💼 Making Your Job Your Side Gig
FIRE BTC #36 - Focus on building your personal balance sheet
When you first step into the working world, your paycheck is your lifeline. Your entire financial identity revolves around trading your time for money. It’s how you pay the bills, put food on the table, and pay for your hobbies and fun.
If you’re smart, you also begin building a savings portfolio using some portion of your earned income (at least 10%). Always pay your future self first.
That savings portfolio will begin to generate new wealth too. Think of it as your side gig. It starts small, but has the potential to grow.
Over time, this dynamic should completely flip. What begins as a side hustle — steadily building your investments and savings — can grow into your primary wealth engine. Eventually, your job becomes the side hustle, while your balance sheet becomes the primary driver of new wealth creation.
The moment when your investments and assets begin to create more new wealth for you each year than your labor does is a game-changer. It’s a financial milestone that can transform your sense of freedom and possibility.
In this issue, we’ll explore how that transition happens, why so few people ever reach it, and how you can deliberately build toward it, especially if you’re using bitcoin as your savings vehicle.
🌱 From paycheck to portfolio
Most people spend their entire lives measuring financial progress through their income statement: their salary, bonuses, side hustles, and other forms of earned income.
It feels tangible and familiar. You work, you get paid, you repeat.
But your income statement only tells part of the story. The real key to building lasting wealth is your balance sheet: your growing portfolio of assets and investments that compound over time. While your income pays for today, your balance sheet pays for tomorrow.
In the early stages of your career, it makes sense for your job to be your primary wealth generator. That is where you build skills, relationships, and cash flow to get started. But over time, the power of compounding shifts the balance. Each dollar you invest becomes a worker that never sleeps, building wealth in the background while you focus on other things.
As this portfolio of assets grows, your role begins to change, and your mindset should change with it. You shift from being solely a wage earner to also being an “owner”. Your investments are your ownership stake in the future, giving you leverage and momentum that your labor alone could never match.
As your balance sheet expands, it gradually outpaces your income statement, until one day it becomes the true and primary engine of your new wealth creation.
😓 Why so few people make the leap
If shifting from paycheck-driven wealth to portfolio-driven wealth is so powerful, why do so few people achieve it?
The first reason is psychological conditioning. From a young age, most people are taught to measure their security, identity, and success through their earned income. Salary is a scoreboard. Society rewards and recognizes high earners, but much less emphasis is put on the power of growing their balance sheet. This mindset trap keeps people locked into trading time for money.
The second reason is lifestyle creep. As incomes grow, spending tends to grow right along with it. People upgrade their homes, cars, vacations, and hobbies, often without thinking about whether those upgrades advance their long-term freedom. Higher expenses mean fewer resources get directed to investments, which prevents portfolios from ever compounding enough to surpass earned income as the primary wealth engine.
Not to mention, in the fiat-dominated world we live in, debt-based consumption is strongly incentivized. Our monetary system breeds high time preference.
Of course, there are other obstacles too — impatience and fear among them. Early investing can feel painfully slow, and the volatility of markets can be intimidating compared to the perceived safety of a steady paycheck. But these challenges are secondary to the two biggest culprits: mindset and lifestyle.
The people who successfully make the leap think differently. They focus on growing their balance sheet from day one, and they maintain discipline around their spending so they can consistently save.
Real wealth — the kind that sets you free — comes from ownership, not just labor.
🏆 Making the shift
The shift from income-driven to asset-driven wealth takes intention, discipline, and a willingness to measure your progress differently. Instead of only asking “How much did I earn this year?”, start asking “How much did my balance sheet grow this year?”
Measure it in both dollars and BTC.
Reframe your thinking to view each dollar invested as a tiny employee working for you 24/7. Over time, those tiny employees can generate more new wealth in a year than your full-time job ever could. That is the moment your job becomes your side hustle, and your portfolio becomes the main gig.
For most people, that crossover happens gradually. In the beginning, it feels like nothing is happening. Then one day, the curve inflects, and the power of compounding takes over. Your savings portfolio starts to grow faster than you could ever match with labor alone.
If you use bitcoin as your core savings vehicle, this transition can happen even more powerfully. Bitcoin’s unique characteristics, especially its hard-capped supply, make it a uniquely strong foundational asset for a personal balance sheet. Your portfolio of hard money can expand in ways no fiat savings ever could.
There will come a day when no amount of labor, no matter how many hours you trade, can rival what your balance sheet produces for you in a single year.
Make your job your side gig.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!
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Until next time,
Trey ✌️
Awesome perspective and analogy. 🫡