BONUS: I got laid off, then I closed an $100k contract

Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek shares her personal journey from being laid off to closing her first $100k contract and establishing 22 income streams, emphasizing the need for individuals to create their own stability in an uncertain job market.

Bajorek discusses the importance of diversifying income streams and building financial resilience. She talks through how to build a simple offer with a tutoring example.

📑 Resources:
📚 See Joan's 22 income streams in Chapter 9 of Your AI Roadmap Book

💰Money Tools: such as a High Yield Savings Account

📄Craigslist Post showing Joan's offer tutoring in grad school!

Joan provides practical advice on how to start side hustles, monetize skills, and shift from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance and opportunity.

Takeaways:

• 🏗 Developing resilience through multiple income streams is crucial.
• 🏦 Passive income sources can provide financial stability.
• 🛠 Creating an offer based on your skills can lead to additional income.
• 🌱 You can start small and scale your income streams over time.
• 💡 There are many opportunities to monetize your skills and experiences.

Sound Bites

"Some of the income streams are passive."
"How I could monetize my experience."
"Entrepreneurship is basic algebra."

Chapters

• 0:00 The Journey to Multiple Income Streams
• 2:47 Building Resilience Through Income Diversification
• 7:03 Creating Opportunities: The Power of a New Income Stream
• 10:54 Mindset Shift: From Scarcity to Abundance

Transcript

0:00

Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of Your AI Roadmap. Today, I'm excited to talk to you about money. So as some of you have been hearing more and more, I have 22 income streams here in 2025. Now, didn't always used to be like this. It's been an interesting journey. When I first got laid off a few years ago, my income, my day job was my main income. When I lost that, it was really, really hard. But because of my entrepreneurship and my side hustle that I started scaling, I was able to close a $100,000 contract in a few months after it. I'm not saying that was easy. It was actually quite hard and I had to believe. But the ability to make income from other things other than a day job, other than a W-2 here in the United States, we have called them the full-time employment. So you know no one necessarily needs 22 income streams. I will say that like right here right now. You can find all, I wrote them out for you, all 22 income streams in chapter 9 of my book Your AI Roadmap. Go check it out. You can buy it at YourAIRoadmap.com/book / book. But mostly what I want to say is that in this volatile time where people are losing their jobs left and right or you may be worried about losing your job or maybe you're worried about your partner losing their job, a friend, et cetera. Thinking about how we develop resilience through different income streams can be helpful. So maybe you have a day job. And actually, I was just talking to a friend the other day. He's worried about losing his job. He's got a main day job. But he's thinking, is there something on the side that I could start scaling up that maybe could help me, support me, just in case there is a layoff? I'll sleep better at night, my spouse will sleep better at night, et cetera. And I think it's exactly that kind of thing of thinking about what are two to six income streams that you might want to consider? And you might say, two to six, even that sounds like a lot. OK, but what if some of them are really passive? If you've been listening to this podcast, you've heard me talk about high yield savings accounts. For example, my high yield savings account pays me 3.8 % to leave my emergency fund with them. I leave a chunk of money, they pay me hundreds of dollars monthly to leave my money with them safe for an emergency. And you can find other money tools that I have for you at YourAIRoadmap.com slash money tools. Lots of different options. But when you think about your income streams, like the HAYOD savings account is an income stream. Every month they're paying me hundreds of dollars. Now I usually leave it there so it continue. Can you continue making more money? I could take it out and get some sushi. That's an option as well. But the idea that I have options, that there is stability, is the attractive part. So I'd recommend that in your different income streams, some of them are passive. Some of them are things like IRAs that you set up and it's making money while you sleep across the years, preparing for retirement. In the end, if you've heard about Roth IRAs, SEP IRAs are also really awesome for those of us who have our own businesses. Again, these are things in my book you can go check out in detail. But I really want you to think about the options that you have in our society. I think a lot of people are like, I want a nine to five, I want stability, I want an employer. But these days, I don't know that employers see us the same way and the stability that they can give us. Do they want to keep us around for a long time? Are we something that they can just choose to fire any day of the week? I think it's on us as individuals to create our own stability potentially for ourselves. So if you're thinking, okay Joan, I'm open to it. I'm open to a new income stream. I'm open to the concept. I would love to tell you a quick story that's also in chapter nine of my book about when I didn't have enough income. So in graduate school, I was living in California at UC Davis, go Davis, and my paycheck didn't cover my rent and groceries. If you've ever been in graduate school and you are teaching, I was teaching at the university at the time, I don't remember the exact number. I think I might've been making $800 a month, something like that. And my rent costs, I don't know, five, $600. California is expensive. If you live there, you know. I had several roommates in this apartment. And then I, you know, with paying for health insurance and paying for all this then the other. how much money I had for groceries at the end of the day was a very, very small number. And I remember very keenly, like it was yesterday, checking out my groceries and the dollar sign being too much. Like I knew how much I could spend on groceries. And when things were too expensive at the grocery store, I would have to take things out of my cart or ask them, hey, I can't purchase that right now. And people would, behind me in the line would watch me taking things out of my cart. And I felt such shame. It was horrible. It so painful just buying groceries. And I was like, okay, what am I going to do? Like, this is not, this is not a thing. Like, what am I going to do? And so I decided that I was going to put an offer out there that I was going to make more money by tutoring. Now tutoring is something I'd done previously and I was in graduate school. So I wrote up a post I put on Craigslist and I said like, hi, I'm an energetic French tutor. and I would love to do tutoring. And I'm a graduate student and I've got degrees and I just came back from working at France. I'd just been working for the French Ministry of Education over in Toulouse. And I put this together and I said, who would like to hire me? And I put it on Craigslist. And I'm grateful to say I got multiple inquiries. There was a student in high school that needed support with tutoring. There was an older gentleman, a retiree who wanted to travel to France often. There was a young family with French speaking children who wanted another person to talk to their kids. We like played games in French. It was really fun, honestly. And they paid me in cash. They paid me in checks. They treated me well. And with multiple different recurring tutoring clients, suddenly I had room to pay for groceries. I wasn't sweating anymore. And honestly, some of my customers were really, really nice humans. was... It's really fun and when I moved away, I miss them. But I think it's this basic idea that I'm putting out here for you is that offer can be simple, right? I chose something that I already had domain expertise in at the time. French language stuff was a really big part of my life. So I had, here's what I'm good at. Here's why you could trust me. I'm really great to work with, right? Testimonials. I had specific dollar signs at the time. I think I was charging $40 an hour. something like this as a graduate student. And so I put the offer out there one hour flexible, but I had an idea of what the offer was, how I was putting myself out there and that people could accept my offer, that they could hire me. And that worked really well for me and it's something that you could do also. So in my book as well, if you're like, okay, that doesn't sound too wild. Like I could put myself out there. I could monetize my experience. In my book, I talk about how to create your own offer, how to set a dollar sign, to scale the offer into potentially something that makes you maybe 40 bucks an hour, or also could scale to four figures, five figures, six figures, replace your full-time income type things. So all of that can be found in chapters, I want to say 10 through 14 of my book. Okay, I'll have to memorize my own chapters better. But the concept is that you can start really small. And that extra 40 bucks, I gotta tell you how much that meant to my grocery budget back in the day. So much, so much.$40 can cover quite a bit of food. Okay, maybe not eggs, maybe not eggs today, okay? But it can cover a lot of food. So these are options for you. And there are tons of people who want to buy services and get tutoring for their kids and want help with cleaning houses and taking care of pets and all kinds of things. I pay my dog sitter quite a bit. point being there's lots of opportunities out there for you to monetize your experience and create an offer. If you'd like to see the exact copy, I found it on Craigslist, I copied it, pasted it, and you can download it. You can go to YourAIRoadmap.com/Craigslistpost slash Craigslist post, and you can download the exact copy that I used back in the day if you'd like to see it. People are already downloading it who are reading the book, so that's really cool. But I really want to hopefully give you inspiration that it's possible for you. it's not rocket science, entrepreneurship is basic algebra, that you could set up an offer. And that if you want to eventually, one of these days, think about how do I put out a six figure offer? You know, I just told you about getting laid off and then closing a contract for $100,000 with Google. That's a lot about relationship building, co-constructing offer, having people who want to close the deal with you, that you can co-construct some amazing contracts and then renew the contracts and... other entrepreneurial endeavors, but really recommend that you start with what you know, what you're good at, leveraging your network, putting out an offer, getting feedback. I think that one of the biggest struggles that I see is that fear of people just fear failing or fear of not being, know, our own mind gremlins, my CTO would say, the mind gremlins might be the thing holding you back the most. And I've actually in my book listed out like things you don't need. A fancy logo you do not need. Your rich uncles like kudos. No, you do not need. What you need is to believe in yourself and try different things and get feedback and put yourself out there and show yourself that you can make more money because we don't have to get smaller in this life. We can expand. I think I'll just end with this note. I met someone recently who her rent is going up and she's really, really scared about it. Seattle cost of living is also high. Maybe not as high as California, but very high here in Seattle. And her rent is going up. And she's telling me, Joan, they increased my rent like $200 a month. And I just don't know. I'm going to have to move. I'm really scared. And I was like, OK, you could move. That's an option. Is there a way you could make an extra $200 a month? Could you ask for a raise at work? Could you pick up a side gig? Is there an opportunity? And as I was telling her this, someone else overheard me and was like, wait a minute. I could hire her for this thing. That thing pays $800 a month. Do you want to talk about that? Could we be interesting? You know, like, want to have that conversation? And she looked at me, she's just like, wow, expansion. Like, not like get smaller, get worried, move, frenetically scared. No, you could make more money, have more options, take care of yourself, have honestly cooler options in this world. What could she do with an extra $800 a month? Okay, she could pay that rent. What else could she do? Could she invest? Could she think about other goals that she has? You don't have to be in this scarcity mindset of fear. You could think about the amazing life you want to build for yourself. And that's a feeling I really hope that you feel inspired by and that you could see that for yourself because honestly, entrepreneurship is exciting and hard and full of learnings. So that is what I'd like to leave you with, that feeling, hopefully that you can move from fear into opportunity, options for yourself, expansion, growth, enablement. There's so much ahead of you that I'm so excited for. So if any of these things were of interest to you, let me mention the three things I think I mentioned. You can of course go check out my book, YourAIRoadmap.com/book slash book. It'll take you right to the Amazon page. I recommend you buy it'll be a great investment. The second thing I mentioned was money tools. If you're thinking about a high yield savings account, a bank account that pays you money per month for leaving your money in there, you can go to YourAIRoadmap.com/moneytools slash money tools for that high yield savings account idea. And then the third thing being if you want to download that Craigslist post, if you're like, Joan, I don't know, did you actually tutor? yes I did. yes I did. And you can find that Craigslist post at YourAIRoadmap.com/Craigslistpost slash Craigslist post. Go download it. I honestly, when I copied it and pasted it from Craigslist, I was like, oh gosh, this could have been better. But hey, it worked. I put it out there, okay? I put it out there and it worked. Wishing you all the best and see you again for another episode of Your AI Roadmap. Bye folks.