How I Make a Living as a Minimalist without a 9 to 5 job

what does it mean to be financially independent having the resources to deal with life's ups and downs to have passive income to sustain our current lifestyles to have enough to pay for our expenses without working a full-time job [Music] it's common advice to save a percentage of our income and to invest for our future to reach financial independence but i felt like i was blindly following this advice without actually having a goal in mind or even considering the path i wanted to take to get to this specific goal if this was what i was working towards i really wanted to paint a picture of what financial independence looked like for me and my husband to tell you a little bit about myself i'm 30 years old married and we live in one of the most expensive places in the u.s we just paid off our student loans and have no other consumer debt except for our two mortgages we don't have kids at least not yet but we both agree to take care of our parents as soon as they retire about two years ago i made a decision that not only changed my life but put me closer to that financial path i wanted to take here is my story one of the questions i get asked the most is what i do for a living or what do i do for work i know that this is going to be a little bit different than my normal videos but i thought it was important to share this part of my life that's not always shown on camera and hopefully it will give you a more complete picture and please remember that this is just my perspective my story my journey and if you're on a similar path then hopefully this will be helpful for you but if not then hopefully it will just give you an insight to how i'm able to afford this house this life on maui without working a traditional nine-to-five job so before we get started a little background story so i moved to hawaii about six years ago from san diego and i only had about a couple of thousand dollars to my name for my previous teaching job i really had no idea what to expect i had never visited hawaii before i had never researched into the job market but this was my new home because this is where my husband was so i was busy looking for any kind of job that i thought i could qualify for during this time i was working for an art gallery just to kind of sustain myself but i was going through many different interviews to find a job that was right for me and i think it was about a month or two after i landed a job at a non-profit agency this was kind of a dream job for me because i had a chance to directly work with the community and for a cause that i felt really passionate about and through this job i made a lot of really important connections which is very important here on maui i had many roles in this job but my primary role was to develop a curriculum to teach personal finance and real estate to low-income families so i partner with different non-profit agencies but also teacher curriculum to our youth and i absolutely fell in love with this job fast forward to today i am still with the company but about two years ago i decided to reduce my hours and go part-time now there's a lot of different reasons for why this happened but my boss was really supportive and really encouraging and she was able to allow me to be a contractor for the company and also work remotely and mind you this all happened before 2020 and i'm so glad that i decided to take everything all my curriculum online and teach virtually because of the steady income and the long employment history it really helped us to qualify for our mortgages i mean my husband still works full-time but having the rental supplement supplementary income really made me feel like it was okay for me to step down to part-time job so let's talk about my rental income we first bought this condo in 2018 and we saved about 15 to put down as a down payment for this condo a lot of it was from my husband's 401k retirement savings some of it was from just our monthly savings and at the time we were getting married and we specifically requested from our friends and family if they were willing and if they could to contribute money instead of giving gifts for our wedding it took us no time to find this place i absolutely loved it it was one of the first open houses that we went to but i love that it was so bohemian i love that i could walk and bike everywhere from this location but still it was a fixer-upper and there was a lot of work to do we were really excited to kind of make the place our own and see what we could do with it during this time my husband and i really wanted to understand real estate better and so we've read so much about real estate investing and how to house hack how to build equity and almost immediately we decided that we're gonna buy another property so we reduced all of our expenses we stopped eating out traveling miscellaneous expenses from our budgets were cut off so that we could put that money towards paying down our principal balance on the condo so within a year of owning that condo we really built up equity we had paid years worth of mortgage just within that one year so we decided to pull equity from this condo to use as a down payment for the current house that we live in now during this house search we were a little bit more savvy we wanted to look for a house with a cottage on the property so that we could eventually house hack or have some rental income coming from it so we signed up for every single alert we talked to agents we went to open houses and i think on page 8 or page 10 on zillow we found a house that really needed a lot of work but had the perfect layout for what we wanted to do for those of you who are not familiar with house hacking it's basically when you live in one of your multiple units of your investment and have renters and the other units to help you pay for the housing expenses so we live upstairs in our three-bedroom house and we rent out the downstairs we also have a cottage in the back that we rent out and of course our initial condo as well to save money we did all of the renovations ourselves with the exception of cutting down a huge pine tree in the front and also a plumbing job that needed to be done downstairs i managed the properties if there are any problems with the neighbors the appliances the plumbing electrical whatever the problem is i am their first point of contact also if there is a vacancy i am the cleaning person i list it stage it sign the lease and everything else in between hopefully there is not a lot of high turnovers because we absolutely love our tenants right now and we're so thankful for them as you guys might know my third source of income is from youtube and youtube is in itself has multiple streams of income adsense you have sponsorships you have affiliate links and different programs you can do merchandising there are so many different opportunities with this route however i didn't know how long it would take me to reach that stage or if this was going to be sustainable um there's a lot of uncertainty going down this path but i'm so happy that i took a chance and now this has become one of my primary source of income what i really love about youtube is that i can be flexible with my time from beginning to end making a video it takes me about 40 hours on average but i love that i have the flexibility of doing it whenever i want to for example you guys know that i am a night owl i like to work in the evenings and it is such a luxury and of course this isn't possible without you guys so this is why i am always so thankful and grateful for you guys watching my videos liking them commenting and sharing i really am thankful for you guys to allow me to create more videos i just want to acknowledge that where i am now this didn't just happen because of minimalism or just having the right mindset while that might help it's a lot of different things like the right timing opportunities support just pure luck and also willing to work hard it's just a combination of these factors and i am just so grateful that i'm able to live this lifestyle i hope you guys enjoyed today's video i hope that it gave you some insight as to how i'm able to afford living here on maui i hope that i was transparent enough if you have any other questions i would love to answer in the comments below as always and until next video take care guys and i'll talk to you very soon [Music] bye you

Channel: Malama Life

Views: 795,803

Keywords: How I make a living, 9 to 5 job alternatives, 9-5 job motivation, minimalist, Minimalism, Minimalist life, Minimalism financial independence, financial independence minimalism, Financial independence, Financial independence retire early, 50 Ways To Make a Living Without A Job, how to make a living without a job, How to make a living from home, How to make a living in Hawaii, How to make a living without a full time job, make a living from home, make a living online, work from home

Id: htfP3RY2Lv0

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021