How I stacked 4 income streams to replace a salary

I make a living. I don’t have an income.

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory, where I write for people who have outgrown a version of a life they worked hard to build. Essays from inside the transition, weekly.

Somebody asked me last month how I make money and I gave an answer so vague that it embarrassed me on the way home.

Not because I didn’t know. I knew. I could have listed them. But I was vague because the honest answer is four things, and four things said out loud sounds like scraping by, when the actual situation is that the rent has been paid on time for a good while now.

So here it is properly, which is not something I have written down before.

The four

1. Design work

Design work for clients is the biggest, and it is mostly small startups overseas.

SaaS apps, a few e-commerce ones, education brands and fellow digital marketing brands.

Every so often a new client turns up and decides they need a stronger digital presence on the web even though they might not know what that means yet.

The other type of design work is the ongoing site builds, mostly. It is also the part I find least interesting to talk about, probably because it is the thing I was already good at before any of this started.

2. Retainer packages

Then the retainers, monthly, from partnerships I already had with brands in a few different countries.

Fixed scope. Checking the SEO content is still holding up, design updates, internal links, metadata.

Unglamorous, and it mattered more than its size suggested, because it was the first money that ever turned up without me having to go out and find it.

I had not understood, until then, how much of the exhaustion was the finding rather than the doing.

3. E-commerce stores

Online e-commerce stores, which my partner and I built together.

There were two of them, which is the part that makes this hard to say in one sentence.

The one still running is in the digital product space. Tools, website templates, UI/UX tools and components for small businesses trying to look like they know what they are doing on the web.

It grew more than I expected, mostly while I was not watching it, because the aim was to make it a passive income business.

The other one shipped actual objects, and it closed earlier this year. That is a longer story than this essay wants. I never really paid myself out of either of them, or I paid myself just enough.

The closed one is the one I keep thinking about. I did not want a future in inventory and logistics. I had pictured myself somewhere with a laptop, and when I started shipping actual objects I had not thought that far ahead.

I opened it to find out how I liked working, which is an expensive way to run that experiment, and I learned more about daily operations than I ever wanted to.

While it was a short-term business, I am glad I gave it a go, as it showed me what I do not want, and I think that is a reasonable thing for a business to have done.

It just took closing it before I would listen.

4. Writing

And the writing, which is maybe about five percent of it.

To tell you the truth, definitely the least money, my longest runway yet, and the one I would keep if somebody made me choose, which I am aware is the kind of thing people say about the thing that pays least.

None of them is a job. No title, no manager, nothing you could call a contract that runs past this year.

I should admit that I cannot give you the exact split. My partner does the maths. He is, among other things, my business partner and accountant, and I could not tell you what share of last month came from where without asking him first, which for someone writing an essay about her own income is either funny or slightly damning, and is probably both.

How they actually arrived, which is less impressive than stacked

They did not turn up together and saying ‘stacked’ makes it sound like a plan, where in reality, all this did not come planned.

The design work came first, because it was a continuation rather than a decision.

I was already doing it. The retainers came about eight months later.

The shop was already running quietly in the background by then, and had been for a while.

The writing came last and took much longer to pay anything at all, and for most of that time I would have called it a hobby if anyone had asked, which is a word I now think I was using defensively.

Somewhere around twelve months in, the four of them together made more than the salary had, though not every month since, and I think that is the more honest way to put it.

I didn’t really notice on the day. I worked it out about six weeks later, doing sums for something unrelated, and then sat there for a while feeling considerably less than I had expected to.

Why the business is still open

My high achiever side and a dash of stubbornness are part of it, and I have said that out loud before.

The rest is less flattering.

I left a salary and I felt guilty about leaving it, and the guilt turned into a rule I never wrote down, which was that there always had to be money coming in from somewhere.

The online shop is still operating behind the scenes. And closing it would mean fully trusting the other three, and I am not there yet.

What a job actually bundles

It took me a while to redesign this in my mind and make it make sense for myself in my world.

A job is not a source of income.

It is a bundle, and you do not notice because it never comes apart while you are inside one.

A job hands you money. It also hands you a title, a schedule, somewhere to be on a Tuesday, a category on every form you will ever fill in, an answer at a party, something to tell your parents, and the general assumption that you are fine.

All of it arrives in one object, automatically, and none of it is itemised.

Take the bundle apart and one item survives on its own. The money. The rest does not come with it and nothing turns up to replace it.

Paying your way and being taken seriously used to arrive together. They come apart now, and the money is the half that turns up first.

Which is a state most of us do not have a word for. Financially fine, socially unplaceable. So people reach for the nearest available word, and the nearest available word is usually struggling.

The word I went and found

Except finally I found a word that resonated while I was scrolling on Substack. Portfolio work or fractional work.

I came across it in Anna Mack’s Stack writing and then again in Nonlinear News, and something in me settled, which is the part worth admitting.

Nothing had changed. Not the money, not the week, not one of the four things. I just had a phrase that sounded like a category, and a category was the thing I had been missing. I used it on myself long before I ever used it on anybody else.

I am still not sure whether that counts as understanding something or just as being relieved.

The part I actually find hard

It is not the money. The money got sorted, roughly, and later than I would have liked.

It is that four things means four beginnings and nothing that ever finishes.

There is no promotion in this. Nobody moves you up a level. You keep four plates going, and the reward for keeping them going well is that you get to keep doing it.

Which is fine, and it is what I signed up for.

It is just not a structure anybody prepared me for, because every story we get about work has a ladder in it somewhere.

I notice I am proud of it and slightly embarrassed by it at the same time. Occasionally in the same conversation. Once, memorably, in the same sentence.

Although, I wonder whether the embarrassment is about legitimacy at all, or whether it is simpler and less flattering than that.

Some of it is just that I miss being able to answer in one word. That is not an identity crisis.

It is a small daily friction, and I think I have dressed it up as something larger because something larger is more interesting to write about, and because admitting you want the easy version of a question makes you sound lazy.

What changes when you stop waiting to feel legitimate

The more useful move, I think, is to stop treating it as a stage you are going to reach and start treating it as something that simply lags.

The money is a fact, or it is a fact my partner can find for me. Being taken seriously is an opinion held by people who are not looking very closely, and it updates slowly, if at all.

That does not make the wanting go away. I still want it.

But it does change what you do with a month where the money worked and the feeling did not, which for me is most months.

The rent got paid again this month. Four transfers, four different dates, not one of them called salary.

I still say I work in design at parties. It is true enough, it ends the question, and I have stopped feeling bad about that.

What I have not worked out is who I am waiting to hear it from. Somebody, apparently. I keep checking now and then…

-Katie

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If this landed, send it to somebody whose income you could not describe in one word.

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More from Multiple Lives Theory:

• The 30-something’s guide to the actual maths of starting over

• ‘How’s the business going’ is never about the business

• The hardest part of a nonlinear career isn’t building it. It’s explaining it.

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