Multiple Deserts of Income

Multiples Deserts of Income - Side Hustle Canada 

I once read that we (the financially savvy and conscious) are supposed to have 7 streams of income at the very least or at best 10 streams of income. Living through a pandemic like Covid19 has made many more of us aware and conscious of this fact. How do I know?

Flashback to 2019 and before when the financial pundits were preaching about multiple streams of income aka side hustles and it fell largely on deaf ears. Now flash forward to life in the pandemic. 

People who were once unconcerned about anything other than their 9 to 5 or part time jobs have flocked to the various side hustle jobs like Skip The Dishes, Uber, Lyft and InstaCart etc. In some Canadian cities and locations these networks have such a surplus of drivers and couriers that they’ve either stopped/paused accepting new couriers, waitlisted applicants, come up with systems to reward the more highly motivated couriers, offered less work to each driver to spread out earning opportunities across the network or even a combination of each of these things. 

Long story short, in this present Corona age, supply is far outpacing demand for certain logistics jobs and especially because certain industries are experiencing closures because of government mandated lockdowns. That said, there are so many ways that your once flourishing streams of income could turn into multiple deserts of income. (I could also get into those who have taken a beaten from the stock market in a next post)

The question remains, what do we do in uncertain times when our once reliable flowing streams of income have dried up or slowed to a trickle?

I want to give (2) suggestions:

1. Conserve 
2. Pivot

Conservation

When resources are limited we conserve or save what we have or have access to. This means eliminating unnecessary spending and being mindful of not wasting what we have. At the beginning of the pandemic we saw that people did quite the opposite. Instead of conserving, people were panic buying and stock piling consumer goods like toilet paper, hand sanitizers etc. and of course food products. We all need to eat and be clean, but in the panic few stopped to strategize about how to cut back or conserve on certain luxuries because let’s face it and state it - in an economic crisis toilet paper is a luxury. Investing in a bidet hose for example would have saved $$ on buying toilet paper in bulk. Also comparatively few caught on to the DIY antibacterial hand soaps and hand sanitizers. Not to mention the reports that surfaced of increased sales in luxury items like swimming pools, trampolines and washing machines. 

Pivot

I recently read a book by the late Spencer Johnson called ‘Out of the Maze’ a sequel to his popular ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ In ‘Out of The Maze’ he tells of a character whose friend ‘made it out of the maze’ but the character himself felt stuck, starving and left behind in the maze. In essence, while the character’s friend changed his mindset and found his way out of the maze; this stuck character was using the same old tools and mindset to forage for food (cheese) in the maze, even though these methods had stopped working and the food supply had dried up. There was no more cheese to be found in the maze and all he knew to eat was cheese. 

Eventually the character had to try new food like apple and learn that he could pivot - try something different in order to survive. This shift in perspective eventually led to him finding his way out of the maze and into a land where there was a surplus of food and opportunity. In essence, he never gave up and he kept searching until he found what he needed and it required a major shift in his perspective first. 

What’s something new you can try or that you’ve been wanting try to create your 7 flowing streams of income?