This peaceful sounding stream isn't in this blog post to make you feel calm, or help you meditate. It's here as a metaphor. But it's a 12 hour video, so if you want to play this in the background to help you relax in these stressful times, go for it.
Most adults in this world have a really poor understanding of money. Our school systems were intentionally set up to not teach averagepeople about money. But that's a whole different matter. This is a short blog post to explain a very basic idea, since 42 million plus people have recently been laid off, though a couple million have been re-hired, which is good.
When you work a regular job, you get a paycheck. If we use water as a metaphor for money, a paycheck is like getting a bucket of money. You get a set amount, and you can use all of that money, that "bucket" of water, to pay your rent, mortgage, student loans, car loans, and buy food, clothes, household goods, and other products you need to survive. If you have some extra, you can put some in savings, or maybe invest in something like your 401k, stocks, maybe a gold coin or two.
When you're used to working for paycheck, for that bucket of water, when you lose your job, you suddenly lose that week's bucket, and the bucket you're used to getting each week or two weeks. So you nautrally think about how to get another bucket of water (money), on a regular basis. You sign up for unemployment, so the government will give you another, smaller bucket of money every week, to get by, until you can (hopefully) find a new job.
But if you can't find a new job, and you decide to start some small business, you need to stop thinking about buckets of money. A good business person thinks about money as a stream, like that one in the video above. A business tries to build a stream of money, and ultimately, several streams, or even rivers. all flowing constantly. You want money coming in day by day, in a constant stream. You may get on the phone or computer and sell your product to create that stream every day. You may have an online store where you have people ordering your products online, 24 hours a day, and you ship out the orders every day. So as a business, you have bits of money coming in, continually, not one big bucket each week. When you need to pay a bill, as a business, to buy office supplies, pay the rent on your office, or buy products to resell, you dip a bucket into your stream of cash, you take a little water out of the stream, and pay that expense. But the business' stream, of money, keeps flowing (if you're doing a good job running it).
So if you want to go from being someone who had worked a typical job, working for a paycheck, for your whole life, to someone who runs a small business, you need to change how you think about money. It's not about getting another bucket of money, a big check. It's about creating a continuous stream of money flowing through your business. So think about that for a while, as you plan for how to move forward in this weird, crazy, Covid-19 affected world.
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