Retirement Income Streams… The Wild and Crazy – Part 3

Retirement Income Streams… The Expected, the Possible, and the Wild and Crazy

And now we come to the really interesting alternative income streams. These would not be for the faint of heart for sure. Many involve a lot of hard work, while others would involve a high level of fortitude and perseverance. Some even look like they could be disasters in waiting. 🙂

I refer to them as wild and crazy, but of course some people take these suggestions very seriously and have made them work, or they would not appear in anybody’s list anywhere.

You can decide if any of these are of interest to you. As it turns out, I was already doing one of these things.

“The Wild and Crazy” – Probably Not for Everyone

In no particular order here are some of the suggestions that I came across a number of times while doing my investigation.

Rent out Your House – As I was doing research for this piece, I found an online article that suggested that for some folks it might work for them to move out of their larger home and rent it out. This would provide an income stream for sure, but it would have to greatly outweigh whatever you ended up paying in rent to make this worthwhile. The idea is that this move would allow you to own your home longer, and let it increase in value, which you could capitalize on at a later date.

Alternatively, it was suggested that you could buy a smaller house and live in it while you rent out your larger home. This is sort of buying an income property in reverse. I don’t think I would ever seriously consider either of these options.

Blogging – Hey! I’ve got a blog! But it hasn’t produced me a penny of income yet. What gives?

Having a blog allows you to host Google Ads or affiliate advertising on your site. The way these things work is, if someone clicks through on the ad link from your site you get paid… pennies. I BELIEVE that if you have an affiliate program and someone clicks through and buys, you’ll receive a small commission of the sale.

What gives, for me, is that people haven’t been clicking on the ads that pop up in my website enough for the dollars to start rolling in yet. Google does not pay you until you reach $100 in monies owing… many thousands of clicks. And I’m still quite a way off from even getting to my first hundred dollars. 🙂 So, if you could all start clicking on the ads on my site at a furious rate I would greatly appreciate it. LOL! Mama needs new shoes. 🙂

Offer Your House Up as a Movie Set – this is a serious enough undertaking that CBC British Columbia did a piece on it in 2017. This quote from the article certainly got my attention:

“Summerland said financial compensation for location use depends on the kind of house, the kind of scene and the region of the province. For example, a small kitchen scene filmed between two people in the Okanagan might warrant $1,000 per day. In Vancouver, the rate could go up to as much as $7,000 per day. The key is to negotiate a rate that makes both parties happy, he said.”
The article provided a link to “Creative BC” where are you can sign up to have your home considered as a potential site. I believe these types of services are widely available across the country. In Ontario, you simply register your home at the Ontario Location Library.

Sell Ad Space on Your Car – I suppose. A quick Google search certainly revealed websites that provide information about doing this sort of thing. One such site, “Market Your Car,” at least warned about sites that offer the service but charge you a small amount simply to be on their list of drivers. Paying somebody to help you find someone to advertise on your car does not seem like a good idea, so good on them. If you are interested in something like this, doing your due diligence around what site to use would be very important.

Buy a Profitable Website – Suuuure. If you’re already wealthy, and probably don’t really need a new income stream.

Publish a Book – Even if you cannot find someone to publish your “opus magnus” it is possible to self-publish e-books through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing for free. Apple also offers an opportunity to self-publish on Apple Books. This can probably be done a myriad of other ways as well.

I believe the idea here is that you write a book about something people might be interested in reading about, i.e. non-fiction. Fiction is way too hard to get published in the first place. So, come up with an idea that most people might be interested in, and that might be saleable for years to come, something like… Retirement… Hey!

I saw this on enough sites addressing retirement and passive income streams that it is probably doable. At the very least, you would derive all sorts of pleasure from sitting down and working on a book. To say nothing of the cognitive benefits it would provide.

And On, and On, and On – When I Google searched the overall topic of secondary income streams in retirement, it seemed like an endless number of sites with an endless number of ideas for making money exist. If you are looking for even more “intriguing” ideas than I have listed here, just do your own Google search.

That said, here is a link to one site that I found to be a whole lotta fun to go through. It listed 62 different ways to make “passive money”. The Site is called Millennial Money, so it is not specifically about retirement, but the ideas pertain to any age group. Some are within the realm of doable, while some of them are WAY out there, like “sell your plasma” (blood). Yikes!

Here is a small sample from the list of 61.

Store People’s Stuff – this might make sense for individuals who have extra space. The first sort of things that popped into my head was that if you had a large property you might be able to provide storage for boats or trailers over the winter.

Sell Your Clothes – You would think that for this to work you would have to possess a very substantial wardrobe of high-end clothing. The Love-goddess has actually sold a few things at a clothing consignment store here in town. However, when I read this it made me think of a friend who wrote to me about my experiences using Facebook Marketplace to sell stuff.

Her question was, and I paraphrase, “do you think I could sell my 200-300 pairs of footwear on Marketplace?… most are from Portugal”. You can imagine the thoughts that rattled around in my head. 🙂 That said, a clothing consignment store might be the absolute right place for her to sell them and make a reasonable amount of money from doing so.

House Sitting – The Love-goddess and I had a woman housesit for us once while we were on an extended four-month trip. In our situation, no money exchanged hands. She got a place to live and we had our cat taken care of. The way I’m interpreting this proposal, you would have you look after peoples’ homes (and pets) while they were traveling, and you may or may not live in those homes.

It is necessary for homeowners to make sure someone is coming into a home on a regular basis for insurance purposes. I could easily see charging homeowners $50 a week for you to come in and do an overall inspection so that any damage that took place while the homeowners were away would be covered by insurance because you discovered it in a reasonable amount of time. If you’re going to do this, you should check with insurance companies to see how often visits need to be made.

We have neighbors who went to Florida one year and had substantial damage to their home because of a frozen and then leaking pipe that did not get discovered for a long period of time. The repairs were extremely expensive, and none of it was covered by insurance.

Become a Host on AirBnB – I do suppose that anybody could do this in this era… post pandemic of course. The only caveat, I suppose, is that you do have to have somewhere else to go and be ok with somebody renting out your place.

Create an Alexa Skill – Too funny. The first thing that popped into my head when I read this was, I will get Alexa to write me a piece of software creating an Alexa skill. This is the conversation that took place between Alexa and I… I was using voice -to-text as I did this so these are my and her actual spoken words; Me – “Alexa can you write software, Alexa – “right now I’m better at being code than writing it, but I’m always learning more”

There are you. A number of ways that you MIGHT be able to generate some totally new income in retirement.

Income Streams That Aren’t

Another thing to remember is that although there are some situations in which you are receiving money, they are not actually income streams. Most are simply your money being returned to you after someone has held it for a while.

Income Tax Return – Yes, if you get an income tax refund it does feel like free money, and perhaps an opportunity to spend it on something adventurous. In reality, it is simply tax that you have overpaid being returned to you. You may want to consider it as forced savings, but it is not an income stream, nor is it found money. So sorry, so sad.

Health Benefit Refunds – if you are lucky enough to have benefits in retirement, when you receive the money for a dental or physiotherapy claim it again is not new money. It is simply the insurance company returning to you the money you have paid for some health-related service. Typically, you are usually getting less back than what you paid in. Yes, it is wonderful that you’re not paying the full amount for the service, but again, you are not up money.

Beer and Wine Bottle Returns – I was laughing hysterically when I dictated this sub-title using voice to text. I am amazed how it typed the right thing. I do enjoy returning beer and wine bottles to our local beer store… you may be taking yours somewhere else if you live in a different province … and ending up with a little bit of cash in my pocket when I do so.

I am aware that this is not found money, it is simply me getting the deposit back, which I have already paid in advance. But I do enjoy it so.  Always keep in mind, if you are steadily increasing the amount of money you receive from your bottle returns, all it means is that you’re spending more and more on booze. A net, net loss.

I suppose there is always the option of going out and walking the edges of country roads looking for bottles thrown out of car windows, but that is probably not going to be the most lucrative of income sources in retirement anyway. LOL!

Our grandson was once involved in a beer bottle collection drive as a fundraiser for one of his sports teams. After the bottles were all collected, the moms and dads were charged with returning the bottles to the beer store to collect the money. Our son was standing there with his back turned to his cart full of cases of empties talking to another parent and discovered when he turned around, that a street person was pushing his cart towards the entrance of the beer store. The individual, who clearly had mental health issues, refused to give him back the cart, claiming that it was his. Rather than make a scene, our son simply let the person keep the bottles and contributed the bottle return amount to the team’s coffers.

Other Actions

In lieu of generating new income streams, your other option for freeing up money for use in retirement generally involves reducing expenses. Here are some of the things you can try that should produce measurable results.

Get Yourself Out of Debt – The only debt you really should have in retirement is your monthly credit card charges, which you should be paying off every month. Other than that, car payments are really the only other debt you should be considering carrying in retirement. And at that, you should be trying to drive the car you already own for as long as possible – especially after it is fully paid off.

Get by With One Car – Having done this in the last couple of years, I know that it is in reality much cheaper to operate one car than two. We are having absolutely no major problems with juggling the use of one car. It may be more difficult once we get out of the pandemic when can we all start going places again, but for now it works just fine.

Track Your Spending – If you have been reading me for a while you know how keen I am on tracking spending and budgeting. It works. It will show you exactly where your money is going, which in turn will show you where you might be able to reduce your spending.

Get Stuff for Cheap or Even Free – Reduce your grocery bills by planning healthy weekly meals around what’s on sale. Refer to flyers and use coupons when doing your grocery shopping. Put everything you buy to the “do I really need this?” sniff test. Our clothing budget has plummeted during the pandemic, and I think we’re going to keep it that way. Stop buying books, go to the library.

I would be interested to hear about your experiences with income streams in retirement. Especially if you have had any with other sources that work. You can either post a comment below, or flip me an email at “retiree@retirednowwhat.ca”.