Summary

Here's why I started this podcast. I've been interested in passive income for a long time. In fact, since 2017, I've made about $300,000 in my side hustle. But that's mostly been active money. I didn't focus on passive because I was scared. Scared of a lot of things, but mostly scared that I would not be successful. That all changed when I met Gregg. Actually, it all changed when I reconnected with Gregg. Gregg was a superintendent who turned me down for a job, but called me later and gave me some good feedback. I was really grateful that he helped me something that I couldn’t see myself. Fast forward a few years, and I reconnected with him, but he wasn’t a superintendent anymore. Turns out, he had retired when he was fifty years old. Why? Because his passive income surpassed his superintendent salary. I was shocked. Here I was hustling, and not able to get ahead to a comfortable level. He helped me see that if someone like him could do it. I could do it too. That’s a powerful feeling. Once I saw that, I decided to start taking some action. The only problem was that I didn’t have a lot of money. I needed to start with a small amount and build it up. I’ve read several books on how to do things but I hadn’t yet taken action. I decided it was time to take action. The book I’m going to recommend for this episode is Covered Calls for Beginners by Freeman Publications. It teaches the strategy that I started utilizing with just $400. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough that I could start doing something. Let me explain the strategy as best I can as I share my month 2 report. The strategy consists of buying stocks in increments of 100 and then selling covered calls, which you can think of as getting rental income off the stock. This is not to be confused with stock lending, where someone literally borrows your stock to make trades. Right now, I know that exists, but I don’t really get how it works. Now, let’s go a little deeper here. This strategy involves selling the opportunity for someone else to buy your stock at a given price. Let’s say you have stock that you bought for $10 each ($10 x 100 shares = $1000 invested). Let’s say you think this stock is going to stay the same or go down over the next few weeks. What you do is sell the opportunity for someone to buy these 100 shares you own at a set price. Let’s say that price is $10.50. So, someone else buys the opportunity to buy the stock at $10.50, and they’re so sure it is going to go above 10.50, that they pay you $0.24/share (.24 x 100=$24) or $24 to have that opportunity. You can choose by what date you think that’s going to happen, I’ve been choosing a week, because I feel like I have a better chance of predicting a week than I do have of predicting what’s going to happen in a month, six months, or even a year. It’s impossible to predict what is going to happen but you can make educated guesses! That’s all I’m doing. I’m making educated guesses. If the stock goes up to $10.45, then I keep the “premium” that the person paid, and since they can buy the stock cheaper on the open market, they don’t assign that sale to me. If it goes up 10.55, then they do assign the sale to me, but I made the $.24/share and the $.50/share that the cost of the stock went up. So, I made $.74/share on that trade that week. Or, the other way to think of it is I made a 7.4% that week. If I hadn’t sold that stock, and it stayed below what is called the strike price, $10.50, then I would have made 2.4% that week. My goal with this is to make 1% each week that I utilize this strategy. Ideally, the trades never happen, I keep the stock, and I keep the premiums. That is what happened mostly in Month 2. I bought stock, and again, I didn’t have much money, so I needed to start small. The book I referenced above strongly advises you to stay away from stocks that cost less than $10/share, but I didn’t have $1000 to start. I only had a couple hundred dollars. Once I figured out how to start using this strategy, I grew more confident and comfortable with investing more. I put $1500 into my account and started selling options. This led me to make $215 in Month 2, or 11.3%. That’s pretty good when you consider that the stock market was in decline most of that time.