“Fall in love.
Stack money.
Get married.
Travel the world.
Have kids.”
– Anonymous
Exactly.
This is hard enough as your average American but factor honesty into it, what I personally want out of life and being completely honest with myself about it, I’m on course but with such stressful desires. As far as large chunks of expenses we have quite a few over the next several years:
Weight loss/physical conditioning: 50-60k. Most of that goes towards facility rental and then there’s my trainers, medical/counseling services, equipment, food, misc. things, etc.
Makeover: 5k. Drastic weight loss and physical conditioning means all new wardrobe, all new lifestyle, and a general update of feminine beauty regiments to maintain the new me.
Wedding: 75-100k. I have a general idea of what I want for my wedding. It’s gonna be relatively small (less than 100 guests) and definitely modern (I’ve come up with my own version of a ceremony and wedding traditions) but overall, it won’t be that large of an event. It’s just that most things about the small ceremony will be completely custom and novel and that’s where the expense comes in.
Honeymoon: 70k. I doubt it will be that expensive but the honeymoon is QUITE elaborate. I wanna take a summer to do a cross country road trip to all the major party/destination cities in the U.S., then I wanna end it with a week at a resort in Jamaica. I honestly think it’ll be closer to 25-35k but I don’t really know how much it costs to party well in each city, so, I arbitrarily chose 70k.
Establishing a home: 600k. I figure, making a nice SFH in Reston would be about 420k, a 90k batmobile, and a car for the hubby, round up, 600k sounds about good for establishing a home with our family.
Entertaining/traveling/passion pursuit: salary. I enjoy dancing and singing and a lot of the choreographers/coaches I love are in Atlanta and Los Angeles, which means I’ll have to travel a couple times a month. I really just wanna do private lessons and make these people my friends since, for the most part, we’re all in that 22-26 age group. I basically just want hella dance/vocal coaching which will require some travel and then at home I’ll be at my best to do things locally and have fun with my hobbies. I also wanna do a couple dinner parties/game nights every month and host at least 2-3 annual events. A six figure salary on a master’s degree will be more than enough to cover the expenses a family of three.
Overall, we’re looking at 800-850k in expenses over the next few years.
Off the top of my head I can think of 3-5 lucrative hobbies to offset those expenses:
Creating a mixtape: Piece of cake. One of them is practically already created instrumentally with songs written to them. We record it, produce it, sell it….possibly do an all new one and make it a double disc set? Easily 10k.
EBook: Self explanatory but this will require a lot of creative promotion. Word of mouth is powerful and if you can generate lasting interest and then charge for the finished product? Basically, if you’re gonna release an E-Book, in order to make it successful it has to be highly anticipated. If we can do that it should easily make 500k.
E-Book special edition: If we do a few high-quality, leather bound editions and strategically market them through that one Black Diamond placement company, charge for appearances when the book gets a celebrity buzz, we can bank another 200k.
I’m sure between the two of us we know some people who are making quuuuite a few thousand a month. I mean 5k+. If we can tap into their knowledge base and have a general idea of how they hustle, we can come up with an additional couple of money generators.
The three I thought up are worth about 710k which leaves 90-140k to make up. I’m sure the difference can be made up with additional input.
The capital for these ventures should be pretty standard. The things necessary to make a mixtape we already have (save the necessary equipment I’d need to put down vocals). I think if we find a creative/original way to sell it via the internet, uploading copies should be fairly inexpensive. Again, I wouldn’t know how much it costs to upload a few thousand copies of something but I mean…if you can send an email with an attachment that’s pretty much free. Again, we’d just have to think tank a cool way to get music out there. Same with the E-Book. The most expensive one is the special edition format. I know a little about magazine publication and a high quality print can run $35-50 a pop. A book is anywhere from $50-75 a pop. I’d personally do magazine format in dope packaging and sell it at a premium. People like cool looking, exclusive things.
Hipsters are hip for a reason.
If our expenses weren’t already stressful enough, the timeline would make this all a bit more neurotic feeling. I’m basing this off the desire to begin pregnancy at 26, have the baby at 27….wait a couple years and have another at 29….wait a couple years and have another at 31. I don’t really wanna be having children any later than that because of my immediate family history with carrying to term/high risk deliveries (though women in my EXTENDED family have kids at 33-36 and it’s a breeze). I don’t want that, nor do I wanna pop out 5-6 kids like they have. So, I’m creating this timeline based on my ideal pregnancy conditions and that’s birthing at 27-31. This makes it so that:
2014: Whether I start today or in the Spring of next year, I need all of 2014 for the physical reboot and it’s cool if it runs a couple months into 2015.
2015: We’d need to get married and have the honeymoon sometime between January and July. Going into late summer/early fall I can start trying to get pregnant. The latter half of the year is when I wanna get settled into a home and travel for dance/vocal coaching; though, that’s fluid and really, it’s year round. The only thing that’s rigid is the first half of the year because that’s the only time the wedding/honeymoon fits.
2016: I wanna be with child between July 2015 and at the ABSOLUTE latest March 2016. That way I’ll have the baby before turning 27.
So, pretty much, 2014 = weight loss; early 2015 = wedding/honeymoon and latter 2015 = settling into a home, passion pursuit, and getting pregnant; and 2016 is birthing our first child together.
That’s my stressful vision for the future and even though this is condensed to an ideal timeline of three years, it should happen naturally within the next five.
There's A Tax On Lust 
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