In 1989, the Information Age began.  My son is only two years younger than the dawn of this revolutionary new time.  I spent the last few days researching the social and economic changes that came about as a result of the Industrial Age and finally, this morning, I had the ah-ha I was looking for.

I began this site, B-I, as a way to document my journey to a million dollars.  I’ve lost focus and changed purpose throughout the last 3 months, but there has always been a common thread of doing “something with the Internet.”  

The problem I just realized this morning was that I’ve been using an Industrial Age term to describe the income.  And that’s where a lot of my confusion came about.  That term is “passive income.”  When you examine how we use this term in common usage, you find that it’s a way of describing how we use an Industrial Age asset to create a systemized form of income.  Nothing wrong there, but if that’s all passive income means to you then it means that you will always be looking at assets with your Industrial Age blinders on.  Probably the most well known way to make passive income is with real estate.

Real estate, the way we live and the way we work, all changed with the Industrial Age.  People moved from their farms (Agricultural) to the cities.  The Industrial Age drew them in and the Industrialists took the farms for more efficient farming.  Suddenly, there was a new class of people - the inner city poor.  And the whole field of real estate investing opened up opportunities.

I love real estate.  I have made a lot of money with it.  Just because we’ve moved into a new Age, it doesn’t mean that real estate investing is gone.  Just because we moved from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age doesn’t mean that agricultural is gone for the small farmer.  In fact, specialty farms are making more money then ever before with niches such as herb growing, organic produce and exotic, fresh vegetables and fruit.  

I had to make that distinction in my own head to understand the confusion I felt with figuring out my next steps with B-I.  The Loopholes of the RIch Charity Weekend this past week flooded me with ideas and contacts.  Today I made the distinction that there really is a new Age.  It’s not the old one with just a different way of communicating.  There are ways to make money that didn’t exist 10 years ago.  

So here are the highlights:

David is working on a plan to retire before he’s 18 (6 1/2 months).  Part of me thinks that is just the optimism of youth but there is a part that says “What if he’s right? What does that say about the 30+ years I’ve spent working?”  

I’ll have a series of affiliate marketing websites up by mid-August at the latest.  We’re working on an easy way to systemize the process and check stats frequently to adapt quickly to changes.

I’m building my new MLM using the technology of the Information Age.  This one might be an argument of an older Age economic system, but I’d make the argument that the very nature of how this MLM works (bringing back the High Touch using High Tech) makes it an exception.

I’m continuing to refine the processes I use at my companies to provide tax and financial educations to my clients.  

I’m not sure how much sense these Sun morning ramblings make. A light bulb has gone off in my head.  It changes how I look at making money with my projects.   It’s not just passive income, it’s Leveraged Income and that’s the new way of making money in the Information Age.