Edit: I didn't realize how long this would be when I posted it, if you don't want to read the personal info, the title question is the only thing I'm asking.
I'm a 30 year old dude living with my wife, we're both in that awkward category of 'too disabled to work traditional jobs, but not enough to qualify for disability payments', not that we'd want to. I don't want to get too personal with the diagnoses but we both have genetic degenerative issues, hers is physical and mine is mental.
We've done the math for everything we require in life, and it looks like we'd need a combined $20k/year (post-tax) to cover all of our basic needs, and a combined $31k/year (also post-tax) to live comfortably and save some too, including the recommended 15% for retirement. These figures would drop considerably if we owned a home.
She can't work at all, and I can work jobs that are part time and simple (I washed dishes for a while, I managed the front desk at a library for a while, I worked in a PC repair shop for a couple years, stuff like that). None of these jobs paid more than $16k/year, but I was able to put about $12k in a Roth IRA during the 6-7 years I did this.
My last job made me $35k but it was a one year contract I lucked into because the hiring manager was my buddy. Luckily for me, the hiring manager was my boss and he had my back, he quickly realized I wasn't the right man to do the job I was hired to do and had me moved to another department where I was mostly building and recycling computers in the warehouse. My wife and I saved $15k that year and we've been living off that since then, but after almost a year of this, our funds are running low.
I'm aware that things like MTurk and Redbubble exist but I wouldn't call that kind of income "building wealth". I make about $20/month doing surveys and $45/month on Redbubble, but when the labor and effort factors in, I'm making around 75 cents an hour. I'm aware that a lot of people will recommend going into software, but to be honest I don't think I have the mental capacity for it. I've taken a few programming classes and I get HTML/CSS, but as soon as they break out the arrays and math, I'm lost. I was on an IEP as a kid and never did math higher than geometry.
I know we'll never become "wealthy" as far as this sub is concerned, but the way I see it if we can hit that $31k (post-tax) mark, it'll all start falling into place because we'll be able to save more and the thought of 'never having enough' will be a thing of the past. We're both decent at the arts, I paint landscapes and she's a classically trained violinist, but I'm not sure you can make a living with either of those. I'd be fine with working from home, but from my research a lot of the 'work from home' style jobs require advanced technical knowledge and the ability to communicate that knowledge to a layperson.
We've been looking (not seriously, just kinda for fun) at a $70k fourplex about two hours away from us, and that'd be interesting because we could live in one of the apartments and rent out the other three, making us a total of $13-1400/month while only paying $260/month in mortgage, plus property taxes and repairs. This is kind of a pipe dream though because $70k is a lot. My wife has also proposed the idea of buying a motel, putting in a laundry room, and then permanently living in one of the rooms.
I guess my question is, are there any semi-passive (i.e. non-traditional) ways to make this kind of money? It looks like in order to do this with index fund style investments alone, I'd need to have close to $500k socked away, which I don't see ever happening. What are our options here?
Submitted September 08, 2019 at 07:03PM by olwhiskeyjack https://ift.tt/34zEvMQ
