, Millennial on a mission goes from unemployed to day job, then from side hustler to millionaire in just five years. Putting 80% of his income into investments for an early retirement made total sense. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. So glad you're here.

I've been on the road going to be in my hometown of Portland, Oregon tomorrow night, live at Powell's for those listening in real time. If you're listening later, I am still probably on the road because I got a lot of cities to go to. Now listen, if you want to achieve financial independence, no amount of cutting back on lattes is going to help you do that. Rather than penny pinching, ultimately you need to make more money. You need a significant increase in your income.

That's why in the world of personal finance blogging and other online commentary, I tend to pay attention to the voices that promote that approach as opposed to people who are into extreme budgeting or cutting coupons two hours a day, or whatever it is. Being able to make more money through a source apart from your paycheck is very much a value of side hustle school. That's what we're all about. So that's why I like this story. I also like this guy, full disclosure.

He's also a friend of mine and I enjoyed the book he wrote that just came out, I believe, a few months ago. So anyway, stay tuned. This story is called Millennial Invest's Side Income for Passive Profits. In 2010, Grant Savadier was in his early twenties and unemployed with a net worth of $2.26. He had a college degree, but was going nowhere fast.

And the fact that he couldn't even afford a burrito left him feeling helpless and out of control. He knew something had to change sooner rather than later. Disheartened by his minuscule bank balance, he set himself an audacious goal. That goal was to save enough money so that he could retire when he wanted to, and not have to worry about money again. But the first thing to do was find a job.

He had to start earning money, at least some. He took a role at a digital marketing agency on a modest salary. At the same time, he started reading books about investing in personal finance. Over the coming months, he devoured so many books that he became somewhat of an armchair expert on all things money. That knowledge was the kaching he needed to set him on the right path.

Grant realized that if he invested every spare dollar he could, then, over time, his nest egg would start producing profit on its own from the interest. He ran the numbers and calculated if he could save $1 million, still no small feat, and invested it, he'd earn enough every year to cover all his expenses. It was ambitious, but at least now he had a target, a financial bullseye to aim for. Soon after, the same math made him realize there was no way he could achieve this goal just by working a day job. Even if he got a raise, it would take decades to save $1 million, an unacceptable time frame.

So Grant began looking for ways to make money outside that job. He was about to become a serial side hustler. He started by combing through Craigslist for opportunities. One stood out more than any other, and that was a law firm willing to pay $500 for a new website. It seemed like a good bit of money, and Grant was interested in learning WordPress.

He pitched for the job, over-delivered on the project, and then deposited the money in his savings. Since the law firm was happy, Grant asked for referrals, and was rewarded with an offer to present to a room full of lawyers from other firms. In no time at all, he picked up more business and was able to transition to charging tens of thousands of dollars. With pockets flush with cash, most millennials, and probably people from other generations as well, would splurge, they would buy a fancy car, they would take an Instagram-worthy trip. But not Grant, he stuck to his plan of saving and investing.

He poured his excess funds into different investments. One of his main choices was an index fund with Vanguard. When you buy an index fund, you own a small piece of hundreds of different companies on the U.S. stock market. That creates instant diversification, and the fund has very low fees to maximize returns.

It's one of the best and easiest ways to make compounding work, where the interest your investments make gets reinvested into buying more of the fund. And eventually, instead of just reinvesting the interest, you can withdraw the money to live off. If you think about it, it makes total sense. Since Grant was still working a day job, almost all of his side hustle income went into this investment plan. In fact, he was so dedicated that 80% of everything he earned went straight into the millionaire grand plan.

A year into the journey, he didn't stop at websites. The thrill of making income on the side was addictive, so he looked for more ways to do it. Grant tried dozens of ideas, including resolving concert tickets, flipping domain names, and freelance writing. Those were a few of the more lucrative side hustles Grant tried, but there was also dogwalking, flipping vintage mopeds, doing focus groups, cleaning boats, moving furniture, and even watching his neighbor's cat. But soon it became increasingly clear that building websites was the most lucrative, even more than watching the cat.

The main thing Grant liked about it was that it wasn't a direct trade of money for time. He noticed that a lot of people he knew would do things like walk dogs for a few hours a week or drive for Uber on Saturday nights. Those aren't terrible for making some spare money, but the profit ceiling is limited. Grant didn't like that. And that's why he went back to the web design focus, eventually adding marketing services and social media management into the mix.

Over the next few years, Grant made close to $200,000 a year selling those services to businesses in the Chicago area. Over the course of five years, he'd saved over a million dollars when combined with his salary. And now it was 2015. He'd achieved his goal of saving a million dollars and was earning enough after investing that money to cover all of his living expenses. So now what?

Well now it was time to teach what he knew. Grant started the Millennial Money Block, which wasn't intended to be a moneymaker in the beginning. He was just interested in sharing what he'd learned about financial independence and investing. He wrote and wrote and wrote some more. Over time, the blog began to reach a critical mass.

Grant was being featured in media outlets everywhere. He signed a book deal and the profits rolled in, almost by themselves. Currently, his blog is earning around $10,000 a month from advertising and affiliate commissions. And for now, that Millennial Money Block is Grant's main focus. It seems side of slang is so much in his nature that he'll keep doing it even when he's retired.

All right, notice that nowhere in this story do we focus on Grant's money saving strategies. He was all about making money. Clearly, he had some saving strategies because it's pretty hard to save 80% of your income, at least for most of us. But just consider this point. When you think about the fact that most of that income over time came from his side hustling earnings, not from his paycheck, maybe it's not so hard.

Because if he wasn't doing all those projects, he would have been like most people in the sense that his salary was his total income. So he went outside that traditional income source to eventually earn monthly and annual income that exceeded his salary. And that's where the savings fund came from. So in one way or another, if you want to achieve financial independence, you need to make more money. And maybe your goal isn't to make a million dollars in five years.

Maybe it's not to retire at a young age, whatever it is. But one of the reasons I think our community is so strong and why there's so much interest in these topics is it doesn't really matter what your goal is. Your objective in terms of creating that additional source of income, that's the same. We're all trying to do the same thing, perhaps for different reasons. So I will leave you with that today.

Also, I do want to give a shout out to Grant because he's got a great story. He's also got a book called Financial Freedom, a proven path to all the money you'll ever need. He's got it set up on the show notes page, but of course you can ask for it in any bookstore. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/893.

Come and check out everything I mentioned in the story. And of course, I'll be back again tomorrow with another one. Thank you so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.

From the Onward Project.