Monday morning I sat down at my desk and opened up my email. Among the ones that stood out was this one below from Shiran of Monaco. She, along with some other readers have asked how I design my life, especially with regards to making money and where it comes from. In her email she asks 4 excellent questions which I will answer in this post.

• What exactly was your 9 to 5 job before ?
• What sort of business provides your passive income?
• How much does [living in Thailand] cost you monthly ?
• How much do you earn?

My thanks to Shiran for the great email.

Why Read

If you want to hear my answers to the above questions then you should read this post.

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The Email

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Hi !

I love to read your blog… After reading 4hrs week book I was looking for someone who applied and damn, you really make me jealous ! Finally it is possible

What was exactly your 9 to 5 job before ? And what sort of business provides your passive income actually ?

I read your article about your day in Thailand… nice but how much does it cost you monthly ? and how much do you earn ?

Shiran from Monaco

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Some Up Front Truths

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I love Tim Ferriss’ take on living and how he designs his life, it is exceptional and truly inspiring. However, the one thing that I feel he does not address in his book is a couple of home truths. If you are reading Tim, please don’t hunt me down (but get in contact – that would be cool)

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He and I are in the fortunate situation where we are able to live relatively selfish lives, at least from a lifestyle design point of view anyway.

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I makes it easier for me to live the life I currently do because of three things:

I am not responsible for anyone but myself – I currently have no family that I am responsible for and no relationship partner to think of. I have close friends but we each are able to live our own lives.

I don’t really own anything – I have no mortgage, no debts, no car and very little stuff. In fact the only three things I own that are not disposable are My Macbook, My Camera and My Watch.

I have a fallback – I am fortunate that I have a family home where, if everything goes horrible wrong, I will always have somewhere to go back to and start again.

This isn’t to say that if you are not these things then your options are more limited, of course they are not, I just think it is something worth bearing in mind, I have been fortunate.

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What exactly was your 9 to 5 job before?

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Before I quit I used to work in the Oil and Gas Industry for an International Swiss Engineering Company called Sulzer. I was employed as a project manager for their new business Pumping Systems arm and was in charge of managing the manufacture of various pumping systems that are used to extract oil from the ground and send it round the worlds pipelines.

If I am honest, as far as a job goes, it was a very good one. I was given alot of responsibility, travelled abroad a lot to meet with clients and suppliers, didn’t have anyone looking over my shoulder or checking up on me and the days were challenging and full of variety. I also had the opportunity to work with some very talented people and teams.

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I had a great boss and I was able to really use and develop my gifts in relationship management, leadership and problem solving.

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It also had the added bonus of a relatively fat pay check.

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(So Why Quit?)

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Thought I would throw the extra question in, hope you don’t mind, to give some idea of why I left it behind me should anyone be thinking about doing the same. The next post on Thursday will look at how to quit a job like a champion – honorably and without burning bridges.

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On the surface I guess it could be said that I had a good thing going and I (probably) would have been set for the long term.  Good Job, Good Paycheck, Good Life. Check. So where is the problem?

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Well, to me, The key problem was threefold. 1, this was not the lifestyle I had dreamed of when I was starting my first businesses out of university and exploring my own ideas. 2. I was firmly in the rat race with very little time and energy, once I had had some sort of social life, to explore my own creativity and my ideas in the business were being crushed by bureaucracy. And most importantly 3. It was a GOOD life but it was not a GREAT life.

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I have always been of the opinion that you should risk the GOOD to go for the GREAT.

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At the time I had my reasons for being in the UK and so I learnt all I could from the job I was in and lived below my means so that I could save. My second post in the “How to be Rich” series entitled “How to be Rich Stage 2 – Understand The Three Financial Equations Of Wealthy Living” will be up on Saturday and goes into more detail on this.

My ultimate decision to quit the job was not a rash unthought out one, I had never intended to be in the rat race long very long (don’t tell my old boss), but realised that there were things I needed to learn and I was slightly sick of living on beans and noodles as a skint entrepreneur.

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Following the biggest and worse event in my life my reasons for staying in the country vanished overnight and I handed in my notice.

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The rest, as they say, is history and I have never looked back.

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What sort of business provides your passive income?

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Ok, to answer this one I really need to give you some history and then how I am designing my life.

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I used to want to build and control empires.

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I wanted to be the next RIchard Brandson. To be the top dog, have many companies and be the brand of those companies. To be the genius behind the ideas and to make all the decisions – to be in total control. That was before I had a small revelation.

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Being the brand and making all the decisions is great except for one small problem – You have to BE the brand and make ALL the decisions.

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This is where 16 hour days and sleepless nights come from. Constantly having to run everything and make all the decisions to grow your empire larger and larger. There is no freedom in this and, in my opinion, this situation is worse than the Rat Race. On realizing this my life goals changed overnight.

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Now I want to build flexible organic cash streams.

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My passion is helping people and I cannot help people if I am spending all my time building my empire, no matter how rich I become. Organic cash streams make me money whether I am working, sleeping, at home or abroad on holiday. They are not time and input dependent.

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My ultimate aim is to have my life structured like the image below. Myself in the centre and  many un-leveraged cash generating assets that create my income flow, whether I am working or not.

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I really only want to be doing things that I enjoy , if what I do happens to make me money also then all the better, if not I should have enough money coming in from other sources that it does not matter.

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Take this blog for example, maybe I will find a way to monitise it sometime in the future but if not it is a labour of love and luckily I have the time to play with it.

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My income streams are not all businesses, they are varied.

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Some are royalty based from patents for products I own and sell to companies while others are from random avenue such as modeling. Having one or two passive income streams that gives you enough to live on frees your time from a job and you will be surprised how many other ways then present themselves to you for making money.

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Even if you don’t currently have any passive income, saving so you have enough to live for 6 months without a job will give you enough time to create one.

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But in answer to the question, my current company EFS LTD is a emergency food distribution company that I own with my great business partner and friend James Blake (other guy in photo). EFS sells long life food packs and water filtration products to UK customers.

It is the first of what I hope is many more small cash generating assets that I will own and has been designed to functions in such a way so as to be completely self running without my input.

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It is still in the early stages and so requires some attention but hopefully not for too much longer.

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All the work, from the website through to sales, supplier order placement, packaging and  distribution, and marketing is outsourced and based on a percentage commission. This makes it easy to benchmark wages and everyone involved in the system benefits from it’s success. It is also organic, the more product we sell the more money everyone makes. In this particular business, the profit margins are very good and so people who work for me can make a lot of money…and I am happy that they do. After all, the more money they make for themselves, the more money they make for me.

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Treat people well and they will treat you well. I am in the business of sharing success.

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How much does [living in Thailand] cost you monthly?

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I have been here a month today and so I can say that so far it has cost me about £500. However that is a slightly skewed price because it doesn’t include flights to get out here and the fact that my company pays for my rent and I travel and live quite a lavious lifestyle.

A better benchmark would be to look at some of my mates that are living here and work as teachers. They earn about 30,000 baht a month which roughly equates to around £600 and they live a very nice life here, just possibly with not quite as much travel and scuba diving.

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The average wage over here I believe is about 12,000 baht (just over £200) but some get paid less then 6,000 (just over £100) so it is possible to live on next to nothing, although I wouldn’t recommend anything this low.

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As a rough guide, the day I had in “A Day In The Life Of An Entreprenur” cost around £18 including the night club. About £9 without it and around £14.50 if you are including rent into the calculations.

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How much do you earn?

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I don’t disclose my earnings to a monetary value but what I will say is that before coming here I had enough in savings to live a good life out here for around a year without any other income coming in. This has allowed me to keep my companies profits in the company without having to draw any out (apart from the rent I guess) and I make enough to live a good life out here from various other sources supplemented with savings. The plan is to be drawing a small amount from each of many companies in the next few years that support what I am doing at the time – sometimes I won’t need much money, other times I may.

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Living a great life cheaply is not difficult if you don’t mind owning very little and are flexible.

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It might be worth reading the post “Own Nothing, Experience Everything” for more on this. Next year I will move from Bangkok to somewhere else that is cheap, perhaps Buenos Aires in Argentina or Shanghai in China, anywhere I get the very most out of every pound I have access to.

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My Thanks

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This is probably the longest post I have written but I have tried to answer Shiran’s excellent questions as best I can, my thanks again to her for taking the time to write. If she had given a website I would have plugged it. If anyone has any more I would love to hear them and I will try and answer them if I can – I don’t have all the answers, I am still experimenting but I can definitely try to explain what I have found that works.

My sincere thanks to all that read this blog. It truly has been amazing the responses I have got back from people and since I started this blog about 2 months ago I have enjoyed the journey immensely and especially reading other peoples view and advice on life…so thank you.

As always, if you would like t help me out and know someone else who might benefit from reading this blog then please let them know using the bookmarking link below.