Danny Baldus-Strauss was making a lot of money working in corporate America: up to $300,000 a year with IBM, he told Insider.
A big salary coupled with a high savings rate helped him build a seven-figure portfolio in about seven years.
"I had this million-dollar portfolio, but I didn't really feel that wealthy because I only had one income," said Baldus-Strauss, who sold IT equipment for the iconic technology giant from 2013 to 2020. "In sales, if you miss your quota two halves in a row, you can get fired — and there are lay-offs within big tech corporations all the time."
With that in mind, he decided to explore other ways to make money.
To become "financially impenetrable," as he puts it, you have to build multiple revenue streams. "Diversity of income streams, to me, means safety. Because if any one of those streams disappears, I have other ones to fall back on."
He spent years researching how to make money before he actually took action, he said: "For the first five years of my career, I spent a lot of my off time reading. I researched how to run an Airbnb and how to start an e-commerce business. And then, towards the end of my career, I focused on building income streams."
He started by building an e-commerce business. (E-commerce is any business that buys and sells products or services over the internet.) He was doing "retail arbitrage," he explained, which is when you buy products at a discount, re-sell them at a higher price, and profit from the difference. For example, "I'd buy a product for $12, say, and sell it for $15. It's like flipping products."
His business bought and resold things like household goods, toys, and cosmetics, he said: "High volume, high margin products like Purina, Swiffer, and Hasbro."
Baldus-Strauss had an operator manage his e-commerce stores so it was more hands-off, he added: "I paid 35% of all profits to use their warehouse and staff and help with fulfillment."
He also invested in a home in Colorado in 2017. He bought it as a primary residence, but with the intention of renting it out on Airbnb whenever he was traveling for work, which was the majority of the year.
"I paid more for a highly desirable location that I knew would be really popular on Airbnb," said Baldus-Strauss, who sold some of his Google and Apple stock to afford a down payment. You can make good money from short-term rentals — he said he's earned four times his mortgage payment some months — but "you have to detach from your home a little bit. You have to be comfortable with people being in your primary home."
After about three years of building his e-commerce and Airbnb businesses, Baldus-Strauss decided he wanted to work for himself full-time.
"These large corporations where you're making a lot of money, they own you in a way — they own your time and your energy," he said. "You have less creative control and flexibility, and that's what you trade to make between $200,000 and $350,000 as a 25- to 30-year-old. I wanted more control of my time and more creativity in my life."
When he quit IBM in 2020, he was earning "a couple of thousand dollars a month from e-commerce and Airbnb," he said.
While he took an immediate pay cut, over the past two years, he's built even more revenue streams and brings in more money today than he did at IBM, he said.
He continues to earn money from e-commerce and Airbnb. His other revenue streams include sales consulting and cryptocurrency mining.
Baldus-Strauss has also spent years building his own brand, Backpacker Finance, and now has more than 97,000 followers on Twitter.
"I knew that Twitter would be a tool I could eventually monetize by creating a big enough following that I could then either team up with brands or build out courses," he explained. "I knew that I needed to build a following first and then there would be monetization opportunities, so I started by just writing and tweeting every day."
Now that he has a substantial following, he makes good money through affiliate marketing and partnering with companies and brands like M1 Finance, he explained: "For a year, M1 Finance basically paid my mortgage to tweet on behalf of them. I would talk about their products, talk about their methodology, and recommend stocks."
He encourages everyone to start building their personal brand.
"The way I see these social media platforms is, you can either create or you can consume," he said. "I consume, too, but I started spending way more time on Twitter and Instagram creating free content for people. I'd write Twitter threads or make videos or do extensive write-ups on stocks, and I would share it for free to build trust and a following."
When figuring out what to build your brand around, think about what makes you tick and what excites you. For Baldus-Strauss, it's finance, investing, and entrepreneurship. He started a lawn-mowing company as a kid, learned about the stock market early on from his dad, and went on to study finance in college. He's been investing his money since 2010.
Backpacker Finance didn't take much time or effort to start, he added: "I built that logo that's on my Twitter account in five minutes. I went on Canva, I found a logo, I typed in 'Backpacker Finance,' and it still sits there today. And my profile picture hasn't been changed for two years.
"I didn't focus on a business plan or my photos or my logo. I just focused on producing really good content and then doing it really consistently."