Passive Income. Multiple Streams of Income. Money Trees. The Power of Compound Interest. Donald Trump, Robert Allen, Robert Kiyosaki, Jim Cramer, Peter Lynch, Suze Orman, etc... Any of these sound familiar? Maybe you even read an article, a book or visited a website regarding these people or topics. Maybe you’ve even attended a free seminar or even - gasp - PAID to attend a seminar. If so, you are not alone and yet you may still be wondering -

Does that stuff REALLY work?

I’ve found that there’s a long answer and a short answer to that particular question.

The short answer is an absolutely honest "Yes, but it won’t work for everyone."

The long answer is just as honest, but it’s a little more personal in scope: "Yes, but it is going to take a lot of your time, commitment, passion, self sacrifice, willingness to make mistakes and recover from them, willingness to educate yourself beyond anything you experienced in high school or college, willingness to do what is uncomfortable and (perhaps) unpopular, willingness to reach outside of your particular comfort zone and it still might not work for you."

While the long answer might seem daunting, if you have graduated from a high school level of education, you have a shot at making most of these concepts work for you. You might not ever be as rich as a Getty or a Rockefeller, but you can enjoy a more comfortable and secure financial position.

One of the biggest failing points, and often the point where many people fail and quit, is the underlying preparation that one has to do to even begin implementing any of these concepts. This underlying preparation is so fundamental that it will be something that will make the biggest positive change in ever in your life and you’ll continue to reinforce those fundamentals as your financial picture improves.

Once the underlying foundation is in place, you move on to working on small streams and structures and gradually grow these into larger and larger entities until you find that they are

generating income that is significant in your lifestyle. Often by this time, you are enjoying the activity that you need to do to maintain and grow these incomes streams so that it really no longer seems like work to you - you are doing what you enjoy and are (hopefully) passionate about.

Too many people make bad decisions during the start of their attempt at creating wealth and income; decisions that make their attempts almost impossible. Instead of understanding that their results was based on their choices, they instead claim that the ideas are all hype and scam. No one can tell them or prove otherwise; those who try are all labeled as people who have ‘drunk the Kool-Aide’ or ‘joined the cult’. It is their loss and if you are serious in succeeding in your pursuit of your own income streams, I’d advise you stop discussing it with them. Your journey will be tough enough without someone constantly telling you that you will fail.

The best result of attempting to create passive and multiple streams of income in your life is that, even though you reach for the stars, you might end up on the moon. So you missed having an annual income of $1 million bucks from your income stream, but you’ll have to settle for $100K instead. Yeah, $100 K a year for failing. Maybe it’s only $10K a year, but isn’t that better than just trying to get by on Social Security? So the attempt is better than doing nothing and the level of success is really up to you. It all starts, though, with the preparation.

You learned to crawl, to walk, to run and to jump. You learned to read and to do basic math. You learned to talk, maybe in more than one language. Most of those things are harder to learn than the knowledge you will need to learn to create your new income. You CAN learn the skills, vocabulary and information to create both passive income and portfolio income. Portfolio Income. That’s a new term for this column. As an example to show yourself that you can do this, research and learn what the difference between passive income and portfolio income is. Then ask yourself, ‘Why was the term ‘portfolio income’ used instead of ‘multiple stream’? There is a reason - if you send me a short write up of the difference between passive and portfolio income, I’ll tell why I used portfolio income.

To give you an idea of just how long it might take for a person to get their fundamentals done and to actually have passive/portfolio income, I can say that once we decided to take this journey, my family finished our basic fundamentals in three years. At the end of those three years, we already had small portfolio income streams working for us. While we consider these streams small, some one else may not; it’s all in the eye of the receiver. Our portfolio income was never less than $50.00 and never topped $300.00 in a single month for the last year that we were building our fundamental financial foundation. Presently, we are actively involved in purchasing our first home, which requires us to strengthen and increase our fundamental base. We find that talking about our finances is never a source of conflict in our lives together. On the contrary, we are both encouraged and excited about where we are and where we are striving to be. Both of us know the state of our finances and if something should happen to one of us, the other will not be in the dark.

I sincerely hope that you will give some of your time and attention to the process of creating either passive or portfolio in your life, and encourage you to attempt both. There are enough stars in the sky for everyone to aim at, and there’s still plenty of room on the moon.