Where to Start

UNEarned Inc. is designed for people at any stage in their financial journey who wish to generate more passive income. What makes us unique is that we focus on passive income you can build almost anywhere, with just your computer or mobile device. We don’t promise the process will be quick, but the method allows you to generate income while you sleep, without having to start a side hustle, post YouTube videos every night, or do other things that are really not passive. The contents below are listed in order, but if you are already familiar with certain types of investments or decide certain investments are not for you, feel free to jump around. Visit this page often as it serves as your checklist to building your future wealth and new content will be added regularly.

As a reminder, we are NOT financial advisors – Please read our disclaimer (again) before proceeding.

Establishing Your Accounts

• The core of our strategy starts with stock investing; specifically growth and high paying dividend stocks. You use the capital gains from your growth stocks to form a base of consistent dividend income. When dividend stocks are too high, you use the dividend income to add to your growth stock portfolio. The key is always buying at the right price point, so sometimes that means funding your dividend stocks, other times that means funding your growth stocks. For this reason, we highly recommend opening multiple brokerage accounts: 1) a growth/trading account; 2) a dividend stock account
• Growth/Trading Account: choose a broker that has a good mobile interface; you want to be able to research and trade on-the-go
• Dividend Account: choose a stable broker that allows you to have the option of turning on or off DRIP (automatically reinvest dividends) for each individual company you own. For example, you may want to always reinvest Microsoft (MSFT) shares, but not reinvest Walmart (WMT) shares. If the brokerage has a good mobile interface, that’s fine, but it’s more critical that this company will protect your money for the long-term and has good customer service. You want to feel comfortable with them holding millions of dollars of your money. The brokerages below are a hand-curated list available to our members.

Establishing Your Monthly Budget

• Selecting your monthly budget is even more important than picking your brokerage – consistency is key in everything, this is why 401Ks have worked surprisingly well for people who are bad at saving. If the money is taken out automatically before you even see it, the compounding effect happens in silence.
• How much do you need? We highly suggest when you’re first starting out, do not create some master spreadsheet that says, “If I want $2 million in 30 years, this is how much I need to save each month.” The number will be too big and you’ll be too depressed. A good amount is $200/month which will be the total amount spent across the growth and dividend accounts. Some will argue that if you’re very young (under 25) you should go heavy on growth because you have so much time to see much bigger gains. While this is true, investing is a mental game as much as a financial one. Seeing passive income hit your bank account early and often will build your faith in the process and allows you to establish a second stream of income without having to sell any of your stocks. For that reason we favor investing more in dividend growth stocks as early as possible, which also protects your basis early on. You don’t want to put your first $200 on Amazon (AMZN) and see it drop 50% in the first two months. We suggest a split of 75% dividend, 25% growth (e.g. $200 total investment would be $150 toward dividend stocks, $50 towards a growth stock).
• Another rule of investing is that you want to obtain as many shares as possible for each company you invest. In general try to always buy a minimum of 5 shares, ideally 10 shares, on your initial purchase. Obviously, if you’re starting out with $200 in the first month, this will be impossible, but this is the long-term goal you want to get to. Some may save up for the initial investment, $1,000-$2,000, then put in $200 per month thereafter just to get over the hump of having a few shares in their select companies. Example: On June 21, 2019 I bought 3 shares of Lowe’s (LOW) for a total price of $303. I knew this was going to be a strong stock. My position at the beginning of 2022 was well over $250 per share. I was well over 100% return but broke my rule by only buying a few shares.
• The quicker you’re able to increase your monthly budget, the more pronounced your gains will be. Saying you made a 100% return on 1 share that went from $100 to $200 is not as impressive as saying you make $100 in passive income each quarter that you’ll never have to work for again.
• If you really want a super simple calculator to see how much money you’ll make over a given period investing a monthly amount, head over to investor.gov – maintained by our very own U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Roadmap

• The roadmap by UNEarned Inc is fairly simple, but there are many road hazards along the way. Hence, why we created this site.
• Use dividend stocks to form a strong foundation for your passive income portfolio; use growth stocks to raise capital and siphon some gains over to dividend stocks when appropriate. As your portfolio and income grow, move into other passive investment vehicles for diversity such as equity and real estate crowdfunding, then crypto – all while doing this from almost anywhere in the world.
• Become a member today and follow us on social media (@unearnedinc) to get more details on your journey to building passive income streams.