Do You Have A 5 Year Plan?
A 5 year plan is a bit more detailed than having goals. It is your plan to achieving 1 big goal. For example how many people would like to make some extra money? Lol almost everybody would like some extra money. Of course detailed instructions on how to make a 5 year plan goes beyond the scope of a single blog post, especially when you consider books have been written on the subject.
You have been thinking you would like to put away $250,000 in the next 5 years. This is a goal, but we will transform it into a 5 year plan, just like magic. Yes you can take any reasonable goal assign it a timetable and break it down just like we are going to with the quarter of a million dollars goal.
What do I do first?
We have already set our goal of $250,000 in 5 years. Now we ned to make a plan so the first thing we need to do is breakdown the huge number into bite sized pieces. 5 years is 60 months, so when we divide 250,000 by 60 we get 4166. So now we know we need to make $4,166 monthly which breaks down further to $138.87
We never said this was going to be easy. For me I found the answer in reselling. With reselling I was able to purchase products from Garage Sales, Thrift Stores, FaceBook Buy, Sell, Trade Communities, Estate Sales, Retail liquidations.
Let's Make The Plan
We already know how much we need to make, but let us explore how much we product we need to buy and sell to make this magic number. Reselling comic books is great you can easily pick up unwanted collections for pennies on the dollar. If you spend $1 on a comic you should be able to resell it for $10. If we sell 20 $10 comics daily we should hit our goal.
In 1 day we sell $250 worth of comics about 25 books. We need to take out shipping and eBay fees. For shipping it will coast at the lowest $2.53 and we need to take out 15% for eBay fees. This leaves us with a daily profit of $149.25 which is almost $10 above our daily goal.
We need to know how much we need to sell everyday, but how much do we need to list to make this amount of money. From experience (since 2014) with eBay if you want to sell 10 a day you need to have at least 100 listings weekly indefinitely, and you first month of listing 20 listings a day 5 days a week, will need to be scratched as you won't start averaging 25 sales a day until your 2nd or 3rd month depending on your status, feedback score, and pricing on eBay.
Stick To It!!
Above it is easy to see (not do) that with effort, planning, and discipline you can make a cool quarter of a million dollars. So the why doesn't everyone just do it. Simply because it is not easy and you will find yourself giving up your favorite TV shows, and not socializing so much, going out less, a whole lot less gaming so you can convert those hours into money producing hours instead of hours that cost money.
Wrapping up you can take this and deconstruct it to match almost anything you are doing today. It is my hope that this article has shown the difference from having a goal and having a five year plan. I used eBay as an example because I know that platform very well and am comfortable in saying if you put in the work, you can make some very good money. The downside to eBay they do not yet accept Crypto. Of course you will want to plot this out on a calendar give yourself a good 90 days for your research and development especially if you are new to reselling and eBay.
Thank you so very much :-)