How I built 6 Income Sources That Generate $59,750 Per Month

What's up, you guys? It's Graham here.

So, I know I'm a bit late to the party, but for those of you that don't watch Lyon Scribner—which you should be watching, Brian Scribner—so check him out. He posted a really good video earlier this month about how he built five income sources by the age of twenty-three, each of which generates between one thousand and ten thousand dollars per month. When I saw that video, the first thing that came to mind was, “Why didn't I think of this topic and post about it first?”

But besides that, I thought it was a great video with great information, and that inspired me to make my own video on this from my own perspective. So, I'm going to be breaking down my own income sources, how and why I was able to build them up, and the timelines for each of those.

And by the way, any time I make a video about this, it's never my intention to sound like some d-bag just boasting about how much money he makes. I mean, sure, the title of this video might be a little d-baggy because that's what gets clicks and views on YouTube, but it's so much more important not to focus on the end result and the final number.

It's much more important to understand the fundamentals of how this works, why it was set up, why it was created in the first place, and focus on the process. That way, you can go and implement some of these things for yourself as well.

Now, my first and biggest income source is what I make working as a real estate agent here in Los Angeles. Now, this began in mid-2008 when I was barely out of high school, had no college degree, and had no marketable skill whatsoever. So, I thought to myself, “Hey, I could just go and sell real estate.”

Now, a few months prior to starting in real estate, I was working in a precious metals investment firm earning thirteen dollars an hour doing data entry. And it was at that point that I realized I never want to work in a cubicle ever again.

It was also such a massive change to go from a pay job where you spend eight hours of your time and you get paid for eight hours to a commission-only environment where you get paid nothing for your time and everything for your results. Just that mental shift was huge.

And if any of you guys watching had never experienced a commission-only sales job, I highly recommend you do it at some point in your life, even if you never want to do sales ever again. I promise you guys, the experience that you get from doing this is going to be invaluable.

Selling real estate really taught me that I can work twelve hours a day, seven days a week for six months straight and not earn a single penny if I wasn't effective at what I did. If I wasn't producing the results, I wasn't making any money.

It really taught me to shift my focus that it makes no difference how hard I work at something or how much time I spend on something if I don't get the end result and actually sell the house. I realized early on that I would never become wealthy working hourly or on a salary for somebody else.

It would take me decades to save up and invest for the lifestyle I wanted to have, and at the end of the day, I would really just be at the whims of somebody else. So, by working in a commission-only environment where there was really no cap to how much money I could make, it really gave me the freedom to decide where I spend my time worrying, how I spend my time.

I can work as hard as I want or as little as I want, and the income wasn't derived from the amount of hours I worked; it was derived from the results that I got. At the end of the day, this also meant that there wasn't really a limit to how much money I could make as long as I managed my time properly and was good at what I did.

Now, at this point, I've just over ten years in the business working as a real estate agent, and at this point, I've really narrowed my clients' house down to repeat and referral business. This has given me such a great work-life balance where I can really maximize the time I do spend working with clients.

Last year, this meant I did just about twenty-two million dollars in sales volume, which works out to be about five hundred thousand dollars in gross commission. Now, this year, I'm estimating I'll be bringing in about thirty thousand dollars per month, maybe slightly more, depending on what I have closing in December.

Now, keep in mind that this sort of income is very sporadic. It might be nothing for a few months, and then all of a sudden, the fourth month, I get like a ninety-thousand-dollar check and then nothing again for the next few months. So, this is just the average balanced out over the entire year.

Now, it was this sort of cyclical—if that's a word—that led me to my second source of income. Now, back in 2011, I was about three years in the business of working as a real estate agent. Back then, I was constantly worried about where my next commission check would be coming from because I would often work two to five months without earning a single penny, besides maybe a lease commission here or there, maybe just a few thousand dollars.

But beyond that, I had no idea when and where my next sale would come from. This was also something where I thought to myself, “Can I really see myself doing this when I'm fifty years old? Do I really see myself constantly worried and stressed out about where the next deal is going to be coming from?

And if I don't close this deal, I'm not going to be getting paid, and it constantly requires my time to go and make my next commission check?” Even though the commissions were great, is this sort of lifestyle really something that I can see myself doing long-term?

It was at this point that really forced me to think. This relies on me continuing to work to make money, but what happens if I don't want to do this anymore? What happens if I want to go on vacation? Well, what happens if it just simply takes me a year to sell a house? I can be screwed.

No, it was that sort of scared mentality that thankfully caused me to save pretty much everything that I was making. I owned everything outright; I had zero debt. I was very conservative with how I spent my money. Notice how I said conservative and not cheap—big difference there. But thankfully, I just ended up saving it all.

By mid-2011, it really struck me that I should be doing something with all the money I was saving up. Because I was in real estate, it just seemed like the logical next step to invest in real estate.

Now, at the time, I saw that the market was terrible when I was looking in San Bernardino, and I realized that, wait a second, I could be in a property seventy thousand dollars. I can rent it for $1,200, and it would net me, at the end of the day, nine hundred dollars every single month.

So, that's pretty much what I ended up doing. I used about two hundred thousand dollars that I had saved up over four years of working as a real estate agent to go and buy three properties. It was two houses and a triplex over in San Bernardino when the market was at its rock-bottom. I ended up doing some minor work to them and immediately renting them out, and that instantly gave me an extra few thousand dollars every single month in rental income that I would not have to worry about.

It was literally at that point that I had this aha moment that really made me realize that this is where the power was. It was in investing in passive income sources that were completely independent of what I did day-to-day with my time.

Now, from there, I began scaling up, and thankfully after 2011, I began earning substantially more money working as a real estate agent. It allowed me to buy another property here in Los Angeles, and then a duplex here in Los Angeles, and then another duplex here in Los Angeles.

Now, within almost eight years, I now own six properties—that's three houses, two duplexes, and a triplex—that net me, on average, every single month, about four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars. This is net rental income; this is not gross. This is net after all of my expenses.

To me, this is really my safety net to know as long as I could keep my expenses below this amount, I can make whatever else I make elsewhere, and all of that just becomes pure profit that I can then go and just reinvest back in more real estate.

So anyway, fast forward to late 2016, just under two years ago. Even though I've had so much fun selling real estate and investing in real estate, I wanted some sort of creative outlet that I could really just kind of have fun doing that was outside of real estate.

Making YouTube videos has been something I've wanted to do since I was like twenty, twenty-one years old and would watch all these other YouTube channels. But I felt like I never really had the courage to do it. So late 2016, I finally felt like, you know what? That was my time. I can try to relax a little bit and just have fun making YouTube videos.

Now, I never expected YouTube to take off. I never expected anyone to watch me. I never expected to earn a single dime from it. I literally just looked up to people like Rob Dom, who in his early days would give inspirational business advice, and I thought, “I wish I could do that too, but who would want to watch me?”

So, I just never posted a video because I literally thought that just no one would watch. So after literally years of me telling myself that no one would want to watch me, I posted a video in 2016 on Christmas Day about how I became a millionaire in real estate by the age of twenty-six.

And by the grace of the YouTube algorithms and gods, that video ended up getting four hundred thousand views in the first, like, three months. It was at that point that I was absolutely blown away, and I was like, “Wait a second. I should really be making more YouTube videos now.”

Because I was making this as like a finance video, let's talk about the finances of YouTube. In the beginning, I was making anywhere from like a few cents to maybe about a dollar a day. And at the time, I was really making between two and three videos every single week.

But after doing that for a little while, after my first video really ended up taking off, I had one single day on YouTube where I made one hundred seventy dollars, and that was the day that really changed everything. It was at this point that I really realized, like, wait a second, there's a lot of potential here in YouTube.

I mean this is so much more than what I expected in terms of like I thought this might just be hobby money that I go and like reinvest in like cool cameras and stuff like that. But all of a sudden, I realized that maybe this is something that has a lot of potential that I should really dedicate more time to, and that is exactly what I did.

Now, even though I started this channel without the expectation of earning a single dollar from it, and it was really just about my own personal pursuits—I've always wanted to do this—when you see the one hundred seventy dollars in a single day, it really makes you refocus yourself and think that this could be something big.

So now today, going from my humble beginnings of making like thirty cents to a dollar a day, I now make, on average, fourteen thousand dollars per month just from YouTube ad revenue. Now, some months, obviously, you're higher than this, and some months are lower than this; it really depends on the amount of views that I get.

But on average, I'm seeing about fourteen thousand dollars a month, and this type of income is just hands-down incredible. Now, when I work as a real estate agent, there's really only so much I can do with my time. I have to be physically present, I have to be here in Los Angeles, and I have to show the properties in the way that I know the best.

Versus on YouTube, I could be anywhere in the world and have a worldwide outreach in a way that I simply couldn't do working by myself here as a real estate agent. And it was at this point, too, that I really realized the power of having leverage and really not being limited to a certain location.

With the Internet, you can reach people all around the world, and it was at that point that really made me realize that YouTube has really where all the potential is at. So, for the last eighteen months, without fail, I have made three videos every single week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Make sure to smash that subscribe button and the notification bell so YouTube notifies you anytime I post a video. But with YouTube, there becomes a rite of passage that almost every YouTuber must go through. We should cue the scary music here because this is selling a course.

Now, my course was initially inspired by another YouTuber named Tanner J Fox. Now, in mid-2017, Tanner J Fox was absolutely crushing it in the world of selling courses. He was doing between five thousand and ten thousand dollars every single day selling a course about how to make money on Amazon FBA.

I also really appreciated the fact that he was completely transparent with his income—that he ended up making significantly more money selling courses on Amazon FBA than he was ever able to on Amazon FBA itself. Now, I'm not going to lie; in the very beginning, I was extremely skeptical about this because here's some twenty-year-old kid with a chrome blue Lamborghini Huracan talking about how he's making two hundred fifty to three hundred thousand dollars every single month selling courses on YouTube.

And part of me was thinking, “How do we know this is real and not just like Photoshop derp? He's just like making this up.” But then one day, we ended up meeting up, and I saw his Teachable account firsthand in person where he actually just logged in the account, and you could see the numbers firsthand. I was absolutely floored.

I remember thinking that day—it was like four PM—and already that day he had made like seven or eight thousand dollars selling courses on Amazon FBA, and he had done that every single day for the last few months. I was just blown away. What I saw that really changed everything because I realized that the true potential here is really just in scalability.

That a product like this, especially a digital product, is much easier to scale over anything else. And it was because of that that really inspired my program, the Real Estate Agent Academy. Now, my course is a lot more niche than just about any other program out there.

It's specifically geared towards real estate agents in the United States or Canada, and the market for this is a lot smaller than like Amazon FBA or stock markets or anything else. But as you can see, I'll throw up the screenshot here: since mid-March, I've averaged about seventy-five hundred dollars per month in course sales.

To me, this is really about providing something in addition to what I do on YouTube, and instead of teaching one person how to sell real estate, I can scale that and be able to teach hundreds of people how to sell real estate using the exact same information. I literally spent about six months planning out just the outline and passing that by nearly two dozen real estate agents so that they can critique it and add on to it with anything I didn't think of.

I spent over a month straight filming and editing this to come out with something I was really, really proud of, and because I'm not naturally a very salesy person, I knew if this was something that I really, really believed was amazing, I wouldn't feel guilty or bad about ever promoting it because I really feel like this would exceed anyone's expectations who ended up purchasing it.

But you know what? For all of you guys that made it to this point—who want to become a real estate agent or grow your business as a real estate agent—I'm not going to put this coupon code anywhere else. It's not going to be in the description; you're not going to see it anywhere else.

But for the first ten people that end up purchasing the program, I will extend a one hundred dollar discount for you. Just use the coupon code “100 discount.” Again, that'll be for the first ten people just as a thank you for making it to this point of the video. If you guys are interested in that, there you go. Hope you enjoy it.

Now finally, that brings me to my last income source, which is money from rents that directly pays down the mortgage in the form of equity. Now, anytime you have a mortgage, your payment is broken up into two categories: one, you have principal, and one, you have interest.

This means that part of the rent ends up paying down the loan, so that all the money you received from your tenants eventually leads to a paid-off property after thirty years. Now, I realize that there are going to be some haters out there. They get very angry when I say this, and they're going to type on their keyboards saying something like, “But but equity is money because you don't get it in your pocket every month! It's not money! Dislike!”

Well, you know what? I think you're right, and you should tell that to the IRS because the IRS classifies that as income. If you can prove to them that that is not income, then I won't have to pay any tax on it. Imagine it almost like every month your tenant ends up giving you one thousand dollars' worth of Apple stock. Is this income?

Even though you can't go to the grocery store and buy your like haterade cream or whatever you buy, even though your tenant's giving you something worth value, this is exactly what paying down your mortgage is like. So, this means that every month, I am paying down my three mortgages, even though I'm already making four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars a month in net rental income.

In terms of cash flow, I am paying down those loan balances by about twenty-five hundred dollars every single month, and as the loan balance decreases over time, as I pay off that loan, that twenty-five hundred dollars increases by about twelve to thirteen dollars every single month. So, the first month might be twenty-five hundred, the next month might be twenty-five hundred and thirteen dollars, the next month after that might be twenty-five hundred and twenty-five dollars, and so on until the entire loan is paid off.

Now, finally, my sixth source of income is probably the least exciting, but it is money I make doing one-on-one coaching or consulting calls for real estate investing or real estate agents. Now, we don't do it too often, and it's really on a case-by-case basis.

But I would say, on average, it tends to add up to about a thousand dollars extra every single month. I also have a few other income sources I'm not counting in this number. One is property appreciation, and the other one is dividend income from Vanguard stock market index funds.

But because those are a little more nuanced, I figured I would leave them out and not count this in the total number that you see here. And the entire moral of the video is don't rely on one source of income and learn how to leverage your time to really make the most of the time you do spend working and making money.

For me, pretty much half of the income I make is completely independent of what I'm doing working as a real estate agent. So, this means I could be anywhere in the world. I can travel; I can not sell any houses whatsoever, and I would still make about thirty thousand dollars every single month.

And this also means that if YouTube fails and everything else falls apart and I don't make any rental income and everything else just goes to hell, I could still make about thirty thousand dollars a month working as a real estate agent in the event I still need to.

Having this is so powerful that it really gives you the flexibility and the lack of stress to really focus on the creative pursuits that you really like the most, which usually in turn means you end up making more money at the end of the day.

And also just a reminder to keep in mind that none of this was started overnight. This is something that I have spent years building up to. It took me about six months on YouTube before I started seeing any real significant money coming in from that.

It took me about eight months of work total to create the course, the Real Estate Agent Academy, and it took me five years in the business of working as a real estate agent before I started to see some repeat and referral business starting to come in consistently.

So, don't get impatient; don't just see the end result and get frustrated. You can't start there tomorrow. Be patient, take your time, and see this as doing something long-term.

So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you made it to the very end and you haven't already subscribed yet, make sure to smash that subscribe button and smash that notification bell so YouTube can notify you anytime I upload a video.

Also, feel free to add me on Snapchat and Instagram. I post there pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to be a part of it there. Thank you again for watching.

I also have some links in the description. This video is too long, so I don't want to make this outro too long, but now I'm making it long.

So anyway, thank you again for watching. Check the description, and until next time!