The Share your salary progression thread was quite interesting, but as we are a FIRE community, I would like to see your side hustle/investing/other income progression.
Here’s mine:
You can see the point where I stopped chasing work and decided to aim for work/life balance and then a few years later when I discovered FIRE and decided to aim for FI.
Really nice to see, I’m envious. May I ask, in what niche are you? I assume something software related?
I’m in a niche finance function. In 2017, I had an opportunity to take a new role that would have increased salary by 50%. I still wonder whether I made a mistake to pass on it.
What’s on the y axis? Monthly gross income?
Amd what’s your side hustle?
Yes, Monthly gross income.
I tried a variety of side hustles in the past, but I’m not a big believer in small side hustles. I think they are useful to see whether there is an opportunity to scale them out, but then you should choose to ‘go big or go home’ as there’s not enough time/attention to waste on sub-scale amounts unless it is enjoyable or very passive (and few things are very passive).
Now most of it is due to investments (stocks, bonds and real estate).
How do you measure the gross income of your stocks? I assume this is dividend? Impressive!
Similar question, I assume you count unrealized stock and RE appreciation as part of your investment income?
That would sound quite wrong to me.
Realized capital gains would make sense perhaps.
But then the “monthly income” perspective above would need to be “ultra-averaged”. 
But let’s wait for Phil’s reply before speculating too deeply.
I guess these are dividends. I also think that (passive) dividends should not be counted as an (active) side hustle. They are already factored in in expected investment returns. Otherwise I see no point in this thread.
I also don’t see a point in focusing on side hustles which are expected to have lower return per time than your main job, but this is just my opinion.
All similar questions. I basically count: dividends, interest and rental income. I exclude any form of capital gains (realized or unrealized). Basically, just take as income anything that under accounting rules would be considered income rather than gains.
There can be reasons for this. One is that you might enjoy it and so would prefer to do the side hustle even if you earn less. Plus most things take time to grow and scale to become more profitable. So sometimes it is necessary to invest time and energy into the business. A good example might be a YouTuber. There are many famous ones who literally earn millions year but when starting off, earned way less than minimum wage for months if not years.
well one time you sure found some change on the street no? Would bum up your graph quite a bit…
No investments either? I assumed most on this board would be working to build up alternative income stream to eventually quit work.
Financial literacy is open also for those who is not in the top 1% - 10% in earnings.
While the income is a lot, it is somewhat skewed in recent years as I’d invested heavily into high yielding stocks such as energy/mining and tobacco and then later sold most of the energy/mining/growth stocks and hold proceeds in a mix of T-bills and HY bonds giving a high yield - which isn’t very tax effective.
I don’t have active investments and don’t count passive income as a side hustle.
Well, the idea was to capture essentially all non-wage income, including passive income (in fact, I was expecting passive income to be the main portion). Not simply active investments and side hustles. i.e. if you quit your job, how much income do you have rolling in to retire on. Unfortunately, I can’t edit the title to make this clear.
What would then be the difference with SWR + net wealth?
Indeed from a taxes pov in Switzerland it is better not to fixate too much on income. It is more efficient to live off capital gains or withdrawals from your portfolio via Lombard loan
Absolutely. Generating capital gains is preferable for tax reasons.
