But that’s no fun.

I try to break every income stream into a daily income measurement. If I do X activity for Y hours, I’ll make $Z per day. Add all of those little projects, side jobs, and fun stuff together, and you have my current annual income. There is, as you might expect, a certain amount of volatility to the calculation. Many of my writing gigs come and go, some are project based, and others are simply one-off articles. I have consistent income as a base, but everything else fluctuates.

One easy way to make extra money is to pick up a part time job, but from what I’ve seen, most part time gigs are unskilled, menial work. I should note that there’s nothing wrong with such work, as money is money, and I’m never one to turn that down when the opportunity presents itself. My wife and I have been dreaming of doing some more traveling this year, but we also have some repairs queued up for the house that we are saving for. That got me to thinking that maybe we could pick up some side work to fund those travel plans and have a more enjoyable year.

This is a bit of a tradeoff. I already have full-time employment through my “hydra” of income sources, so this would keep me extra busy. If I stayed with it too long, I’d simply get burnt out, so the work would have to be temporary. So we looked around and sure enough, there are a number of places hiring for the holiday season, This would mean an extra 15 or so hours a week of work for each of us, but only for a few short months. The pay isn’t great, but we are hoping to get to work together, and even a small hourly wage will still end up being a couple thousand dollars well all is said and done.

That means we get to travel, the house gets fixed, and we aren’t bogged down to something we’d hate doing for a long time. Sounds like a win-win to me.

As time went on, I realized that I didn’t want to wait 15-20 years to retire at the “young” age of 45. This didn’t mean I was getting away from saving for retirement at all, just that I wanted to do work I found fun everyday while saving rather than just aiming straight for the paycheck. So my priorities changed, and I worked toward building up income from a variety of sources. As such, each day would be different, the variety and fun would be rewarding, and I could retire like a normal person at 65+. If you really enjoy what you do, this isn’t such a daunting prospect.

Note also that I’m really not there yet. There are still a lot of things I want to accomplish even as I check off previous goals like purchasing a home. I want to travel more, and to do that I would like to bring my wife along, too. She is still stuck at her local office job, which she enjoys as far as jobs go but restricts her ability to move around for more than a week or two at a time. I’m going to have to work smarter and harder if I want to see this through.

Resources for Extreme Early Retirement

If you don’t mind putting the time in for 5-15 years before pulling the trigger on your retirement but you want to get out of the workforce and doing what you want as soon as possible, I have two recommendations:

Early Retirement Extreme: Jacob is an extremely capable and bright person who had decided he wanted out of his current career and onto something more fulfilling on a personal level. It wasn’t easy, but if you have it in your head that you want to retire in your 30s, this is the guy to show you the way. He lays out what you’ll need to do and how you should go about doing it in short order.

Retire Early Lifestyle: From high-powered entrepreneurs and corporate drones to living on the sunny beaches of Mexico, Billy and Akaisha Kaderli are a monument to what is possible if you put your mind and financial resources to an important goal. They often write about their travels and experiences, and if you are curious about retiring early, this is a great starting point.

Resources for Working Happily

The Art of Nonconformity: As far as I can tell, Chris is a robotic cyborg programmed to show us that we’re not locked into a particular lifestyle. He is currently visiting every country in the world, writing a sequel to his book, running a successful business via his blog, and teaching us all how we can do the same. He works. A lot. But he enjoys it as far as I can tell, and provides a lot of inspiration for those looking to capture that spirit.

Nerdy Nomad: Kirsty from Nerdy Nomad is a free spirit, traveling the world while building up her online portfolio. I’ve never seen such a transparent blogger, as she is happy to provide a breakdown if income each month and talk about strategies inbetween her various global adventures.

There are some things I understand about the $700 billion dollar bailout plan. The financial markets were, in fact, in a state of total chaos. The government needed to do something that would assuage the general fear in the marketplace and provide some government support to a rapidly deteriorating market place. It would hurt to shell out $700 billion to companies that should never have gotten to overleveraged and taken on so much risk, but in a lot of ways it had to be done (this last point is arguable).

With that mind, however, I can’t help but wonder who is watching Uncle Sam’s tolerance for risk and spending. We’re shelling out hundreds of billions of dollars that will be tacked on to an ever increasing pile of debt. All told we’re staring at the bottom of a $53 trillion dollar hole.

So what’s next for Uncle Sam? There’s going to be some decisions to be made. In particular, we’re facing some tough love in the near future. It’s likely we’ll have to raise taxes, cut benefits like social security and medicare, or both. No one wants to do either one of these things, but that’s the reality we face.

I just came across an interesting post over at Get Rich Slowly. I’ve always been sure that credit cards have led us to increase our spending, as they give us access to a capital base we wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

While it may seem fairly obvious, the post is worth a read and goes on to suggest some credit card habits that will allow you to utilize credit in a responsible away, assuming that’s possible.

But what about area where competition is heavy? Sites like SJA Mobile operate in a niche supposedly so full of advertisers that its very hard to get anywhere. Trying to get your message to pierce through thousands of others to attract visitors is, to some marketers, an insurmountable task. What’s important to realize is that sites are usurped all the time in the engines, and competitors who were seemingly toothless have managed to one up their larger, more well equipped opponents (think of Google when it originally took on Yahoo!).

Given enough persistence, effort, and the ability to present your idea differently and more efficiently than your competitors, and you can break into saturated niches and even profit heartily from it.