Earning a Dollar a Day
What's the Value of $1 a day?
A common goal among people looking to make extra money is to earn a dollar a day online. It isn't unusual for people to spend one hundred hours or even much more to reach this milestone.
Yet this isn't enough extra income to make us rich, and for many people it will barely boost their standard of living.
So why do so many of us put so much effort into earning a dollar a day online?
To Buy More Stuff?
Earning a dollar a day lets us buy more stuff. There are still many things we can buy for a dollar, and we can buy one of those things every day if we earn a dollar a day! If you're not convinced, here are 100 Great Things You Can Buy For / With A Dollar $1.
There are even better things we can buy with earnings of a dollar a day plus patience. We'll earn $30 a month, which is enough to buy almost every book on Barnes & Noble's Top 100 list. After 13 months, we'll have enough to buy an iPad 2 from Walmart.
Poverty Factoids
An estimated 1.3 billion people around the world live on less than $1 a day.
Half of the world's people (nearly 3 billion) live on less than $2 a day.
To Make Up for Our Lack of Savings?
Earning a dollar a day is worth a surprising amount of money when you think about it in terms of how much we'd need to save to earn the same amount of interest.
If we were to invest our dollar a day earnings in a mutual fund with no minimums, our account would be worth $5,264 after 10 years, assuming an average yield of 7%.
To buy a 1-year certificate of deposit (CD) that pays a dollar a day in interest, we'd need to invest $51,408, assuming the CD pays the national average interest rate of 0.71%.
To Experience the Thrill of Earning Passive Income?
For many of us, the reason we're willing to put so much effort into earning a dollar a day is the thrill of earning passive income.
Passive income is income received on a regular basis for which we don't need to put in much effort. While it may take real effort to reach the dollar a day milestone, the beauty of many online activities is we continue to receive that income without further effort.
The specific amount of passive income is not the point. Rather, for people accustomed to making money only in exchange for hard work, the point is we are receiving any real amount of passive income. The dollar a day threshold is only a confirmation that we are receiving real money, instead of mere pennies we wouldn't even bother to pick up.
To Validate Our Writing Skills?
For writers, perhaps the most important reason we seek to earn a dollar a day online is that it validates our writing skills. It'd be difficult to argue that we have good writing skills if nobody reads what we write. Upon reaching the dollar a day threshold, we know that at least some people care enough about what we write to regularly stop by.
