My 15 Sources of Income at Age 30 ($205,000/Month)

hey everyone my name is charlie chang and in today's video i'm gonna go over my 15 sources of income as a serial entrepreneur here in southern california i just turned 30 years old and i spent the last eight years working for myself now just to give you guys a little background i graduated from ucla in 2014 with a degree in psychobiology and of course i told my parents i was going to become a doctor so i applied and got rejected by over 20 medical schools i also didn't get hired as an emt and yeah it was a rough time because i had literally zero job prospects my parents were super disappointed i felt like a loser so i decided to try building my own businesses fast forward to today after many failures and lessons learned i'm pretty happy with where i am at my point in making this video is not to try and brag rather it's to try to inspire you to make money in non-traditional ways and sort of stray away from the typical nine to five career route that most people take that you guys is my passion in life okay so for each income source i'm gonna show you what i do how i got started and my advice if you want to do something similar thank you wellfront for sponsoring this video let's get started alright so my first source of income is amazon fba and if you don't know what amazon fba is it's basically a way for you and i to actually sell products on amazon basically what i do is i get products made overseas i private label them using my own brand import them over to the us where i get them sent to amazon's warehouses and from there people can actually buy these products on amazon.com i started this business in 2016 after i realized that i needed to buy something on amazon but there weren't many people selling it so after doing a couple days of research i decided to start my first product and luckily that product did really really well as of right now i think i have about six or seven active selling products although this is an income source that doesn't bring that much money anymore that's really because i focus my time and attention on my other businesses which we will talk about later in this video however i do think that ecommerce especially amazon fba is such a cool side hustle i've learned so much stuff doing this and you guys all the skills that i learned from this business have really helped me with everything i've been doing it is a pretty passive source of income meaning you spend a lot of time finding your product and setting it up but after that with the right processes in place it can run pretty smoothly i started the side hustle with about two thousand dollars and yeah like i said it's such a great side hustle and something that i really recommend you guys check out all right so my second source of income is hustle club puzzle club is a newsletter that teaches people how to become better entrepreneurs after seeing the success of companies like the hustle and morning brew i was like i want to create my own newsletter because i do have an audience i feel like i can create a pretty valuable newsletter and so that was how hustle club was born it's still pretty new i only have a few thousand subscribers on this newsletter but with it i'm able to monetize using affiliate links as well as brand placements i do have a team of writers that does help me out with this newsletter so it's pretty passive and i'd say that i only spend maybe one or two hours per week editing it yeah we talk about book takeaways side hustle ideas interviews with successful entrepreneurs and also entrepreneurial hacks so it's definitely a newsletter that i am really passionate about if you guys do want to sign up i'll leave a link down below in the description now to build out and host hustle club i use kajabi to build up the website as well as to handle the bulk email sentence it's a cool business that literally anyone can start and allows you to talk about something that you are passionate about okay so my next income source is affiliate marketing and i started this in the year 2020. basically i do affiliate marketing on three youtube channels my newsletter as well as all my social media accounts basically what affiliate marketing is is you're essentially acting as a salesperson for a company or product so whenever i promote a link on my youtube channel or on my other platforms and someone actually clicks on that link and signs up or buys i will get a small percentage of these sales i've worked with brands like weeble robinhood amazon real estate express moomoo and a lot more these are all services that i personally use or have used in the past and yeah i'd say that it's one of the best sources of passive income that i make for example you guys if you use my weeble link they're gonna give you guys six free stocks and they're gonna give me a small commission and so when i'm making a bunch of content and giving free value out people will use my links because you know it doesn't cost them anything extra and it does help support the channel and from that i earn a very steady income source you guys can sign up for platforms like share sale commission junction amazon associates impact radius these are some of the biggest affiliate marketing platforms that you guys can get on and you'll instantly be able to you know search for brands that you vibe with apply for their affiliate program and then start promoting their links i'll say that this income source does require a lot of eyeballs so whether you want to get those eyeballs on youtube or tick tock or instagram reels or blog or newsletter it doesn't really matter as long as you give out good value and information to a targeted niche and you pair that with an affiliate program that meshes really well with it then yeah in my experience that is what leads to conversions overall a super great income source that you guys can start doing literally right away but you will want to pair this with at least some type of online traffic all right my next income source is actually my real estate brokerage so in 2019 i started a real estate brokerage called core capital realty it's a full service residential brokerage here in california and we basically help clients buy and sell real estate now in the last year i have not grown this company as much as i should have and that's because i've been focusing on my other businesses but the way that i make money is from actually doing real estate sales myself which goes through this company or actually have agents within my firm that can actually go out buy and sell real estate for their clients and i will actually get a small percentage of these sales i started real estate in 2017 i was trying to buy my own place and i realized hey i could actually just get my real estate license learn a ton of stuff in the process and represent myself as a buyer for this home sale besides getting a three percent commission on that sale it really kickstarted this whole real estate career that i really got into over the next few years so after a couple years of that i actually got my own broker's license and from there on i just decided to start my own brokerage having this brokerage in place allows me to actually represent a buyers and sellers and keep a hundred percent of the commission since i am the broker myself so normally with a real estate license you have to work for a broker and the broker is the one that gets paid and then they send the money to you they always take a commission so that's why i was like i want to create my own brokerage and the great thing about my brokerage is that we actually give 100 of the commission to our agents while taking a very very small flat fee on top of it so yeah most agents are going to save a ton of money when they join a brokerage like mine unfortunately since i don't have the bandwidth to manage more agents i'm actually not taking on new agents at this time but i do think that at some point in the future i'll begin to grow this business more overall real estate is a really awesome career that i really recommend for a lot of people because it allows you to you know get to entrepreneurship work for yourself and create your own hours all right so since this video is about my income sources it makes sense to talk about wealthfront which is a platform i use to invest a significant chunk of my money welfare is a robo advisor investing platform that helps you invest and build passive income they do this by putting your money into a range of etfs that are hand selected by their team of experts you answer some questions and in a few minutes they build you a diversified portfolio that matches your goals it's like hiring a financial advisor except with a beautiful web and phone app and a super low 0.25 annual management fee that's about three dollars a month on a 15 000 portfolio spend your time building your business and investing in your passions instead of worrying about which investments to choose because software can handle that for you if you're looking for an effective way to invest passively this is the platform for you i use it many of my friends use it and has been such a valuable platform to keep me on track with my investing goals so if you're interested in automating your investments you can sign up through my link wealthfront.com charlie and get your first five thousand dollars managed for free i'll leave that link in the description box so be sure to claim your free bonus with the link below and start building your wealth today and now back to the video alright so my next income source is referrals and this store does relate to my real estate brokerage since i am personally not trying to do many deals at this time i can actually refer any leads i have to agents within my company or at other companies and when you do this you can actually get a percentage of their commission you can sort of think of it as affiliate marketing for real estate since i don't want to actually do these deals myself i'll refer them to a qualified agent that i know and in the industry the standard is a 20 referral fee so let's say i get a lead for someone that wants to buy in arizona since i can't actually do deals there i'll refer to someone i know there and that person is going to help them by ourselves if that agent makes let's say a 10 000 commission i'd actually be getting 20 of that or 2 000 so yeah another pretty cool way for people with a real estate license to make money so my next income source is youtube adsense adsense is probably the most direct way that youtubers can monetize their content and if you're watching this video you may have seen an ad that played at the start of the video or in the middle essentially advertisers are bidding to put their ads on people's videos on youtube and youtube is going to take a 45 cut and give us creators 55 of that revenue so in the typical month i'll probably make around 40 000 in adsense revenue and it's a really cool way to make money especially if you're making content on youtube because they literally handle everything for you i get a pretty cool direct deposit from google into my bank account now with my type of content obviously finance entrepreneurship investing these all have much higher ad rates than say something like gaming or food so you have your cpm cost per ml this is basically what youtube is bringing in as ad revenue for every 1 000 views on your channel on average my cpms are typically in the 40 to 50 dollar range and this basically means that i'm getting about 20 something dollars per 1000 views on my channel the reason why adsense is so cool and so passive is that one video that i can make can basically generate youtube adsense revenue for a long time i saw a view as virtual real estate right so i put out one single video and that video can continue to get views for many many years and bring in youtube adsense revenue that way adsense is not the biggest revenue source for most creators and that's because it does require a lot of views there are much better ways to monetize even for very very small content creators and so yeah i just sort of view youtube adsense as a bonus overall a very cool income source that any youtuber can get you just need to have 1 000 or more subscribers as well as 4 000 hours of watch time in the last year so after that you can actually apply for the youtube adsense program and after you're accepted you just need to enable ads on your videos and you're going to start making money right away all right so my next income source is photography and this is something that i've been doing since 2007. this has been the most consistent side hustle of my life and it's really what i credit for getting me into uh youtube and creating videos back in freshman year of high school i remember one of my friends getting their first camera and i remember seeing him take some pictures and thinking whoa that's super cool so thankfully i convinced my parents to actually buy me my first camera and from there on i just started learning so much i spent hours a day on photography forums i did so many free shoots in my free time yeah i realized that this is actually a very valuable high income skill that i can start doing to make money so later on in high school and during college i started doing a ton of portrait photography we're talking grad shoots head shots for actors family photo shoots dance photos really anything that involved photographing people i was there after i graduated college photography was probably one of the most important things i did that really kept me afloat at the time i was doing tutoring i was also doing photography while trying to start my business so the photography and tutoring those are my like main steady income flows i take that money and sort of just funnel it into my businesses many of which of course failed today i don't do that much photography anymore i'll maybe do one or two photo shoots per year but you guys if you're looking for a high income skill that's both fun but also extremely useful i think photography is one of the best things that i have ever done it's opened so many doors for me i've learned so much that has helped me in creating my videos today i've met so many awesome people that have become my future clients for my other businesses and yeah just an amazing hobby and side hustle that you guys can start learning right away you can start learning on your phone you can buy a cheap camera but yeah my big tip with this is just do a ton of free shoots for your friends focus on portraiture because that's where the money is and yeah after a while you should be able to charge between one to five hundred dollars per hour the next way i make money is through brand deals so brand deals are basically sponsored content that i put in the middle of my youtube video as you guys saw in this video i worked with wellfront so they actually paid me a flat fee to you know talk about their service for one minute and this is probably going to be one of the biggest revenue sources for most content creators i do brand deals on three of my youtube channels as well as on tik tok and instagram but i say that the majority of the brand deals i do are on youtube not every youtube video i make has a brand deal in it but i'd say that in most months i'll do anywhere from three to five brand deals i also do sponsored videos on my tick tock and with all those i'm getting a flat fee from the company sometimes i'll also do a sponsored story or post on instagram although for me those are pretty rare but for those i do get a flat fee for my channels i can get anywhere between maybe a couple thousand dollars a post all the way to 30 000 or more depends on the deliverables so like what type of content you're making for them as well as if you're giving them rights to actually use your content for their own advertising yeah i work with a ton of different brands on my channels this is one of the best ways to monetize for content creators and for me i handle all of my brand deals myself so basically i have an email on my youtube channel and brands can actually reach out directly to me from there i'll sort through emails only pick companies that i feel comfortable working with and then we negotiate on what they want me to create as well as the price i also do work with multiple agencies so a lot of those agencies will come to me with a deal and we'll just work it out like that the reason why i like to handle all this myself is because i know my channel the best i can get craved with pitching different video concepts and i don't have to pay anyone a 10 to 20 percent fee so overall a great way to monetize your content and if you are an aspiring content creator this will likely be one of your most significant income sources in the future next up is the ig reals fund so each month instagram actually incentivizes certain creators to put out instagram reels and so let me show you guys my professional dashboard just to show you guys how this works if i come down here to bonuses it's going to show me how much money i've made in reels this month so you can see i've made about 100 and this month i have a maximum bonus of twelve hundred dollars uh so if i do get up to eleven point zero two million views on my reels i will make that full one thousand two hundred dollars so as you can see i'm not even close to that and as a result i've made about a hundred dollars this is on the five instagram reels that i've posted this month so far this is going to be different for every creator and i will say that it's not going to be available for everyone however if you do get enough followers instagram will at some point incentivize you to start creating instagram reels and you'll be able to make money this way there's also the tick tock fund which allows you to make money through your tick tock videos and the youtube shorts fund which allows you to get paid through youtube shorts so for anyone that wants to create a personal brand or become a content creator i always tell people you need to do tick tocks and repost those onto instagram reels and youtube shorts this is the absolute best roi of your time because you can literally make one short video for tick tock and have it posted onto three different platforms yeah a little bit of a tangent but that's what i would do if i was getting into content creation so each month with the instagram reels fun i'll make maybe 200 maximum so not a lot but it does pay for my coffee my next source of income is coaching consulting so currently i do one-on-one zoom calls with people and i started helping create a plan to make more money start a side hustle build good habits or pretty much anything that they want to talk about i really find a lot of enjoyment working one-on-one with my viewers and it really does allow me to create a more personal connection with them i'm also super passionate about helping people transform their lives so that's why this is something that i really do enjoy that being said i am trading my time for money and so naturally i do need to charge a good amount of money right now a one hour coaching call costs five hundred dollars initially i did feel pretty bad charging so much money but i'll tell you guys this it's actually not worth my time to do these coaching calls i can easily make more money working on my other things rather than hopping on these calls but for me it just allows me to connect with my audience in a way that i normally wouldn't be able to do some people really want these calls i just really want to give them a way to have direct access to me plus i give everyone i talk to a direct action plan so i'm really able to help hold them accountable i'm also introducing a new coaching product where people can book a gym session with me and will basically work out at equinox mastermind about their business and life and then get a meal after so i found that coaching is really cool because it allows me to also learn while coaching and yeah if you guys have literally any type of skill you can start coaching people on platforms like fiverr upwork building your own landing page and doing it that way really the list is endless my next sources of income are my online courses so right now i have two online courses that i don't really promote much but they are the six figure youtube academy as well as the personal brand masterclass the first course teaches people how to create a successful youtube channel and the personal brand masterclass is my six week flagship program where i basically teach people how to build their personal brand my first course i started selling in november of 2020 and as of right now we have close to 200 students in my second course i have about 50 students as of right now and we started selling that course in april of this year now of course sales are a very very small percentage of my income i'd say around one to three percent for most months but it's a really cool passive income source that i can create once and have it generate sales for a few years for all my courses i use kajabi to create them it's basically a platform that allows me to build my landing pages handle all my email marketing as well as host all the videos for my course i can also build an online community through kajabi so it really is like an all-in-one platform that i really recommend for any course creator there's also cheaper options like thinkific but yeah you guys will find that it really does not matter what platform you guys use to host your course overall online education is booming and if you guys have any type of valuable skill or knowledge you can literally package that up into an online course and begin selling it the hard part for most people is not creating the course rather it is finding these students to join the course so that's where your marketing comes in however i will say that you do not need a big personal brand or audience online to be very successful with courses there's so much organic outreach you can do through instagram through linkedin even through running ads now this is something that i recommend everyone do because online education is booming and if you have a skill that you can package up into an online course you can seriously do really really well financially with it now i'm not the most successful course creator but i have friends that have done millions and millions of dollars in core sales i do think that with the trends we're seeing education is really shifting away from the traditional education system and more towards courses that you can do from your laptop or computer so if you guys are looking to get into this pick something that you know how to do extremely well film your videos and then find a platform to host it it's such a great learning experience and you have the potential to make a lot of money my next source of income is startup wise and this is a blog youtube channel that i started up this year basically we create free guides and tutorials that are aimed at entrepreneurs i think of everything on this list this is the one that i'm super excited about because i think has a ton of potential i've already created a bunch of really actionable tutorials on there i think that this channel has the ability to become an affiliate marketing powerhouse i will say that i've failed tons and tons of blogs before as well as youtube channels this is my third time trying to build a personal finance entrepreneurship blog i will say that the blog part is sort of like the supplement and the youtube channel is the main component of this business the blog portion is hosted on wordpress which is the most popular open source blogging platform in the world if you guys read any big blogs it's very likely that those are going to be hosted on wordpress what i did was i bought my domain through namecheap got web hosting through siteground and then bought a website template from there on i built the site with the help of one of my contractors and sort of tweaked the design until i was comfortable with it for every video i have on the startupwise youtube channel i will also have a corresponding blog article and within the video and the blog there are going to be affiliate links so that's the main way that this channel and this blog are going to be monetized very small portion of my income right now but i do think this has a lot of potential my next income source is making money through stocks and crypto now you could say that i've been making negative income recently especially with the markets down significantly this year but you guys i take a long-term approach to investing so i really don't care about the price going down or up in the short term i don't day trade and i also don't do any technical analysis for me i think it's a huge waste of mental brainpower and i'd rather spend that effort actually building up my own businesses i have a ton of resources on my channel helping people get started with investing but yeah my whole approach is to buy solid companies hold it for the long term and then just build up a ton of equity in your portfolio from there on you can actually borrow money from your stock or crypto portfolios and use that money to live that way you never have to really sell and create a taxable event right now is such a great time to buy because you know when people are not buying that's normally the best time to buy and when people are super hyped about the markets that's also usually not the best time to buy that being said besides making money from the long-term appreciation of stocks i do have a good portion of dividend stocks in my portfolio and with those i do make money from the dividend yields this is one of the most passive ways to have your own money work for you and that's why i really encourage for everyone watching this video get started investing today you can literally start with like a hundred dollars it doesn't matter how much you start with as long as you get into the habit of putting your money into investments that's what really matters and so yeah if you guys do want to get some free stocks i will put links down below uh to weeble and moomoo who are giving out tons of free stocks right now number 14 on the list is real estate income so long story short my sister and i purchased a property in 2017. it was a complete fixer-upper super gross we spent about 42 thousand dollars rehabbing the property and then i lived there for two years and then moved to orange county which is where i currently live right now it is rented out to my sister her boyfriend as well as another roommate so we are getting some positive monthly cash flow through this property we just refinanced last year at 2.875 interest rate so besides that positive cash flow from the rents we were collecting we're also building equity as the market appreciates i sort of like the view as a for savings account right you have a ton of equity built up into a property and even if you're not renting out your property to other people you can sort of view as a portion of every dollar you're paying for your mortgage is going to build your own equity in the home and you will recover that money at some point in the future it's great to diversify that's why i really recommend having real estate if you are an investor and it really is the ideal investment i d e a l i is for income d is for depreciation e is for equity build up a is for appreciation and l is for leverage all right so my last source of income is angel investing so pretty much what i do is i invest in early stage companies from there on we hope for the valuations to increase as the company continues to do well at some point you do hope for a cash out event which is where you can actually get your money back now a lot of my deals are actually from my network and that's why i say your network is so important and essentially people will come to me with these early stage companies that are looking for investor money and i'll typically write a check between five to fifteen thousand dollars as of right now i invest through road runner ventures multiple companies that i've worked with in the past refunder sweater and yeah there are tons of cool platforms that allow you guys to get into vc investing i will say angel investing is super risky most of the companies that you invest in are likely going to go to zero but there are going to be a few companies that let's say 100 to 200x in valuations and that is where you're going to make all your returns it really is a tail-driven world which means that a large portion of your gains and wins in life come from a small percentage of things that take place and so in this case while most of the companies that we invest in are going to lose a small percentage of them are going to really hit it big and that's what really results in the great returns that vc investing offers so as of right now i am making equity through my investments through vc but we have not yet had a cash out event so none of those gains having to actually turn into real money but i like to call this an income source because technically equity is income so yeah those are my 15 sources of income at the age of 30. i will say that having more income sources does not equate to making more money there are people that have you know one or two income sources but make far more money than me but for me i just love the fact that i can work on so many different things all at once i think i get sort of bored easily and having so many things that i'm working on really makes me feel fulfilled in life my income sources continually go up because i'm always looking for new opportunities i do think that at some point i will start to you know cut down on some of these things that aren't making as much money as the others and really focus all my attention on maybe you know five to ten different income sources but for now these income sources have seemed to work pretty well for me what i recommend doing is build one income source work on it until it can actually run by itself and then start building others you don't want to try building you know 10 15 income sources all at once because that is a recipe for disaster a lot of the income sources that i have do not require active participation and so my days are actually not all that stressful the point i want to give to you guys is to just start right now this has been my life since 2014 so a lot of people see the results and think that you know it all happened magically all at once definitely not you guys i have failed so many times i've lost so much money on many of my businesses but taking this path towards entrepreneurship and making money in non-traditional ways has been the best thing that i have ever done i wanted to make this video because i know a lot of you guys are going to be on this path towards a more traditional career and while that is okay i know a lot of you guys are going to want to have a lifestyle that's more like mine where you can wake up be on your own schedule and work on the things that you truly are passionate about i hope it is that you can create whatever you want in life you just need to get out there and start doing it anyways i really hope you guys enjoy the video if you guys have any friends that are wanting to get into entrepreneurship maybe share this video with them also if you guys want to support the channel make sure to hit that like button and also subscribe for more content just like this i make a ton of videos about personal finance entrepreneurship and investing thank you so much for your time and i'll see you in the next video peace [Music] bye

Channel: Charlie Chang

Views: 117,305

Keywords: charlie chang, income sources, make money from home, making money in nontraditional ways, multiple income streams, multiple side hustles, multiple sources of income 2022, multiple sources of income ideas, passive income, passive income ideas, serial entrepreneur, side hustle, sources of income, streams of income ideas, streams of income online, streams of income teenager, young entrepreneur, young entrepreneurs, income ideas, self employment ideas

Id: mGNjfzFtLOc

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022