Last time we met John Hunter, a digital migrant living in Malaysia.  John is a regular human, with two mortgages in the United States, who took a ‘six month’ vacation to Southeast Asia in 2011 … and never came back.

We ended with John making the claim that he could live on $1,300/month in Malaysia.  That’s $16K/yr, which, given taxes, means a minimum income around $10/hour to make a go of a forty-hour work week.  At $20/hr, that’s a twenty hour work week- anything higher than that means less hours or more in savings.  (Of course, that doesn’t include the cost of packing up your entire life, or the price of plane tickets …)

Still, it got me interested.  Just how does John generate the income to sustain that sort of life style, plus to save up for emergencies or retirement?

I’ll let him answer in his own words.

Matt Heusser: Now let’s talk about the hard stuff.  How did you find remote contract work in Southeast Asia?  Who are your customers?  How many hours do you really work a week?

John: I have several sources of income: rental income, income from my web sites, consulting income.  All I have done to find remote contract work is talk to a few people I know.  I should talk to a few more people I know (I planned to do so, but things worked fine financially and I kept myself busy so I never go around to it – if I had needed the money I would have).  I work a great deal on my web sites but the income from that is fairly low.  For The W. Edward Deming Institute I do some consulting, write their blog and present seminars.  For Hexawise I do some consulting and write for their blog.

My total hours of consulting and seminars a week averages less than 10.  I work on my web sites over 30 hours a week on average.  I make less from my web sites than either consulting or rental income.  At the very beginning the web site earnings alone (Google, Amazon and similar options) more than covered my living expenses.  That has declined significantly (for whatever reason I had a significant surge in income for about a year but it has gone away – from a bit before I left until about mid 2012).

I wrote a book last year, Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability, which doesn’t show any evidence of providing significant income yet, but maybe it will (I do not think it is incredibly likely to do so however).  I just launched it in January and have been working on marketing it.  I probably averaged over 10 hours a week for 6 months on it.  It was what I wanted to do with my time; not something I figured would pay well.

I have no question if I was most interested in raising my income I would need to focus on getting consulting and seminar work.

Matt Heusser:  You decided to keep your homes when you moved to Malaysia and rent them out.  Why did you do that?  How has that turned out — I imagine the taxes, mortgage payment, and paying someone else for upkeep exceeds the rental income, so why do it?

John: Well it started when I kept my first house and rented it out when I bought my second.  Actually it started when I was looking for my first house; part of my thinking was buying something that would be a good rental.  I was actually planning on convincing my mother or brother or someone to take ownership of half of the first house (just to raise some cash and spread the risk – having to replace a roof or whatever) when I moved into a new house.  But I ran the numbers and the return was so great it was crazy to give that up to someone else (even family).

I very much like the idea of multiple sources of income.  And I had plans of going out on my own, in some undefined way, so creating an income stream from real estate was one strategy to support that option.  My second house I was less focused on rental prospects and it shows – I paid significantly more (and it is assessed at more) but rent is about 85% of the other one and has many fewer interested tenants when I try to rent it.  My first house is 2 blocks from a metro, in a very nice and active neighborhood.

The rental income is great.  It provides a consistent stream of income.  Though you do need to understand you can have months where you might have more expenses (due to repairs) than income.  I do pay someone to take care of them for me – I actually started doing that the last few years I was there (for the first property – just to not have to deal with it myself).

Matt Heusser: Describe a typical day.  How much time do you spend working, and what else is there to do?

John: A typical day is:
1) Wake up and go onto the internet, do some reading, maybe write some, maybe do some research… while grabbing a bite to eat
2) Option to go for a swim or play basketball (I’ll do one or the other 3 or 4 times a week)
3) Do a bit of work: maybe a bit of coding, write for one of my blogs, consulting… (basketball takes longer so this is not done if I play basketball)
4) Walk to lunch (a great Indian place about 3 times a week is 5 minutes away, some other places within 10 minutes.  About once a week a longer walk (several more options within 20 minutes).  Or I’ll get delivery, eat what I have on hand or take a taxi somewhere.
5) Work some more – with online breaks or reading books…
6) Dinner, normally I just eat what I have; I eat dinner out once or twice a week
7) Working on stuff for fun

I will have plenty of days where I only really do 2 or 3 hours work and others where I do 10 or more.  I spend a bunch of time doing things that can certainly be classified as working but are certainly not the way to optimize income.  I can spend a great deal of time gathering data and analyzing it for a blog post which couldn’t really be justified if I was trying to maximize income.  I am working on what I feel like.  If I needed more current income I would have to put more effort into where I knew the pay was greater (consulting and seminars) but as I don’t have to, so I do what I feel like.  I would be happy to do more consulting and seminars, doing the work to get more of that work doesn’t really excite me so I let it slide.

The time difference means if I need communicate in real time with the USA I need to do the early in the morning or in the evening.

I just started a new activity: taking a course via coursera.org.  It looks like that might take a significant block of time (more than an hour a day), I just started this week (and am signed up for a second course taught by Dan Ariely).

After a great deal of email correspondence and a phone conversation or two, I can start to see how John is successful. I can’t help but notice that while he needs to work 10 hours a week to make a living, he ends up spending forty on business.  Plus earning that $16K won’t pay for plane tickets, so he doesn’t get a chance to get back to the United States as often as he might like.  Finally, I’m struck with how John has certain advantages over the typical tech worker in a developed economy.

So let’s dig into that, with a final piece of the interview next week, where I ask John his advice on how others can get where he is.  I’ll close with my own thoughts, including how to develop that differentiation yourself.

Stick around; we’ll have cookies.

Before I was inspired to write by a sudden, surprise, 1% linkedin email, I was interviewing David Gewirtz, a CBS correspondent, Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of “How to Save Jobs.”

It was the David’s work on economic policy that got me most interested in an interview.  Along the way, I wanted to find out what his own life was like, and how he steers between the freedom of freelancing and the reliability of steady employment.  

Let’s get back to it.

The last time I wrote about this I was taking about Call Centers. American Companies had outsourced phone support to other countries, often India, and the results were so bad due to cultural and communications issues that the USA companies insisted on a call center across the street so the Indian Companies rented office space across the street and hired US Workers.

A month after I wrote that article, Tata consulting opened an office for three hundred technology workers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Re-shoring isn’t coming to IT, it’s here, and the same offshore companies that started round one are taking the lead in round two.

The odd thing is, at least according to the Chicago School of Business, this shouldn’t be happening – at least on first blush.

Let me tell you why.

How did this happen?

If the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago were to come up with a slogan, it would probably involve the idea that efficient markets win.

By efficient markets, I mean markets with lower cost structures.  If you pay 2% per transaction in the stock market, and I pay 1%, over ten years, I’m going to end up with more money, right?  Put another way, if we have to pay a five cent fee on every transaction, and work to lower that amount to four cents, in a way, we made money.

If that were true, then the round-tripping of contracts to India/China/Pakistan and back agan, with its associated communications costs (have you ever tried to set up a conference call to a developing nation?), combined with the sheer overhead of managing a multi-national company, should mean that the best deal would be a local deal.

Simply put: This should not be happening.  It makes no sense.

We did this to ourselves

Thanks to the build/boom/bust cycle of American real estate, office space is available cheap.  Thanks to the layoff/outsource cycle, labor is available cheap too.  Those two efficiencies combine to create just enough cost savings to allow for management overhead and awkwardness.  (Shrinking the distance between doer and client adds efficiency as well.) Yet there is opportunity here.

A local company, with less overhead, could be more efficient. That efficiency could lead to a better contract, with more cost savings for the outsourcer and more profit for the local company.  When I think about local contracts, a few companies come to mind; Menlo Innovations, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, competes for that kind of work. Pillar Technology is a 200-odd person delivery company which had no physical offices for over a decade; the executives and staff all work from home. I once took a call from a Pillar Recruiter, working out of her home in Georgia, to do a software project in West Michigan. In 2012, Pillar opened a software studio near Detroit, but its executives continue to operate with no building, which means no gas bill, no lease, and no maintenance, reception, or jantorial expenses.

One more time: Efficient companies win.

There is an opportunity here for local companies that are efficient.

Where are the small local companies?

David Gewirtz is the author of “How To Save Jobs: Reinventing Business, Reinvigorating Work, and Reawakening the American Dream.”  In that book, he claims that we schooled the entrepreneurship out of our society – that by focusing our culture on getting a good education in order to get a “stable, secure, good” job, we actively turned ourselves away from the idea of creating a business.  When the companies merged and laid off redundant departments (or sent work offshore), those now-laid-off went to the market to look for another “stable, secure, good” job.  Multiply that by a thousand mergers and offshore initiatives, and you have a lot of unemployment and a job market ripe for hiring, but no entrepreneurs to do that hiring.

This idea of entrepreneurship is not entirely gone; companies like Pillar and Menlo are still doing impressive things, and we cover the individual perspective right here on this blog.

What’s next?  I’m not sure.  Mr. Gewirtz has recommendations in his book, both for society (more small business) and for any individual stuck in the “good job”/lay-off trap.  My favorite idea from Gewirtz is to look for other people who have good products, then either partner with them (you take over marketing, logistics, and production, to make the product “real”) or outright purchase the product idea and develop it yourself.

There are many people with ideas; Gewirtz suggests becoming a ‘finisher.’

Lessons

Writing this article has helped me realize two things.

First, that we (myself included) in the US are overly focused on ourselves.  This blog has readers from all over the world; it would interesting to hear from the current IT workers in India, Pakistan, and Vietnam on their perspectives on re-shoring.

Second,  I would like to get Mr. Gewirtz to interview on this blog.

What questions should I ask him?

I’ve covered a lot of things on this blog in the past year and a half, but one of the recurring themes is going independent.  I’ve run interviews with Corey Haines, J.B. Rainsberger, David Hoppe, and Rosie Sherry, along with several posts about my own journey as a digital migrant.

A few people expressed concern over what I was writing.

After all, most North Americans are looking for those ‘job’ things, with the benefits, paid time off, corporate retirement plan with unemployment insurance if things go badly.  By pushing people to go against their natural instincts, I am pushing them to make an unnatural choice.

At least that’s the argument.

I’m not too worried about the person that shouldn’t go independent.  They won’t read these articles, or if they stumble on to them by some great accident, they certainly won’t do anything about it.

No, I am looking to find people on the fence, who have the inclination, but lack a little something – people who want to be inspired.

Today, I’m going to try to inspire you.

The Set Up

Imagine for a moment you are a director of IT, trying to plan out what you can do in the next year. You have, say, thirty employees (five supervisors, each with four direct reports), a fair amount of hardware, and influence over a few ancillary departments. Your fiefdom includes production app support/helpdesk, the Windows Server Team, the UNIX server team, the network guys, and the DBAs – or something like that. You’ve probably seen the setup before.

Your problem is that the world keeps changing, and as it changes, the skill sets you need change. The programmers are talking to the end customers about the benefits of cloud computing – how they could roll out changes at the push of a button – but you don’t trust Amazon’s EC2 and you don’t know anyone who knows OpenStack, and don’t have budget for Windows Server 2012. Even if you did, no one on staff knows Windows server 2012. Then there are the business users who want to get off Outlook and to go gmail — but who knows how to integrate LDAP with gmail? Not to mention the Business Intelligence Initiative. Now you’ve got to hire someone that knows how to support that tool, too. Not to mention (mumble mumble I could do this for three more paragraphs).

If that sounds convoluted, confusing, and too much at one time — well, welcome to the head of a typical director of IT.

If you are lucky, as an IT director, you might get budget for two full-time employees. There is just no way any two people will have the skills on all the new systems you need.

Or, for the price of one employee per year, you could hire five different freelancers for four weeks each — or ten for two weeks.

The freelancers come in, do the integration, train the staff, create the policies, and go away. No long-term impact on budget at all; next year, you can hire ten different people, with ten different skills.

It turns out this is an economically reasonable choice.

Do the math. 5 people 4 weeks = 20 weeks, means the typical freelance contract worker gets 2.5x the hourly rate of an employee. Add benefits, and it could be 3x.

And they should.

Long-term contract labor has some amount of job security; you get a six month contract. Regular employees get unemployment benefits and implied longer-term job security. The economic tradeoff for that is reduced wages.

I am not trying to be judgement here; I am speaking in terms of economics.

When I talk about going independent, some of my friends are scared.  They are worried.

But wait.  Take a moment.  Make a list of your strengths and skills – especially unique skills.  Are there skills in that list that some executive, somewhere, might find valuable enough to rent at a premium?

If the answer is yes, well, congratulations.  You could probably be talent if you’d like … but don’t quit your day job just yet.

All I am saying is that you might have more options than you previously realized.

Forget about living out of your car and starving — that IT director needs you.

You just need to find him.

Let’s keep talking.

I my previous post I suggested that the workforce is split into three general roles – ‘Labor’, ‘Crew’ and ‘Talent’ — and that it was better to be talent.

In order to be talent, you need to be differentiated somehow from everyone else.  Unique; different.  The classic definition is either a ‘known good quantity’, willing and able to do things others are unwilling, or unable to do — and you’ve got to work gigs, not that day job stuff.

Let’s talk about how to get there.

A Branded Quantity

The straightforward way to do this in IT is to pick one (preferably several) of the following:  Get a PhD in computer science, become a professor at a referencable school, write a book establishing your expertise, then work at a big company with an impressive title.

My model for this is a man named James Whittaker, who yes, earned his PhD from the University of Tennessee, taught at Florida Tech, gave a talk with one of his students that he later turned into a book, How To Break Software.  After Florida Tech, Whittaker left for Microsoft, then did a couple of years at Google, and, as of last February, is now back at Microsoft.

That’s Whit over at right, when he was a director of Test Engineering at Google.

So yes, real people are really able to plan their career in such a way as to do things others have not done, to make their expertise sought-after and desired.  If you are under 25 with no mortgage or serious life commitments, this is an approach.  Right now, my advice is the University of California at Berkeley, MIT, or Carnegie-Mellon University, then on to Google, possibly Microsoft, or Groupon.

But that’s not the only way to do it.

Willing To Do What Others Can Not – Or Will Not – Do

When I click on the “Talent” list for Craigslist, the same listings come up again and again – actors, actresses, and *cough* models doing, well … things on cameras that anyone could do, but that violate the average person’s sense of proprietary.

The easy way to be talent is to simply do things others are unwilling to do.

It doesn’t have to be … adult.  Garbage and Sanitation workers get to work reasonably short hours and command premium pay and benefits relative to their experience.   Mike Rowe, on the discovery channel, has an entire show about this called “dirty jobs.”

In IT, this means carrying a pager or offering support services at midnight.

Consider this business model

There are one hundred and sixty-eight billable hours in a typical 40-hours-per-week month.  If you know your customers well, you might know that they only need, on average, thee to five hours of support – but want time reserved if they need it up to ten hours a month.  So you sell thirty customers up to ten hours of reserved time and get paid for 300 hours a month.  Most of the time it will work – occasionally you will need to call in some help (or just go crazy.)

This is how my brother in law got a very large house.

Or This One

The other end of what people aren’t willing to do is what they aren’t able to do.   So you go out and write your own webserver, or some other component, that is terribly needed to make an open source project really work.  You don’t have to write the whole thing. Zed Shaw, for example, wrote Mongrel, the webserver that made Rails efficient – and gave it away.

Or take David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”), the creator of rails. He once had a recruiter ask how many years of Rails Development experience he had.  David replied “ALL OF THEM.”

Neither of those guys is going to have a problem finding a gig anytime soon

The Last Piece

But there’s another element, the toughest element, in becoming talent – moving toward pay-per-event – that most of us avoid out of culture.  We want the “safe” day jobs, which, ironically, means that freelance work becomes  work that few people will do, further increasing the value of that work.

More on that next time.

In my Informations Systems Policy Class in Graduate School (yes, they have classes for that), outsourcing was one of the hot topics of the day.  Specifically, outsourcing of business process. The basic idea was to clearly identify services, then cut cost by moving them to low-wage areas.  We even had impressive, triangle-shaped strategy graphs that talked about what to outsource and how to outsource it.   I ended up doing my master’s capstone work on the subject of outsourcing; it still stands up to scrutiny today.

But I have to admit, when the Washington Post ran an article on Indian Companies setting up call centers in the United States, I was as surprised as the next guy.

There is a lot of confusion going on here; a lot of doubt and mis-understanding.

I’m going to try to clear it up … and let the opportunity show through.

 How Did This Happen?

If you’ve ever called an 800-number for technical support, only to be transferred a dozen times, you probably realize how hard it can be for outsourcers to clearly identify lines of service.  Add a half-dozen time zones, eight layers of management, and a great-annual-review, transfer/promotion/forget_about_yesterday culture to the mix, and you’ve got a prescription for some real trouble.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned from that, but one of them is that keeping the outsourcer close — physically close — to the client company adds incredible value.

So that is exactly what the outsourcers have done.

After complaints about poor service, they looked at the United States (and other developed nations) with our bad economy, large numbers of unemployed workers, large amounts of cheap office space with power everywhere (that works!  All the time!) and said “hey, why don’t we set up shop across the street?”

According to the article, Aegis ignores credentials, uses a competency test, and pays workers who can do the job of repeatable business process outsourcing (mostly phone calls) from $12 to $14 per hour, along with a monthly bonus that might be worth an additional dollar per month.

To a competent high school graduate, it isn’t much, but it beats Taco Bell.

Truth and Consequences

One thing that always struck me about offshore technical work – from low-skill to high – was the sheer number of inefficienies in the process.

First you need a sales person on-site in the developed nation; you need an office to support that sales force.

Then you need the recruiters, trainers, and management overhead in the developing nation, plus, likely, an army of translators and liason-people.  You need to pay taxes, fees, and lots and lots of airfare and hotel expenses.

All this translates to inefficiencies in the system – it makes costs go up.

The Opportunity

A few years ago, an offshore company was offering programmers at $30/hour.  The work wasn’t that complex; it couldn’t be, in order to be offshored.  At the time I thought “A good college intern would accept that rate.  Why, I could get student to drop out of college for a few years, pay them $25/hr, and collect the float.”

I did have a bit of a chicken and an egg problem – I could not get the employees until I had the sales, and vice versa, but the idea was right.  I thought local people of ability could compete directly with offshore work by eliminating complexities in the supply chain. (In English: Cut overhead and work from home.)

I didn’t have the investment cash to pursue this, but it turns out, someone else did.

Today, the outsourcers are setting up shop locally and hiring the talent themselves.

The thing this – they are still saddled by those layers of management, the sales force, the physical office.

With IP telephony and rerouting, someone is going to build a virtual office, enable people to work from home, and lower costs to providers.

The only question is if it will be the developed nations … or the entrepreneurial, scrappy, outsourcers they have come to rely on.

If anyone wants to talk about this — you know where to find me.

In order to qualify for unemployment benefits in the state of Michigan, you need to do a few specific things.  First, you need to walk through the doors of a “Michigan Works!” office and do some paper.  Then you need to create an account on Michigan Talent Bank.

It sure seems like a brilliant idea.  I mean, have every person who is looking for work register with their skill set, then give any employer access to the database.

Shrink job searches, eliminate all the folks in the job market just to get a counter-offer, shrink the welfare budget by getting people back to work, and, let’s face it, help companies save on employee costs by hiring folks who are the most hungry.

Everybody wins, right?

Like I said, it’s great theory.

The Problem

The state of Michigan doesn’t want just anybody signing up for the search.  They do not, for example, want out-of-state recruiters offering jobs far away.  Nor would they want a scammer to have access to the list, to try to trick the unsuspecting (and desperate) into a get-rich-quick scheme.

So anyone can search on Michigan’s Talent Bank, but to get contact information, you have to apply as an employer … and that’s where it gets weird.

You see, if you apply as an employer, you’ll get an account, but it won’t be verified. The website indicates that you will receive a phone call to talk through the details.

You guessed it.  My tiny little business, Excelon Development, has some positions to fill, and I signed up on October 29th.

After a month of no phone calls, I tried to log-in with the ID I had created and got an email that I was not a verified employer.  I could email them for help, or call 1-888-253-6855 during business hours.  So, the very next day, I called during business hours.

Then It Gets Weird

When you call that number, the first thing you are told is that if you want unemployment benefits, call a different number.  If you want to sign up for Michigan’s Talent Bank as a Job-Seeker, call a different 800 number.  If you are really seeking to sign up as an employer, please hold.

Then you are transferred to the voice mail box for Michigan’s Talent Bank, and told that it has overflown and can not take more messages.

Then you are dumped to the state of Michigan Switchboard, and told to type in the first five letters of the name you would like to connect to, or hold or press zero for an operator.  After you wait for an operator, you are told that all available operators are busy, and the system hangs up on you.

At least I was when I tried this experiment on Nov 30, 2011.

So the one thing we know about the system is that some employers are trying to get access to candidates, and the phone support is horrible.

I tried the email support, got a reply within a business day and an account within a second day.

Really though – who can’t be troubled to check voice mail?

The Talent Bank System

Every state in the union has a talent bank; they government-funded attempts at a private/public partnership, and charge no fee to employers to search or hire.

As a result, the employers are customers only in an academic sense; it’s a free service.  Likewise, the job seekers are not really customers — they get paid, indirectly, to use the service, by making it required to collect unemployment benefits.

This means the system itself has no incentive to provide great performance.

You don’t need to be a six-sigma black-belt to figure out what that means.

But notice, I said every state in the union.  And it’s essentially the same system in every state.

I suspect this isn’t just a problem in Michigan.

What you can do

Find your own local talent bank.  If you have the papers (you can file a doing business as (DBA) at the courthouse) and are considering hiring a cleaning lady or a painter, go ahead and sign up.  Conduct your own experiment.  See what the service is for you; if it’s bad, tell someone.

Who knows?  In six months, we might actually get people checking and responding to voice mails, which might actually mean employers find the candidates they want, and people find jobs.

Think about it.  Say after all this work, ten people find jobs.  Yes, I believe that with a few tweaks the number could be hundreds of times that, but let’s say we start with ten jobs.

Isn’t that great?

Here’s a solid lead — a chance to stop complaining and be a part of fixing the economic condition in this country.

I’ve said my piece.  What you do with it?

That’s up to you.

Have you ever seen or heard a conversation something like this:

This guy had eight bosses. Would an FU Fund have helped?

Person: My job stinks.  My boss is a jerk.  My goals don’t make sense, and just as I’m about to have a handle on them, they change.  I report to six different people.

Comment #1: Man, that stinks.

Person: I’m worried about my job.  I might lose it.  I wish I could just quit, but I need to pay the mortgage.

Comment #2: What you need is an F U fund!

Ahh, yes.  The F U fund, which may stand for “Forget You.”  Three to six months of savings, so if things get really tough, you can bail out.  I understand.

The problem is, it isn’t enough.  Oh Yes!  The internet commenters say, you /really/ need six to nine months.

That isn’t enough either.

In fact, it’s unlikely that your F U fund will ever be large enough to solve this kind of problem – but there are other ways – which are demonstrated on, of all things, an episode of The Office.

Yes, that’s right, Michael Scott, the bumbling manager of The Office, figured this when he tried to sell the Michael Scott Paper Company …

Even this guy gets that an F U Fund isn't enough.

In season five of the office, Michael Scott leaves Dunder Mifflin to start his own paper company, which makes money mostly by under-selling Dunder Mifflin’s existing customers.

And I mean under-selling.  Michael gets himself into that unique jam where he takes a loss on every sale.  This allows him to attract lots of customers, it’s just that more sales means the company will go out of business sooner.

Meanwhile, the management at Dunder Mifflin is running scared.  They are losing existing customers (and future sales), to this scrappy upstart, and make a purchase offer.

The buyout offer is $50,000, which they later up to $60K.  That’s quite an F U fund.  Even split among the three employees of the Michael Scott Paper Company, the funds would be enough to get by for a good long while.

Michael doesn’t take the offer; he realizes that a large F U Fund isn’t enough.  Without unemployment benefits (which you don’t get when you choose to quit), the F U Fund run dry in a few months.  Moreover, you’ll be unemployed.  By a great twist of fate irony, it’s very hard to get a job when you are out of work, because unemployment carries an implied stigma — “If he can’t get a job anywhere else, well, we’d sure better not hire him.”

Michael realized that he (and his staff) needed more than money in the bank; they needed a revenue stream.

He negotiated to get them hired back at Dunder Mifflin and sold the company for nothing.

That’s the real ticket.

If you’ve got a mortgage, have to provide your own health insurance, and have niggling little things like car insurance, electricity, heat, water, internet, cable, trash, and phone bills, then you’ve got a big ol’ pile of recurring expenses.  With safe bond rates sitting around 3%, I figured I would need close to a million dollars of F U Fund to live off the interest.  (And that’s a pretty Jimmy Buffett life, at that.)

That’s the lesson of the F U Fund: The more you explore it, the more you come to realize that you need something to pay the bills — and, for that matter, might want to focus on making those bills smaller.  You can take that second part as far as you want to go; I know people who have lived out of vehicles, crashing for a couple of nights in a row at this friend or that friend’s place.  It can be a surprisingly cheap way to live, especially if you’d in a company with some amount of social health care.

But I digress.

The point is, you can work on offense (bringing money in), or defense (letting less money out), or maybe special teams (making a big temporary pile) — but special teams will only get you so far.

Plus, I’m a bit long in the tooth to couch-surf, and there’s no way the family would go for it.

Which brings me back to creating your own revenue stream.

There are a lot of ways to do this.

You might get an IT support gig at night.  You might teach at the local community college; you might start your own IT support company, or do training. I’ve known folks who owned catering businesses, DJ businesses, lots of website designers, and one dude who delivered pizzas on the weekends.  The DJ guy made pretty good money, and, compared to what Shawn makes, on a good tip night, the Pizza guy didn’t do terrible either.

It’s time we got beyond the F U Fund and talk about enabling self-sufficiency.

More to come.