4 Alternative Investment Ideas to Bulletproof Your Financial Future

I love multiple income streams. I consider a one income stream household to be one of the riskiest financial positions to be in. 

If that income gets disrupted, it can be devastating for the entire family. Many Americans are just a couple paychecks away from complete financial meltdown.

For this reason, multiple income streams are a vital part of creating Indestructible Wealth. That’s why I’m here today to walk you through my four favorite alternative investment ideas: crypto, crypto mining, crypto staking and lending, and self-storage. 

Most of my clients ask the question: how can we build multiple income streams? That’s where these alternative investment ideas come into the picture.

Adam and Jen’s story is a great example. 

They were responsible, hard-working earners and parents, who just didn’t have anything left over after the bills were paid. This is a scary place to be, and it’s incredibly common.

A shift is necessary to get out of simply trading your hours for dollars and begin to make your money work for you.

Once you have made the basic first steps towards freeing up your hard-earned cash, you’ll want to get it working. 

You don’t want to be like the kid in the candy store with $5 burning a hole in his pocket, but at the same time, cash sitting in the bank is getting eaten alive by inflation. 

I get the appeal of 0.01% interest they’re handing out on your bank balances, but with red hot inflation at 9%, that means you’re losing 8.9% by not investing.

I believe it’s crucial to incorporate one or more alternative investment vehicles into the mix of revenue generating activities that make up your wealth portfolio.

I introduce and explore many of these strategies in my podcast, this blog, my online courses and my book. 

If you haven’t bought the book yet, it’s available for immediate download and my podcast is free! Dive right in. There is a lot to explore and learn, including why to invest in which areas, which ones might be right for you right now, and which avenues might be goals for the future, as your wealth grows.

When you are ready to dive into the world of alternative investments, I recommend that you begin with something you are genuinely knowledgeable about — or at least something you have enough interest in to become educated about. Like poker, ha!

I started out playing for quarters in the dorms, with the dream of someday competing in the World Series of Poker. 

I used my rental property income to buy the $10,000 ticket, and good thing I didn’t spend my own hard earned cash, because I got knocked out in 10 hours! 

That was the most expensive 10 hours of my life, but successful investing gave me the opportunity to check off a bucket list dream!

I have at least 16 different revenue generating activities that I’m invested in. The weirdest one is probably poker. 

That catches most people off guard, but aside from the World Series, I’ve earned six figures playing the game over the last several years. 

Most people still think it’s a game of luck, but if you win 75% of the time and your average win rate is $2600 per session, the numbers say it’s not all luck. 

Out of sheer love for the game and the camaraderie of playing with friends and strangers, I’ve sharpened my skill set. 

Now that I’m good enough to play competitively, I can’t say I’m upset at having a few extra hundred grand around. I consider the time I invested in playing and learning the game to be a kind of alternative investment, if you will.

Now, would it have made sense for me to try to create a similar income stream out of, say, betting on horses? If I had, I’d likely be out a lot more money because I have no interest in horse racing and, therefore, no knowledge about it. 

Maybe it’s an obvious point I’m making, but many people make the mistake of trying to create alternative investments out of things they don’t understand or don’t have sufficient interest in to take the time to learn about. 

My poker example demonstrates that almost anything can be turned into an alternative investment, but likewise, anything can also become a money pit.

If you’ve done your Indestructible Wealth homework, you know that most of the investments I recommend will be in safe, low risk instruments. 

I never advise changing your lifestyle in order to invest in something risky, like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or the “next big” crypto, just because there’s an outside chance of huge returns. I’ve been there myself, and the results weren’t pretty.

Why? Because when dealing with alternative investments, we understand that in those cases where the returns are higher, the risks will be bigger, and so we only dedicate money to alternative investment ideas that we know we can live without.

What is an Alternative Investment?

An alternative investment is usually defined as any investment made in an asset class apart from cash, bonds, or stocks. 

Some alternative investments are as old as time:

• Real estate
• Gold and silver
• Fine art

Now we have infinitely more options! Every year it seems that new asset classes are added to that list, such as crypto mining and NFTs. So how do you choose?

I always recommend starting where you are at. Take a look at the niche topics you know and love. Sports fans might want to invest in baseball or other sports cards, (which are making a comeback), or in sports memorabilia. 

My buddy Jeremy makes $15,000 or more a month trading baseball cards! It works for him because he loves it and he’s taken the time to learn the trade. Maybe you’ve traveled quite a bit and have a strong desire to give back to those less fortunate by investing in an entrepreneurial venture abroad.

Whatever it is for you, the basic formula I recommend is to combine something you know about, and enjoy, with a need. It’s important to know yourself when choosing your investments, because only you are the key to your success.

Why Consider Alternative Investments?

Why not just stick with stocks and bonds? Why must I take in the efforts to learn about alternative investments?

Well, frankly, diversification into alternative investments is key, now more than ever. The markets are volatile, and inflation seems to be hitting everyone hard. Paying into a mutual fund may feel safe, but history shows the market can tank in a hurry, along with the expensive fees built into those funds.

Should you invest in gold and silver? Should you buy real estate? Should you devote your time to crypto trading?

Only you can decide.

A lot of folks freeze at this point. The choices are overwhelming. That’s one of the reasons I became a financial coach, to take you from potential opportunity to a wise investment that works for you.

There is money to be made, and lost, in every asset class. Alternative investing allows you to take the reins, utilizing your own specialized knowledge and life experience. 

It becomes so much more interesting when you can apply your own unique experiences to help you understand where the asset has come from and where it may be going.

A Note on Liquidity
Many alternative investments do not have the liquidity of a traditional investment in the stock market. Depending on your situation, liquidity may be of greater or lesser importance. When you approach different types of alternative investments with the mind of an interested student, you have taken the first step in growing your portfolio carefully and in such a manner that you can’t lose it all if one of your bets fails.

4 Alternative Investment Ideas to Bulletproof Your Financial Future

#1. Crypto Investing!

While governments around the world continue to devalue your hard earned savings by printing money and causing inflation, you may feel helpless to do anything to protect your savings. I’m here to tell you that you’re not.

I added an exclamation point above, because holy crypto! This investment has taken us on a wild ride. I talk a lot about crypto as an alternative investment on the podcast, but it bears repeating: Crypto is an asset class that is here to stay.

Crypto is being adopted by major players in every industry, from Wall Street banks to some of the top football players in the United States who are opting to get partial payment in Bitcoin. 

Now, this doesn’t mean that every coin out there is a good alternative investment; in fact, a lot of the shitcoins will go to zero. But I think it’s fair to say that no investment portfolio is complete at this point without crypto.

If you want to get in on my crypto picks, which my team and I research exhaustively before recommending and investing in them ourselves, you may want to consider joining my Premiere Mastermind group.

#2. Crypto Mining

Once you’ve taken the plunge into crypto investing, you may be intrigued enough to want to jump on the crypto mining bandwagon as an alternative investment. 

However, this is a different affair than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, you could set up shop with a desktop computer and go to town on mining when you weren’t using that computer for work.

Today, crypto mining is a serious alternative investment venture that requires dedicated computing power and, frankly, cash to invest. If you’re looking to get into Bitcoin mining, after a year of buildout, I have slots in my mining operation that are now available! 

We will source quality machines, and plug them right into our hosting containers (picture a UHaul like moving pod). We provide all the technical expertise, and you literally don’t need to know anything about it other than watch the bits of crypto come into your wallet!

#3. Crypto Staking and Lending

Owning crypto is smart. Mining for crypto is very smart (I think of it as a legal way to print money). 

Another level to this whole crypto game is staking and lending your crypto. In short, staking crypto is a way of guaranteeing your crypto to the blockchain, agreeing to dedicate it for a fixed period of time. 

Crypto lending is the same as when your bank lends out the money in your savings account. Not surprisingly, staking yields a higher return than lending, while lending which is safer and easier to execute and allows you to liquidate your crypto whenever you want.

#4. Self-Storage

This is one of my personal favorite alternative investments, simply because of the risk to reward ratio. The team that I invested with over the past decade has never had a return less than 10%, and typically returns hit 25% annualized. 

That beats Warren Buffet’s returns, and that’s no easy feat over an extended period of time (anyone can beat his returns over the course of a year, it’s the consistency that really matters).

I know it sounds rather boring, and that’s exactly what you want in a quality investment. The boring nature of it leaves off distractions and a loss of focus on what you’re really good at: Increasing your skills and earning power in your chosen profession!

When people pay $100 to $200 per month for a storage unit, they’ve obviously got stuff in there that greatly exceeds that rent. 

Maybe they’ve moved or downsized and they just don’t have a place yet to put that stuff. If they’ve moved across the country, it’s going to be a hassle to get it to their new location. 

Or maybe they’re just working abroad for a year. Whatever the reason, they are highly motivated to keep paying that low rent because, of course, they want their stuff back at some point in the future. 

They’re not going to risk losing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars worth of stuff, right? People typically pay, and they pay on time.

As an investor, I don’t have to deal with tenant drama, or a rental property that has an issue every other month, or drastic ups and downs in the financial markets. 

If you are an investor with a significant amount of money to invest, I consider self-storage units to be an alternative investment winner, hands-down.

Exciting Things Coming Up

We aren’t done yet! There are still plenty of weird and wild investment opportunities to explore in my next blog. See you there!