While You DCA, Earn Outside the Market

1. What Should We Be Doing?

During DCA, apart from buying to the plan, we don't need to keep busy with other trades. We don't need to watch prices every day either. So what should we be doing?

What comes next is also what makes our approach most different from other people's.

We shouldn't focus our attention on trading, because there is so much in the market we cannot change. We cannot change the direction of prices or directly decide how the companies we invest in are run. We'll discuss this in more detail later: not having to take part in running a company ourselves is a major advantage of investing in the secondary market. Other people may put everything they have into trading. For long-term DCA investors like us, spending all our energy there isn't worthwhile.

We should focus our attention outside the market. More specifically, we should put our energy into our ability to earn money outside the market.

The reason is very simple. We need to keep investing for a long time, so we need to keep contributing money throughout that time. Our income needs to cover everyday expenses, with room set aside for unexpected costs. Beyond that, the more we can earn consistently over the long term, the better. That is the real challenge.

2. Can You Sell the Same Time More Than Once?

Going to work usually means selling your time. And that time can only be sold once. As we mentioned earlier, if someone lives for 78 years, the illustration we used puts their total working hours at the equivalent of about 10.5 years.¹

If earning more depends only on working more hours, time itself sets a ceiling.

One simple way to think about improving our earning ability outside the market is to sell the same time many times.

What does that mean? What kind of work lets us sell the same time many times?

For example, write a bestselling book and sell it many times. Prepare a course and sell it online many times. Or write a piece of software and sell many copies. These are all examples of selling the results of the same time over and over.²

3. You Can Also Sell Other People's Products

Often, when we aren't yet able to create our own product, we can work in sales: sell products other people have made to different customers and earn income under an agreed arrangement.³

We may not yet be able to use our own time and effort to create a widely popular product, and so cannot repeatedly sell the results of the same work. But we can take products made by highly capable people and sell them many, many times.

4. From Selling Time to Earning with Money and Time

If we sell each block of time only once, all we have to sell is our finite working time. Take another step, and we can turn our time into a product and sell it many times.

Take another step still, as we do with DCA, and we use money to earn money. Alongside that money, we also put time to work.

1. The first personal business model: sell a unit of time once.
2. The second personal business model: sell the same unit of time many times.
3. The third personal business model: buy other people's time and sell it on.
4. The fourth personal business model: use money plus time to earn money.

Many years later, how could our lives be the same?

In the next article, we'll keep exploring this: during DCA, how else should we focus on improving ourselves outside the market?

1. The illustration credited to Anna Vital in the first article, Why Invest?, lists a 78-year lifespan and 10.5 years of work. ↩
2. For example, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing's official eBook Royalties documentation calculates royalties per unit sold. The same work can be sold repeatedly and generate income. ↩
3. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Wholesale and Manufacturing Sales Representatives describes representatives selling manufacturers' or wholesalers' products to businesses and other organizations, with employers commonly using salary plus commissions or bonuses. ↩

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