Residual Income or "Walk Away Income" are terms used by many people promoting Network Marketing opportunities. These terms mean that you can build up a group of people that you will get paid on whether you work or not, like royalty income from books or cd sales. Well, the truth is, it doesn't happen like that at all... and here is why.

This is a touchy subject amongst some people, but I want to share my opinion regarding it. I have been working full time in the home business industry for 10+ years. A period of the time was spent in multi-level marketing companies where the idea of working 2-4 years and building up a walk-away income is marketed to prospects. I have been very fortunate to have some extraordinary success in that field, working in that type of compensation model for 7 of my 10 years.

During that time period I've had enough time to see trends and see that this concept of walk away income doesn't exist. I've met many top earners who you would think had achieved the mythical walk away income, but guess what...? They are still working today, some in their 2nd or 3rd company since I've known them!

I ask, where is the residual or walk-away income here? I say it doesn't exist. I have known reps who have had 100's of thousands of distributors on their teams at one time and now they are rebuilding and doing it all over again still promoting walk away income. It makes me want to scream! They can't see that 99.9% of the people can't do what they do and they can't even achieve the mythical income.

There are many reasons why I feel this way and all are based on real life examples. One is companies change. I don't think companies like paying a million dollars a year to a someone sitting on a beach somewhere not doing anything to grow the company, so they change the compensation plan to include requirements to make these people "work", hence no "walk away". The company may go out of business or get sold, the product may have issues with a regulatory agency and people get scared and your team vanishes. One of your top leaders gets a signing bonus to move over to a new company and takes most of your team with them, then what? No walk away income and you are starting over.

Not only are these real life examples, but they all happened to me!

So here is my question to you... If there isn't true walk away residual income, why not work in a business model that allows you to create the most income in the shortest amount of time? Then you can take that money and invest it in true residual/passive investment vehicles like Real Estate or other investment vehicles that throw off passive residual income. Passive income is the key word to understand here.

I ask many people this question and most of the time I hear "but this one is for real" or "this one is different". I heard this recently from a friend and very talented marketer. It was October and he announced "he had found the one", but it wasn't 3 weeks later, a delivery arrived at my door from a new company and guess what? It was him, promoting a new company not even a month later!

So I say - Do it NOW, Do it BIG, Don't believe the myth!