How does one decide which passive income stream to follow? It is already difficult enough to make up our minds considering the fact that we all likely have a steady/active source of income (full time work).
Whether you work full time, attend school full time, or run a family, you only have a minor fraction of your day to devote to your secondary income source. This time usually cuts into your sleep or time spent with loved ones. Therefore, a lot of though goes into which source of passive income we will decide to follow.
The Paradox of Choice- Why More is Less is an excellent book written by Barry Schwartz. I was going to do a full blown book review but I opted to try something else. I wanted to apply a few of the main concepts/theories to passive income and the decision making process involved.
New choices all of the time
Every time you go online you read about new ways of earning an income. You read about all of the different ways that internet entrepreneurs are making money (and lots of it!). You learn about emerging real estate markets. You learn about hot new stocks on the rise. There is a great wealth of information available on the internet that gives us about a million different passive income options.
Every day we are bombarded with more potential income earning sources. We have a difficult time establishing which income sources are truly important and which are merely interesting. Most of these new sources simply lead to information overload. Information overloads leads to us not making any decisions at all.
Missed opportunities for passive income
By running a blog you take time away from another passive income stream. Instead of writing for your blog you could be running an eBay store or managing real estate properties. Instead of investing massive amounts of money in real estate and closely watching the property, you could be focusing that energy towards writing an eBook on a profitable niche.
While trying to earn an income from blogging, I have seen many internet entrepreneurs start successful websites where they sell a service. Pat from Smart Passive Income wrote a few eBooks and did a few audio recordings that have been extremely profitable for him. These are all missed opportunities for the rest of us that are trying to earn an income through other sources.
Choice and Happiness
Do you want the stress that comes with investing a large amount of your savings into a passive income stream?
Are you willing to spend over 8 hours a day monitoring your blog?
Will you be happy with an income that fluctuates on a monthly or even weekly basis?
These are all choices and decisions that we make regarding our passive income that will ultimately affect our happiness.