I Have Seven Income Streams: Here’s How They Compare

“The beauty of diversification is it's about as close as you can get to a free lunch in investing.” - Barry Ritholtz

In most months, my freelancing income makes up most of my total income. Last month, it made up over 95% of my total income.

If you only looked at that last month, you would think I’m wasting time and effort on all those other income streams.

But when you zoom out, you get a different picture: about 20% of my yearly income comes from other sources, and that number is growing. Crucially, the number is growing but the number of hours I put into it is not.

I’m not talking about passive income streams. That’s mostly a charade anyway. I’m talking about asymmetric income streams: the income grows faster than the effort required.

Read on to learn how you can diversify your income streams as a freelancer, and how you can leverage your freelance career to this end.

Seven income streams

Here are the seven income streams I currently have:

Freelancing as a software developer.
Freelancing as a writer.
Stock dividends.
Rental income.
Course sales.
Book sales.
Consulting.

In addition to these seven, I have retired three income streams and am preparing one new one (more on that near the end of the article). Read on to find the reasoning, pros, and cons behind each income stream.

Freelancing as a software developer

Web development is the foundation on which I built everything else since 2011, when I started freelancing. Most of the money that I invested into my other income streams came from freelance web development.

My income grew in tandem with my The Evolution of My Productivity as a Freelancerproductivity as a freelancer over the years, until the savings became so substantial as to allow me to branch out and try other income streams (with varying success).

Pros: reliable, well-paid

Cons: hard to scale, tiring, very competitive

Barrier to entry: coding skills, proposal-writing skills

Freelancing as a writer

In 2019, I started writing on Medium as a hobby. In 2020, after some of my articles became popular on the platform, I started getting offers for freelance writing work. Unexpectedly, I jumped into this new world.

Freelance writing is Freelance Writing vs Freelance Software Developmentvery different from freelance software development. Different earnings, different processes, different clients.

Pros: educational, creative

Cons: high overhead, moderate pay, AI competition

Barrier to entry: English skills, writing skills, industry knowledge

Stock dividends

Buy stocks or ETFs, then sit back and watch them grow. Enjoy the occasional dividend. That’s the ideal, but picking stocks is a loser’s game. Most professional fund managers fail to beat the market most of the time.

Sometimes I’ll make opportunistic stock trades, but I mostly just buy and hold the S&P 500 because the overhead of following stock market news is not worth the potential extra growth, not to mention the risk.

How much can you make from stock investing without putting much time into it? Not much on year 1, or year 2, or year 3. But within 10-15 years the dividends become so significant that they can replace a good chunk of your income.

Pros: passive income

Cons: some amount of risk

Barrier to entry: cash flow, stock market knowledge

Rental income

I bought my first one-bedroom apartment in 2017 using my freelancing income. In 2023, I upgraded to a bigger apartment for my family. In 2024, I started renting out the old one-bedroom.

Being a landlord is mostly passive and only requires a few hours of involvement a month, at most. Some months, I don’t even spend five minutes managing the property. This changes with scale, but if you have enough money to scale your real estate portfolio, then you also have enough money to hire a property manager.

My tenant is very conscientious, to the point that they remind me when I forget to send them the bills for the month. To find a tenant like that, I lowered the rent by about 10%. This isn’t my main income so it makes sense to optimize for peace of mind rather than for cash.

Pros: mostly passive income, real estate appreciates in value, resilient to market fluctuations

Cons: lots of money tied up in a non-liquid asset, hard to scale

Barrier to entry: cash and/or eligibility for a bank loan

Course sales

In 2020, I recorded my freelancing course, aptly titled The No-Nonsense Guide to Freelancing on Upwork.

Since then, over 500 people have watched the course on various platforms. It doesn’t generate a huge amount of income, but it feels magical that you can create something once and watch people buy it for years after that.

The great thing about this type of income is that it’s asymmetric: the amount of work input doesn’t correlate with the money output. The same amount of work goes into a course that sells 50 copies and a course that sells 5000 copies.

Then, the name of the game is audience-building.

Pros: asymmetric

Cons: hard to promote

Barrier to entry: knowledge worth sharing, sales funnel

Book sales

Everything I said about the course also applies to my book, The Unstoppable Freelancer. The added benefit of publishing a book is that it increases your reputation, particularly if you’re a freelance writer.

Selling books is a difficult business, though. If you don’t have a traditional publisher doing the heavy lifting for you, you have to put serious effort into building an audience for the book.

Pros: asymmetric, reputation bonus

Cons: hard to promote, time-consuming to create

Barrier to entry: knowledge worth sharing, writing skills, sales funnel or publisher

Consulting

On occasion, I’ll take on beginner freelancers as consulting clients. Sometimes, these are seasoned professionals who are looking to make the switch from full-time employment to freelancers. For some, this is a part of the journey to becoming a startup founder.

For others, it is a much-needed escape from the corporate world. I love consulting gigs - they pay well, I meet great people, and I feel like I’m making a difference in their lives. But they only happen on occasion and I view them as a bonus, not as a reliable source of income in the long-term.

Pros: rewarding, network expansion, good hourly rate

Cons: sporadic

Barrier to entry: strong reputation, sales funnelv

Income distribution

Overall, this is the distribution of my income in 2024. Freelancing income dominates, but all the other ones are alive and kicking.

I could live without the extra income, but consider this: I only put a small fraction of my time towards all these income streams combined. Now, if tomorrow I couldn’t freelance as a web developer for some reason, I could go all-in on these other ventures and could replace my lost freelancing income within a few months.

The passive income streams also provide a buffer - if I fell ill or something else prevented me from working completely, I could at least pay the bills and stay afloat during that time without dipping into my retirement fund.

Retired income streams

Not all income streams are suited to everyone. The ones that are suited to you today may not be suited to you tomorrow.

Here are three income streams that I no longer have, for three different reasons:

Fantasy sports company. This is a company I How I Built, Promoted, and Sold a Product with No Investments and No Marketing Budgetbuilt and eventually sold between 2013 and 2017. After the exit, I decided to leave that industry because of increasing regulatory pressures.
Affiliate sales. I’m mediocre at selling my own products. I’m horrendous at selling other people’s products. I’ve tried being an affiliate for a lot of things. Products I believe in. Products I use. Never made a single dime. Sometimes you just have to accept something is not for you and cut your losses.
Outsourcing. I had a good run for a few years of How I Used Outsourcing To Increase My Freelance Incomeoutsourcing. I was active on Upwork, and a lot of offers came my way. I forwarded some to agencies and freelancers I know in exchange for a percentage. It was a good business, but as I transitioned from Upwork to mostly large projects for repeat clients, this Upwork activity became a burden. Then the market changed for the worse and I decided to stop actively searching for outsourcing opportunities. The overhead was just too big and good opportunities too rare.

Knowing when to quit can be just as valuable as pushing forward.

Future income streams

But wait, there’s more!

By leveraging the How To Avoid Burnout as a Freelancer: The 70-30 Rule70-30 rule of freelancing, I have time to venture into new spaces.

I’m working hard on growing my newsletter and this blog, which will eventually be monetized in some way. I’m also considering a few options for SaaS tools I might build for freelancers and agency owners.

I may even expand my real estate business if I can get enough cash on hand and decent terms from a bank.

Everything is open when your finances are diversified and resilient.