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What Happens When You Leave Your Job or Business Abruptly

I started working in my early teens. I didn’t make any significant money for doing so but it’s been a while. I received my first pay-check in 2004. I am 30 years old now and I can say I’ve worked for more years than I have not.

Despite being in a career for this long, I have never had a day job. Not even for 1 day. So I don’t know how that works. To top this off, my own company is also a distributed one with a headcount of less than 5 and a couple of freelancers. So I’ve never seen the other side of the picture clearly. May be there’s something I’m missing out in a day job, I absolutely don’t know about that.

However, thinking on those lines something popped up in my head and I thought to lay it out here.

When you leave your job abruptly, what happens? If after 7 years of working, you have decided to leave your job today, you may be given some bonuses I suppose for staying around long enough. I don’t know what that number would be but I suppose it won’t be a lot or that it would depend a lot on case to case basis.

When you’re asked to leave your job unwillingly, severance may be offered? How much does that sum into? Internet suggests 2-4 weeks per year that you’ve worked. Let’s average that out to 3 weeks. Since you’ve worked for 7 years, this could be mean you’re getting 5 months of salary without working. That’s not too bad.

What happens though when you leave your business abruptly? If it’s a very very small internet business doing anything between $10K-$100K per year. You will easily flip it for 30x monthly multiple. If it’s slightly bigger than that, but still a small business doing $100k-$1MM per year, I suppose you’ll get over 40X monthly multiple. If your business is larger, solid, more consistent and has been around for 7 years, you can hope to get paid even more than that. If it’s an offline business, I suppose you will get paid a lot more than what you get paid for internet businesses today.

Assuming you have a steady job giving you 6 figures per year i-e $100,000 USD, for having a business of the same size you’re looking at an extra $300,000+ for abruptly leaving it. I don’t think any bonus or severance pays that much. Educate me if my understanding is incorrect.

As humans, we’re so focused on the short term, living in today and thinking everything in the terms of daily and monthly gains, that we forget about the value that is created outside of today. The value that is created outside of today can often be much larger than today. A reminder of that is necessary and I make every effort to constantly remind myself.

Thanks for reading.

How Can You Be Wealthy?

Each person looks at this term differently. Probably for some, it means being able to afford Lamborghinis without a second thought. Or being able to stay in presidential suite in Las Vegas. Not for me. I don’t think of wealth like that. Because if you do think of it like that, then there’s always going to be someone ahead of you, there are always going to be things you can’t afford and this is a never ending cycle.

I define wealthy differently. For me, it’s the ability to pay all your bills on an automated basis, without working. In bills I generally include the unavoidable bills including rent, utilities, grocery, school, medical etc and some leeway for vacations, gifts, shopping etc.

I recommend you to find this numerical figure. It’s extremely important to do so. For example, you have calculated that your annual expense end to end is Rs 2 million. This means Rs 165,000 per month or approximately $1079 per month. If you can create a way to generate Rs 165,000 a month without working, you’re wealthy. You are financially free. You can actually retire, regardless of your age.

The second step is finding a way to acquire assets that generate $1079 a month. The mistake that most people make is they don’t wait to spend on luxuries. I want to spend on luxuries too, and I feel everyone should be able to do it. But not without following the right framework.

The right framework requires earning money, saving it, acquiring assets, generating income and spending that income. What most people do is earn money and spend it. Doing what most people do is a perfect way to work until you die. Doing what I recommend you to do is a perfect setup to retire between 5-15 years.

To generate $1079 per month, you can acquire (or build) SaaS/Blog/App for $32,370 (at 30X monthly multiple). If you’re more into “real assets” you can acquire property that does 5% per year for $258,960 or you could invest in stocks that generate annualized average 8% per year by investing $161,850 in stocks. Or you could do a mix of these things by diversifying and invest a total of $100,000 to generate $1079 per month.

It may sound tough, but it really isn’t. Especially if you’re young and have the ability to save more. All you have to do is have a clear goal: A) the numerical figure that you need every month, and B) the numerical figure required to invest to generate ‘A’ every month. Once you have these numbers, you need to see how much can you save each month, and calculate the number of months it’s going to take you to save until you’ve hit ‘B’. By doing so, you’ll have a set date for you to become wealthy.

I recommend you to read the book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. It’s not the best finance book to read, but it is the best first finance book you should read.

Winning The Passive Wealth Generation Game With Blogs

When I first got involved in the digital space, my family was both supportive and skeptical. My father wanted me to go ahead, experiment and spend my time on this newfound hobby which he thought was productive. At the same time, my mother although also supportive, thought this was at best only a hobby. I was also occasionally reminded that this could be a great way to make an extra buck, but only that.

Over the long term, I have come to realization that internet is way more than extra buck. On the contrary, it is the greatest wealth generation tool ever made in the human history. Let me explain.

Just like any business, an online business also has customers or consumers. It also has some walk-in traffic and some footfall, often more than the physical counterpart. In fact I do not know of any physical business in the world with a potential footfall of 3 billion people. And just like any business, an online business is going to last for at least as long as you’re going to serve your customers, and sometimes even longer.

A few days ago, I posted a story about a failure that made me over $17,000 passively. Today, I wanted to give you another case study. In December of 2013, I published my last post on my music blog Koolmuzone. Over the past 6 years, Koolmuzone has continued to serve views day after day. In fact, yesterday it still served nearly 20% of the views that it served in Nov 2013 exactly 6 years ago. Which means the business could still potentially be earning 20% of the monthly revenue years after it was closed. And since closure, it has served content 15,785,164 times.

Koolmuzone Traffic Stats, Nov 2019

I can’t think of a better way of building wealth than years worth of free passive money and if you want to win this game, go ahead and make your first app, blog, Facebook page, vlog or website. Deploy it, fail or win, and let the passive number game be in your favor.

Fiverr Is Awesome, But It Can Ruin Your Life

This blog post isn’t about Fiverr in general. It’s about freelancing, which I think is a great place to kick-start your internet journey from. I mentioned Fiverr over other platforms because it starts as low as $5 and that’s a great point to start from. But I’ll get back to this later.

Back Story

As already mentioned many times over, I started in 2002 with a homepage, a music site and a web-forum. Given that I didn’t have $50 as a teen to buy a domain or a hosting, it was difficult to get started. Many other young Pakistanis and people from other emerging countries face the same problem even today; investment. They don’t have money as little as $50 to start their internet business. Which is why I love Fiverr. As a kid, I didn’t know you could earn a living on the internet by providing services. I only knew about the display ads and running a website needed investment. That has changed drastically over the past many years.

Why I Love It

You can basically get started today if you know anything at all. If you know a certain language, you can translate. If you are a fluent speaker, you can provide voice-over services. If you can click, I think you’ll find a job for that too. For clicking thousands of times everyday. And I love all of this because it is the simplest way to get started. It requires no money, little skill, and you can start selling. This is why I love Fiverr.

I also love Fiverr because selling services is not just about having a skill. It’s also about marketing, sales, customer service and more. And running a gig prepares you for all of that. You learn everything about selling end to end. Along the way you can make some mistakes, and it’s all going to be fine. Your customer only pays very little and expects a few mistakes. He’s gonna be some-what patient with you. Fiverr teaches you a lot. I think the hardest part is making the first $100 online and Fiverr makes that easier. $1,000, $10,000 and beyond comes fairly easily compared to the first $100.

So if you don’t work online at the moment, go ahead and sign up at Fiverr straight away. But if you’re already working as a freelancer, keep reading.

Why I Hate It

As mentioned already, I think Fiverr is a nice starting point, but just that; a nice starting point. I believe in value creation over the long-term, passively or actively, but over the long-term. None of that happens on Fiverr, or any other freelancing platform unless of course you’re running an entire company or agency over the freelancing platform.

One of the greatest investors ever, Warren Buffett, says

If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.

I believe in that. In making money while you sleep and it’s just not possible if you are only trading time against money. Time is limited and it is going to only make limited money for you and of course only while you’re awake and working.

Blogs, on the other hand, could provide long-term value. You could keep making money for many years even if you stop updating, or leave altogether. You could also sell it in the end for at least 20X your monthly profits. Software as a Service would also build long term value for you. Instead of providing your service individually and only once, you could be offering it to everyone again and again building not only nice monthly recurring revenue but a great value asset at the same time. Youtube channel, Instagram, Facebook Page; all of these can create long-term value. It doesn’t just have to be one of these things, but I highly encourage you to build a product or a user-base, no matter what kind.

Because I feel freelancing is great, but products are the shit!

My Sweetest Failure Made Me $17,239.85

Everyone says it’s great to fail. They say if you don’t fail enough times, you stand no chance at succeeding. I agree with that. But this post isn’t about that. It’s about one particular failure. A blog that I abandoned. Yet, it netted me $17,239.85. Which by the way is not an arbitrary figure. I exported it from my bank statement to know exactly how sweet was my failure.

Sometime in 2010, I started a technology blog. I was supposed to write about jailbreaking iPhone, rooting Android and all the other crazy things that you can do with your phones. Except that I don’t do crazy things with my phones and I had no interest in writing in this area. I started it because I heard the CPMs (Revenue per 1000 ad impressions) in tech are great (and they were). I also started it because many of my friends and colleagues were doing great with their tech blogs. The blog was inspired by Taimur Asad‘s RedmondPie and Zawad Iftikhar‘s SegmentNext. Since it wasn’t something I was passionate about, despite a good start, I just didn’t have the patience to run it for the long haul.

Stats for RewriteTech since inception till date of publication

Personally I gave this blog about two weeks. Later I hired some writers and let them contribute content with no oversight by me but eventually stopped that too since I couldn’t see any growth. Over the past 9 years, I have passively generated $17,239.85 (average $160/mo) after costs from the leftover traffic that Google kept sending in small numbers. Like someone said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. This post is about that. About taking a shot. Almost missing it. And still walking away with a pile of cash. Could it happen, if I didn’t take this shot? Will it happen, if you don’t take a shot?