Hi, I’m Winnie. My goal for this blog is to document my journey of achieving my life-by-design goal of “360 balance”. What took me many failures and years to figure out, will now take you a few hours at most. That’s what I want this blog to do for you. Cut your learning time down by helping you avoid all the mistakes I’ve made, while also teaching you everything that has worked for me.

What Is Life-By-Design?

Life-by-design is a new philosophical movement of questioning the status quo of living. It’s to identify what the status quo is and then proceed to make the active decisions to change, tweak and improve on it for your own life’s needs.

Tim Ferris, the author of 4 hour work week is arguably the founder of the term. He took his then life of endless working hours, and consciously created something he enjoyed instead.

He created a life he wanted, and that’s what life-by-design is all about. Consciously creating a life you want.

He also spear headed the movement of ditching the conventional 9-to-5 life for a more travelled one. There are now hordes of digital nomads and location independents around the world, myself included.

I started my life-by-design journey since I graduated University in 2014. Since then I have created a location independent lifestyle by pursuing online passive income streams.

It has allowed me to travel to numerous countries without worrying about asking for permission to take leave, take 4 months off work to attend to family and to really enrich my life with something bigger than getting the bills paid. But most importantly it has given me a sense of security and stability in the face of my bipolar disorder.

What Is 360 Balance?

The idea isn’t to follow someone else’s map, but to create your own.

But it’s hard creating something from scratch with little to no reference. And being the systematic type of person that I am, I created a model to organise the map.

The model is what I call 360 balance. It has 4 pillars that covers what I believe are the core areas of creating a life you want.

The 4 Pillars are:

Physical Health

Social Health

Financial Health

Mental Health

By taking these 4 pillars, you can begin to form your own ideas of what you want in life and how you can achieve it. For me, I translate the 4 pillars with a focus on the amount of freedom & control I can achieve in life.

The physical health to have the freedom to do what I want.
The financial freedom to do what I want whenever I want.
The mental freedom to never be afraid to go after what I want.
And lastly the social freedom to make my own decisions on what I want.

What Exactly Do I Do?

Entrepreneurship hasn’t been anything like what I expected before I started, and I think I’m not the only one with this misconceived idea of what entrepreneurship is about. I’ve had many failures and successes over the years and I still have a lot to learn, but everything I have learnt thus far is on this blog.

I specialise in online passive income streams and use that income to create the life I want. The reason why I focus on creating online passive income is because I find it to be the best fit for my 360 balance goals in life.

Creating passive income streams gives me more time freedom in the long run because it gives me the opportunity to have multiple streams of income at once without increasing my time commitment to active working hours. And to top it all off, online methods of making money is a lot less risky with lower investment needs.

My Kindle publishing business was one of the first streams of income I ever created. Kindle publishing was what changed it all for me and I highly recommend anyone looking into online money making methods to check this one out.

It took me 3 months to breakeven, 6 months to reach $1000 per month and then another year to reach a steady level of $2000+ per month in royalties. It’s one of my most successful passive income streams because it 100% passive. I work no more than 4 hours a month on my Kindle business and those 4 hours consist of checking dashboards, accounts and keywords only.

Thanks to the time freedom my Kindle business has given me, I can explore and experiment with other passive income streams. Since then, I’ve expanded into other streams of passive income to gradually and steadily build up my portfolio of income streams.

I now have 6 streams of income, 4 of which are passive.

This includes Adsense, where I got 10,000 Youtube views to a brand new channel within 1 month, making $1000 in the first 2 months from digital products sales, and making this blog profitable within it’s first year from affiliate commissions.

I keep my site as transparent as possible as I share my own journey to 360 balance. I’ll teach you how to avoid all my mistakes and how to replicate all my successes.

This blog does talk a lot about money but I don’t want you to get the impression money is the most important pillar of the four within the 360 balance concept. It’s not, they’re all equally important. The only reason why I talk about it so much on this blog is because financial freedom is the most objective and practical.

Everyone is different and your life by design should be uniquely tailored to your needs and wants. But almost all needs and wants need money to be fulfilled.

You can read some of these posts to give you an idea of how I use my income to achieve my goals in life:

What Is Passive Income?

Passive income is a type of income that is generated by assets without your active participation for it. In plain English, this means you’re not trading your time to make money.

Passive income is allowing people alternative ways of financing their lives, as well as giving them more time freedom to live alternatively. This is why passive income in many cases will go hand in hand with people’s life-by-design goals.

With a steady stream of passive income that can add up to more than most careers; you can take this income and meet the real financial needs of creating the life you want. And that’s what this site is all about.

Here on Million Dollar Winnie (MDW), I focus on online passive income streams because unlike traditional routes of passive income, online methods have a lower entry barrier. The initial investment is far lower and profit to investment ratio (PIR) is far higher.

The idea is to not trade your time for money but to put your time upfront for continuous income down the road. So here at MDW, I teach you how to do exactly that. How to put upfront time, effort and resources into creating an online asset that will generate a passive income.

Financial Literacy

My mum always told me from a young age “it’s no use making money if you don’t know how to save it”. That was one of the best financial lessons she could have taught me as a kid.

A better lesson would have been “it’s no use making money if you don’t know how to keep it”. (I’ll let you figure out the difference between the two)

I learnt how to save from a very young age, and my parents gave me a solid financial education. I learnt the importance of investing and the idea of using money to make more. They were entrepreneurs themselves and retired in their 40’s, so I consider myself extremely lucky because this early education at home shaped my attitude towards financial literary.

You have to be pro-active in educating yourself.

Around 70% of Americans live pay check to pay check, and that trend is growing among all developed economies. We’re talking about blue collar, white collar, corporate high earner and everything in between. People are failing to retain and grow wealth.

The truth is, financial education has always been kept in the family. Intergenerational wealth and poverty is all down to financial education. You don’t need straight A’s to succeed in life and you don’t have to have a powerful social circle. My parents are living proof of this. All you need is a financial education, and if you can’t get it at home, you need to get it somewhere else. Before, it would take a lot of luck, self initiative and effort to gain that knowledge, but now there’s the internet where ideas and knowledge can be exchanged at a rate like no other.

Here at MDW, I exchange good financial ideas and knowledge with you in one convenient place. I cover the basics from what does APR mean to how to approach retirement planning effectively. (Because it’s no use to learn how to make passive income if you don’t know how to manage your cashflow)

A Little Bit About My Background

I started my online passive income journey in the second half of 2015. I stumbled upon passive income by accident when my first Etsy business became passive thanks to good SEO. The moment I discovered the power of passive income, was the moment I decided to dedicate myself to it and nothing else.

But before all of that, I was going through life on auto-pilot like everyone else. Getting good grades in school, mindlessly applying for University and having every intention of joining some graduate program in a Fortune 500 company.

And I nearly did, because I actually applied to the programs, went to the interviews, jumped through all the hoops and got accepted. But I decided not to in the end.

Not because I wasn’t tempted by the security of a monthly payslip or the prestige from working at a large company.

I just knew life wouldn’t let me because it threw a massive curveball my way in 2010. I was diagnosed with bipolar type 2 disorder. A genetic mental condition that affects the chemical balance in my head.

I declined every single offer and decided I’ll need to create my own life to fit my own unique needs.

That’s how my adventure into online business started. It didn’t exactly fail, but I wasn’t exactly popping the champagne out either. I hadn’t a single clue what I was doing, but I had my savings in the bank and a lot of time on my hands. What else does an entrepreneur need?

Apparently a lot of things.

So why the name million dollar winnie?

Other than the fact that my name isn’t available as a domain name neither any variation of it. I wanted the saying “a million bucks” to be the motto of my life. I want to MAKE, FEEL and LOOK like a million dollars. (Not to say I wouldn’t mind making, feeling or looking like more)

If you made it this far down the post then you’re probably on the same boat as me. Why not subscribe to my newsletter and learn from my mistakes and successes?

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” – Confucius

Hopefully you can read about my journey and remember to not make the same mistakes, but to repeat my successes!

Winnie