Com guanya 10.900 $ al mes després d’un acomiadament: els sis ingressos i el capital que hi ha al darrere

Hello world, I'm an unemployed ex-big tech software engineer with 25 years of experience in the tech industry So it's another week and there are yet more massive rounds of layoffs being announced by big tech companies now as some of you may know I was laid off for my own big tech job late last year and over that time I've gone through the normal range of emotions right like shock anger, shame and depression But now I feel like I've come through the other side. With every passing week, I'm feeling better and better about life. It's now gotten to the point where most days seems to be filled with possibilities for me. And on some days, it feels almost euphoric. It's so good I don't want the data end. And this is all because my layoff, it indirectly pushed me into a kind of involuntary early retirement. a step that I would have never actively taken for myself. Now, I know I'm one of the lucky ones. This type of early requirement, it's only possible because I had many years of a high paying tech job in order to save and invest. It allowed me to become financially independent. And for this, I am extremely grateful. But for the techies who are not there yet, the ones who are thinking about... or even actively trying to escape the rat race. Maybe you're getting close to escape velocity. Maybe you're already past it, but you're afraid to take that step. If you're still employed, you're probably dealing with constant stress, picking up all the tasks from your laid-off X co-workers. You're probably fighting burnout while carrying survivors guilt and imposter syndrome like everyday. Maybe you've already been laid off.

like maybe after years or even decades in this industry. You're now stuck grinding through the Kabuki theater that is linked in. Maybe you're enduring an endless gauntlet of interviews that resembles a humiliation ritual. And all of that just to get a low ball offer for a job that you may not even want in the first place. Now I genuinely feel for you guys and I want to help you out. That's why I want to share the strategies and income streams that have helped sustain myself and my family post lay off. Think of it as a public service announcement. Hopefully gives you some inspiration and ideas for building your own path to financial independence. So I'm going to talk about how each of these income streams were developed, how much money they return, and how much time I spend on every one of them. So let's jump in. So our biggest income stream is our two rental properties. These are houses located near major cities with fully paid off mortgages. We paid it off over the course of years. Now rental property one is managed by a rental agency. So it's essentially pure passive income. Maybe every once in a long while I'll get a phone call about a major repair and I just have to sign off on it.

So for rental property one, I get $2100 a month. Now, rental property two for a host of reasons cannot have a rental agency. And it's much more of a headache for me. When things break, or when maintenance has to be done, I get looped in directly. Sometimes I would even do the maintenance activities myself just to cut down on costs. In any given month, I would spend between two to three hours. just on rental property too. For that effort, we get around $1800 a month, which means in total we get about $3900 per month from these rental properties. Now, as mentioned, we've been saving and investing for many years. Really ever since the 2008 financial crisis. And most of our investments are in these broad-based index funds, like the SMP500 index fund. And we put these investments into both pre-tax accounts like 401k's, as well as post-ax brokerage accounts. Now, within the post-ax brokerage accounts, these funds will return a dividend about every quarter or so. And for many years, I used to do this thing called drip. It's dividend reinvestment program.

where I would set it so that all the dividends that a fund returns, it's automatically used to buy more shares of that same fund. But ever since I got laid off, I turned off Drip and I've started collecting this minimum dividend coming out of my brokerage accounts as income. Now, I hardly spent any time on this income stream. Maybe an hour, every six months or so, just to look at the investments and that's pretty much it. We get around $1,500 a month in dividend income. Now for many years we had what's called a high yield savings account. Think of this as a savings account that has a higher than normal interest rate, usually between 3 to 4%. Up until 2023 I had like 3 months worth of savings in this account as a kind of emergency fund. Then all these mass rounds of layoffs started happening in my job and I got a bit worried. So I started stashing away more money into this high-veal savings account. By the time of my layoff, I had about a year worth of expenses put into this account. Now, my ex-employer was super generous. They gave me a great severance. It was like a year worth of our expenses and I put that severance directly into the same high-veal savings account. Now this income stream is entirely passive. It takes no time at all for me to maintain. We get about $300 a month from it. Now one important aspect of early retirement is that I got a lot of time on my hands. And in general, I find that the most satisfying way of spending that time is to pursue hobbies and activities that I'm interested in.

It sort of gives me structure every day and it gives me these goals and achievements that I can pursue. Practically speaking, I've been pursuing a large number of hobbies. Everything from starting an herb garden to learning how to reach Chinese to becoming a drone pilot to learning how to swim for the first time and so on. But in doing these hobbies, I quickly learned that in the super hypercapitalist economy that we live in. It takes almost no effort to monetize your hobbies. So essentially, I'm getting paid for some of these hobbies that I would be doing for free anyway. So let me share with you my hobby income streams. So journaling is an entirely unexpected income stream for me. When I first got laid off late last year, I fell into this kind of depressive spiral. And my therapist suggested that I journal my thoughts down. as a form of self-therapy. And being pretty lazy, I decided to do this journaling in the form of V-logs, and that got me into YouTube. Now, journaling did help out my mental health a lot. But as time went on, I founded both therapeutic and fun to make these V-logs. The other key benefit that journaling gives me is socialization. So back at work, I'll be talking with dozens of people every day.

Now that I'm by myself every day, it can get a little bit lonely at times. But with journaling, I get all of these comments from random people to respond to, and from time to time, I get invited to participate in discussions and podcasts and live streams and so on. So all in, I'm getting like five to six hours of socialization time per week, and that's really helpful for me, mental health wise. Now, I spend between two to three hours a week producing these V-locks. Once the V-log is made, however, there's a whole bunch of boring stuff that I decided to automate via workflows. Things like generating metadata. Think the video's title, description, thumbnail, text. Things like transcribing the video. And then generating long-form articles from it. And generating short-form video snippets from it. Things like pushing all of this generated content to different media platforms like YouTube and Substack and TikTok and so on. It took me literally like half a day to code up all of these automations and now I just create the V-log and the automation does everything else for me. So in terms of income, YouTube pays by far the most for me. I get around $2,800 a month from YouTube.

For other platforms like Bimea Coffee, Substack, Fourth Wall and so on, I get a combined total of around $200 a month. So all in, I get around $3,000 a month from my journaling hobby. Now speaking of socialization, I find that coaching is a great way of getting high quality socialization time with people. I use this SaaS service called Calendly to schedule these one-on-one coaching sessions with people. And in these sessions, I get a chance to really listen, communicate, problem-solve with the other person, and do it face-to-face. And coaching, it's such a therapeutic hobby for me, right? If you're someone who likes to communicate and interact with others, not being able to do so, it's almost like having a muscle that just atrophies and whithers away. And running this coaching hobby, it allows me to keep this skill to keep this muscle sharp and flexible. So, on any given week, I spend between 1 to 2 hours in coaching sessions. And that returns around $1,200 a month for me. So,

I originally got into software engineering so many years ago because I genuinely enjoyed programming. And now that I'm not under the constant stress of having the deliver under tight deadlines, I'm slowly starting to regain my love for coding. In my GitHub repos, I got a bunch of projects I'm happily working on. And honestly, a Gentic AI has been helping me a lot in terms of getting these projects moving along. Now don't get me wrong. I don't agree with this current borderline, massacistic trend of softer engineers boasting about how much AI slopp code they're generating every day. You know what I'm talking about? All those guys out there boasting like, hey look bro, look at my agentic workflow. I'm able to push 50 PRs a day and there's no mistakes. Not that's nothing bro. I'm a loop engineer now. I can push a hundred PRs a day and that's why I got invited by Andre Carpathie and Peter Steinberger to their villa for a minasia twat. Yeah, like that. So I don't agree with this philosophy. Instead, I just write code that does something that I think is cool or it helps scratch my own itch. And if I push even five PRs a day, it's good enough for me. Now with a Gentic AI. It's absurdly easy to monetize the software projects. For example, back in January of this year, I created a couple of days list of projects that finds niches, generates AI wall art for those niches, and then pushes that wall art to online marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon. So I ran this workflow for two days and generated around 200 assets.

But then I realized it was a stupid idea in the first place because it didn't produce anything of real value. All it did was to cannibalize value from existing art. And so I shut the workflow down. Now, ironically, these 200 published assets, it continues to make money for me. It makes about $700 a month, month after month. Another example was fun employment day. It's this little mic process app that I built. for tracking my time. And this is because I missed having something like a work day application that I used to have at work. It's got hundreds of users now, including some that are paying users. Out of all of my hobbies, I spend the most time coding between five to six hours a week. And I make around $1,000 a month from all of my software projects. So, NetNet, I'm getting just under $11,000 a month. from all of these income streams combined. Now for some, this is gonna be a huge income. And for others, it's gonna be barely survivable. But I had shared in a previous V-log just how much money our household spends every month. And this income greatly exceeds that spending amount. In some ways, my involuntary early retirement feels almost utopian. Like, I'm unemployed.

I'm not working a traditional 9-5 job yet I'm getting money from sitting around and from doing hobbies that I actually enjoy. It almost feels like a small preview of a post-labor economy. Although, given the K-shaped economy that society is morphing into, maybe this is less like a utopia and more like something out of the movie Metropolis. Either way, if you're thinking about leaving the rat race, or you're on the fence about pursuing financial independence or early retirement. I hope this can give you a realistic view of what life looks like on the other side. And that's all I got to say about that. Anyways, if you have a more big curiosity to join me in this life journey, please feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel and subscribe to my Substack newsletter. If you want to support me and my V-log creation efforts, Please become a member of this channel or just buy me a coffee. If you want a 101 coaching session with me, just schedule it. Anyways, thanks so much for watching. Talk soon. Bye.