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- J.P. Livingston embarked on an early retirement at 28 with a nest egg of $2 million.
- To her surprise, she continued to generate income while retired, earning more than $60,000 in one year with less than five hours a week of work.
- Livingston was able to do this by monetizing her personal-finance blog, The Money Habit, in a way that yields passive income.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
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You can take the woman out of work, but you can't take the work out of the woman.
At least, that's the case for J.P. Livingston, who retired at 28 with a nest egg of more than $2 million, which she saved while living in New York City.
With a job in finance that paid $100,000 by the end of the first year, Livingston was able to tuck away 70% of her take-home pay. From there, she invested 40% of that and saved 60%. When she received yearly raises, instead of increasing her spending limit, she saved the difference for retirement.
But to her surprise, her corporate years weren't the last time she would see a flow of income.
"When I was contemplating early retirement while working, I was very burnt out," Livingston previously told Business Insider. "I imagined I would want to sit on the couch and eat bonbons, sleep in late, that kind of thing. I did do that, but it gets boring eventually, and I ended up getting active again with different hobbies and projects. Eventually, one or more of those projects yielded income. It's hard to be awake for 60-plus hours a week and not find a single enjoyable way to earn some money."
She began writing a personal-finance blog, The Money Habit, because the topic had been of interest to her for years, she said.
"I didn't expect it to make any money at all because there are a million blogs out there, but it eventually got big enough that between the hosting and email bills, I decided I should figure out how to monetize it enough to pay its own bills," she told Business Insider. After its first year, she said "it made over $62,000 with me spending less than five hours a week writing about things I wanted to write about."
Setting up passive income through blogging
Livingston started writing on the blog in August 2016, covering everything from investing and saving to planning for early retirement, she said. In 2017, after she had attracted a few readers, she researched how others monetized their blogs.
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It turns out that affiliate commissions, in which she refers a product or business on the blog and receives a percentage of a sale or a flat commission from that company if a reader makes a purchase, were a huge opportunity. She earned $60,162 in 2017 with this strategy.
Much of the money was passive income, meaning she didn't have to put in endless hours to see her work pay off. The lasting value is a bonus of the side hustle, Livingston said.
"If you build your own blog or side business, you have created an operation that can continue to throw off cash for you in the future," she said.
Near the end of 2017, Livingston began adding advertisem*nts to the site, something that earns her $1,000 to $2,000 a month. Because she started using ads so late in the year, they brought in only an extra $2,164 in 2017.
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"Earlier this year, I had a kid. I was completely offline for three months, but the blog generated over $14,000 in that time," she said. Livingston had posts scheduled to publish once a week during this time, few of which had affiliate links, so most of the revenue came from previous posts and ads.
She added that "it has been amazing getting to talk to thousands of other people who are passionate about the same things as I am."
In fact, if she had known it was still possible to generate income while retired, Livingston thinks she would have retired even earlier than she did.
"I wanted to be absolutely sure I didn't have to work at all once I pulled the trigger," Livingston said. "If I knew then what I know now, I would at least modify my target retirement number to need less buffer because I knew I could work part time as a fallback to supplement our needs."
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She added: "But the reality is that if you have the initiative and discipline to retire early, you are probably the kind of person who likes to get very engaged in new projects and hobbies, which will eventually yield an income."
Economics Correspondent, Millennial Wealth
Hillary focuses on the intersection of youth culture and wealth, reporting on the lifestyles and economics of millennials and Gen Z. She covers trends in how these generations are living and spending and examines how the economy is shaping them and their financial behaviors. She also reports on consumer spending and New York City's economy, and previously wrote about the ultrarich and personal finance at Insider before joining its economy team. Basically, she's written about money from every angle you can imagine. Inside the epicenter of America's Great Resignation: Kentuckians lay out the 4 forces driving the state's labor shortage — and explain why it's here to stay Millennial New Yorkers are ditching basem*nts and roommates for luxury apartments at $1,000-plus discounts The world's youngest self-made billionaire hopes to power every future self-driving car with a technology that Elon Musk says is 'doomed' Tiffany and the Trumps: Insiders describe how the president's younger daughter has charted what they say is a distant relationship with her father and come to terms with having America's most divisive last name Inside the French Riviera's pandemic party problem Yachting insiders detail the rampant sexual harassment aboard million-dollar ships, where crew members are promised a glamorous lifestyle and can instead find themselves trapped at sea with no one to turn to Millennials came limping out of the Great Recession with massive student debt and crippled finances. Here's what the generation is up against if the coronavirus triggers another recession.
