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Like most people, I love the idea of a second income but hate the idea of a second job. And making extra dough on the side often means a lot of extra work.
Renting a spare room? Using the internet to create a 'side hustle'? Those sound like quick ways to turn my life into a non-stop juggle of stress and responsibilities.
On autopilot
This may be the reason why many are now entering the stock market. The number of UK adults who own stock in the company is now 27 million, believe it or not, and it's not hard to see why.
Shares in listed companies offer a great opportunity to earn that secondary income without getting your hands dirty. Once set up, they operate more or less on autopilot.
The challenge of investing in stocks is not hard graft but choosing carefully. For example, I might start investing and turn to FTSE 100 and big business in Britain.
The index has hundreds of proven business models that make a ton of money and are known to pay some of the best dividends in the world. That's great when you have a lot of money, but in the long run we need to grow.
Grow like a weed
If I look over the FTSE 100, i London Stock Exchange it is home to about 2,000 different companies from 60 countries around the world. A hundred or more new ones are added each year. Many of these companies will explode but many of them will grow like weeds.
Ashtead's (LSE: AHT) is one of the latest cases. At first glance, the business is nothing to write home about. It rents industrial equipment such as excavators or forklifts, making it easy for construction projects to get the tools they need.
Doing so easily may make for unpleasant party discussions, but that hasn't stopped shares from shedding tears. A share price of just 37p in 2009 came to £51.65, as I write. Such growth is unique, but it shows what is possible.
Ashtead is now an FTSE 100 giant with growth potential ahead of it and is reasonably priced (trading at 19 times earnings) – a decent premium which means it's not a stock I see as suitable for my portfolio right now.
Just a ticket
But if I really want that second income that doesn't have stocks like Ashtead or the many thousands of others on the LSE it could be my ticket to get there. It is a well-trodden path that has made many people rich in the past. Best of all, it provides wealth creation and a secondary income without feeling like I have a second job.
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