money grows on trees

[Unfortunately, our cruise ship group didn't last. But I'll continue to blog about the few lessons that continue from those few trips we had and from the money group that I continue to attend.]

In the prosperity mind of thinking, money does grow on trees. But the question really is:

-which tree can you harvest from?
-and where you should plant your tree?

The crazy part about America in particular that immigrant parents often don't understand is that there are a ridiculous number of ways to get paid. My brother who is pursuing acting said that there are people who get paid to be the corpse or people who make six figure incomes creating the random overheard dialogue in crowd and restaurant scenes in movies. Who the hell would ever think someone would pay you for that much less make six figures doing it?

So even within a profession there are many trees to harvest from. It's unfortunate that usually we only know of one way. Like if you're not the famous A-list star then you're not making a decent living.

The other day Tuhan said people always talk about how they'll make money in stocks, real estate or business. But when you look at each of the things, they are all the same in the sense that there are many levels in which to make money, the question is which one do you like and which one are you willing to put work into.

Take real estate. Everyone thinks you need to buy a house and buy multiple houses or be the one to flip the house. But you could be the one that simply finds the deals. Or the one who fixes the house, or the one who finds the buyer. Grant it they all don't get paid the same amount, but there are different risks and skills.

In business, you could run and own the business, you could be on the board, you could be the group that sells off different portions of business, or you could buy stock, growth stock, dividend stock. Slow, fast, large small. They're all the same.

I started realizing a bit of this when I looked into the whole invention craze and how to make money off an idea. The steps felt alot like real estate deals. Well, I could produce my idea, or I could just have the idea and license it out to someone else who would produce the product. Different levels of risk, different amounts of income.

The question is, which tree are you willing to harvest? Do I want to learn to shimmy up a coconut tree to get the coconuts high up above? Do I want a low lying berry bush instead? Am I willing to fight through the thorniness of a pineapple? It depends. If I'm in the tropics and there were mostly coconuts, well, I either pick the coconuts, pay someone else to pick them, or move to an area that has other trees. Once you figure out what tree you want to harvest, now you have to figure out where they should be planted.

We started a photography business with my husband. We started doing weddings because it seemed like that's the way if you're a photographer how you're supposed to make money. But we weren't willing to put in the kind of time and money to really make it work, besides it was going to make it more of a new job to really make it work. So what else could we do? I had tried the cafepress site to put photos on products but that was limited. Then I found Zazzle that made it so much easier. They were pictures we were already taking from our trips abroad, from weddings we had done, or ones we took when we were just goofing around. But they had an artistic quality that worked for the products. We probably missed a window for the holiday gift buying season, but at least we now have product. It's a good place for those photos plus they advertise the wedding business.

Another place we looked at was stock photography. You know, all those pictures on advertising. The reason you see the same faces all the time is because that is stock photography. They find an appealing picture and design their ad around it. But it's similar to renting a house in that you are renting the photo to each person. One photo to different people. If you get good at it, you can generate quite a bit of cash flow from it.

But like every venue you enter, you have to put in the time to study what it is that's needed for a good harvest. While alot of our photos work for zazzle, they don't work for stock photography. Right now what we find appealing with this level of photography is that it's not about us waiting for someone to contact us to get paid to do something, we do something first, and work to make a product people will buy. And it's something that can be bought and sold over and over again over time. And it also means just about everything and anything can be a photograph that can be sold.

Same skills to take the photo, different mindsets in creating the product. Stock photography is not wedding photography is not editorial photography is not photojournalism, although some of these do overlap. And each type has a specific place and arena and market that wants that product. But which one do you like doing? Some people hate wedding photography as much as they hate being a landlord.

We know that we'd like to make money off of photography because it's something the hubby and I enjoy doing. It's like saying I want to make money off of citrus trees or even orange trees. But now we're in the process of asking ourselves but what varietals of oranges do we want to plant? And where and how do we plant them? This is the part that times work and time and study and experimentation. But once we figure out which plants work for us, then we can be very good at reaping a fine harvest year after year.