How to Make More Money

In this episode, we'll talk about how to increase your income. Whether you're looking to make more money to retire early, have more security and flexibility, or simply to make ends meet, there are a number of things you can do to make more money.

How to Know If You Need to Make More Money

There are a few signs that you may need to make more money. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, if there are important goals that seem impossible to achieve, or if you've already dug into your budget and cut out unimportant and low-value expenses, then it's possible that you need to increase your income.

Why Even Though You're Making a Ton of Money It Doesn't Seem Like Enough

There are a few reasons why even though you're making a lot of money, it may not seem like enough. One reason is that the cost of living can vary dramatically from city to city. Another reason is that you may have a high cost of living due to your lifestyle choices. For example, if you like to live in a big house or drive a fancy car, then you're going to need to make more money to support those lifestyle choices. Finally, you may be supporting others financially, such as a spouse, children, or family members. If this is the case, then it's important to factor in the cost of supporting those people when you're considering your income needs.

How to Increase Your Income

There are a number of ways to increase your income. Some of the most common methods include:

• Leveling up in your career 
• Changing jobs 
• Freelancing
• Being paid for content creation
• Side hustles
• Creating arts and crafts
• Starting or buying a business

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:00

This isn't gonna be easy, right? And I think that's one trap that a lot of people fall into. They think about, oh, I want to have a passive income stream, or I just want to make so much more money, but not put in the time.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

This is Techy Personal Finance Bootcamp where I help tech professionals in their 20s and 30s balance a great life's day without sacrificing their future possibilities. I'm your host, Lucas Caceris, certified financial planner and founder of Level Up Financial Planning, where I help educate, coach, and build strategies with my clients to help them take their financial confidence to the next level.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

This information is for education, so don't just go use it. First consult with your financial advisor, because that's way more legit. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

That was Orlando Gomez, and you can catch him in season three, episode four on how he broke into tech by writing a jingle.

SPEAKER_03 0:54

Hello, welcome to season five of Techie Personal Finance Bootcamp. I'm excited to be kicking off this episode with something that I think of pretty often, and I think it's something that's on the minds of a lot of people is how can you just make more money? So sometimes there's just not enough money to do all the things that you want to do. And that that's pretty easy to be the case because there's an endless amount of ways that you could spend your money. It's ever growing. So not even everything that you're gonna spend your money on five years from now even exists right now. So there'll be new things popping up all along the way. So it's very easy to spend your hard-earned money, and uh sometimes it just comes down to you need more money. So we'll we'll tackle that. But before we get into that specifically, we'll talk about how do you know if you need to make more money or maybe you just need to be better with the money that you have. We we'll also talk through even though sometimes it it doesn't make sense, right? You're making six figures, you're making so much money. How come it's not enough money? So we'll we'll talk through situations why that may be the case. And then finally, we will get into a few different ideas of how you can increase your incomes to start generating more money to be able to do more things, have more possibilities, and have more control over your financial future. So, one thing I'll share with you in advance is that big changes are rarely gonna be easy. Making more money, at least significantly more money, is not gonna come easy, right? There's probably gonna take some effort, some time, some energy, uh, sometimes some investment in yourself with monetary dollars out of your savings account, taking out loans, things like that. So it's not gonna be easy, but um one thing that's amazing and nice about the situation though is it's definitely possible. So you'll you'll have to evaluate your whole situation, make sure that one of these options might be a good fit for you, or at least a good fit for you to start to try and see if that's gonna work. But the good news is definitely doable. I've seen people have multiple income streams, or just keep their same income stream and increase their earning potential. So we'll dive into all that here in just a few minutes. How do you know if you need to make more money? So if you're living paycheck to paycheck, if if you're really counting down the the hours, the days to getting paid next, you probably are living paycheck to paycheck. It does not feel good. And the nice thing is, well, hopefully that's temporary, right? Hopefully there's things that you're putting into place. Maybe it is creating more income, maybe it's paying down some debt, some past decisions, and and just catching back up to where your income is now. But that could be one obvious situation where, yeah, living paycheck to paycheck definitely feels a little stressful and a pain in the butt. So that's a clear indication, yeah, maybe we do need to make more money. If there are really important goals that just seem impossible for you to achieve, that's hey, I'm never gonna be able to buy a house, or I'm never gonna be able to pay off these student loans, or I'm never gonna be able to put my kids at college, whatever it is that's important to you, if it's important enough, but it feels impossible, then that could be a clear indication where, well, maybe we just need more money to input into your financial system to make these things work. And I've seen people do this across the board when they go from just kind of traditional jobs where maybe they're making 40,000, maybe they're making 50,000, and then they they make this huge transition into a career that has a higher earning potential, and all of a sudden they double their income. Well, there's a lot of things that become possible that you just thought previously was impossible. And yes, just increasing your income, whether it's 10, 20, 30, 40,000, 50,000, that those are all meaningful numbers and really changes the potential flexibility and control that you have over the future. So another clear indication would be well, maybe you already dug into your budget. Maybe you went in, you cut out all the unimportant stuff, all the low value expenses that aren't added into your life and still live in paycheck to paycheck or still not being able to do some of the goals that you would like to achieve. And so that would be a clear indication as well. You already went through the stressful process of looking into your money, seeing where it's going, and then making the the cuts that that you felt were necessary and it's still just not enough. Well, pouring more money into the system will definitely help. And then we'll talk about those things. But what if you are making six figures? What if you're making well over six figures or upper six figures, and it just doesn't feel like enough money? You're not alone. It's a common question I get from a lot of my clients is like, we're making good money. What's going on here? Why does it not feel like it's doing enough? And and there's a huge list, a laundry list of ways and reasons why that could be the case. But some of the the ones that are obvious are well, you might just live somewhere where it's ridiculously costly compared to somewhere else. So that's gonna vary from city to city, even different cities within the same states could be drastically different from the cost of a house or a rent uh to food costs and and things like that that are really big ticket items and and takes a lot of your budget. So that could be one reason why you're making a ton, but a lot is just going out to basic live in essentials because of the high cost of living area. So that could easily be it. It could be that you just like the finer things in life or doing some of the extra stuff. Nothing, nothing wrong with it. You're not gonna get any judgment from me. But if you're using your resources in a way that maybe some of your pairs are not, or someone else that may be making less income, but they're still able to reach all their goals just because they don't have as many line items, they don't have as many upgraded options that they're turning on for themselves. And so, yeah, it could just be you just want nicer things, you want the the more lavish things. And if that's the case, well, yeah, there's more money flowing out than is maybe required or necessity. But if those things are important to you, if if it's really uh gonna impact you to say no to those things or prioritize them in a different way, well, then yeah, we just need to make more money to make those things work and still put you on a good path towards financial success. Another big one I think it shows up more for my minority clients, which is about 50% of my clients at this point. But this is when you're supporting others. So uh it could be a spouse, could be children, a family, could be other family members like parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews. The list of people that are important to you could be pretty long. And once you feel like you've made it, if if especially if you're getting six figures and you never dreamt of that, it feels like again, you should have enough money to take care of yourself and take care of other people. And and you might, but it just gets a lot trickier, right? Because it's not just yourself that we're paying for, it's not just your wants and needs, but the wants and needs of these additional people. And so nothing wrong with that. It's actually awesome if you are able to help others and and be able to put others up in front of your needs or even keep them up equivalent with your needs. But I think it is important to just be aware of the impact of those decisions, especially before before making them, right? And I have four kids now of myself, and they're the most expensive the investment or most expensive line item that I could have ever done. But I knew that going into it, I've worked in financial planning, I've worked in finance type areas long enough to know that children are just super expensive. And that was a decision that, yep, this is what we're gonna do. And and as a result, I had a shift where I was spending money that normally I'd be spending on myself, uh spending on technology, video games, food, eating out, things like that. But yeah, once I decided that, hey, this is a priority for me, this is important for me and my wife, and she did the same thing, different sacrifices that she's made, different sacrifices I've made because of what we were making an informed decision that, yeah, kids are expensive and we adjusted kind of where our money was going. Same thing happens when you're going to help a family member. Because the tricky thing is once you get on kind of that ride, it's hard to get off. It's hard to say, I you know, the money I've been given or the support I've been providing. Well, now I'm gonna have to take that back or reduce it down. It sometimes would just have been easier to not put yourself in that situation where now you feel obligated to kind of continue that. And so that that's why it's important to you be aware before you kind of make these commitments, before you make these big decisions that are a little tricky to change once you start going down that path. And I've seen it even where my clients specifically would be really frugal with what they're doing, that they'll skip eating out really good with budgeting their money, but then they're supplementing a parent or supplementing a brother or sister that is living a more lavish lifestyle than my client is, and it's because uh my client's given up and sacrificing those types of things so that their family member can be enjoying those things. And and that that might be something that's important to you or important to them. But sometimes when you talk through it and think through it, it's like, well, how does that make sense? That's that you're being really intentional with your money, but because of your assistance there, they're those people that are relying on you might be taking advantage of the situation and and not really be treating your money the same way that you're treating it, as far as with that care and and being intentional with how those funds are being used. So it's your money, it's your decision, but definitely being aware of that impact will help you better protect yourself, your sanity, and and ultimately it's the relationships with those uh family members too. You've got to create these boundaries, make sure that you're aware of these things in advance because again, it's tricky to walk those things back once they just become habit, people become even more dependent on what you were providing. So now we're now we're to the fun part about actually how can we just start increasing income, generating more income so that you can do more stuff. Maybe it's so you can retire early, maybe it's because you just want more security, more flexibility. Maybe you just want to have a little bit more fun money. And usually the case when you're kind of entry-level earlier career, or or maybe just in a career that doesn't have a high upside as far as income. Sometimes it's just to make those ends meet. So the nice thing is you definitely can make more money. There's ridiculous amounts of ways that you can make money, lots of ways you've never even heard of or thought of. And if you do a Google search, you'll you'll start to see like all these crazy ways you can add money into your financial system and get that working for you guys. Before we dive into that, I think it's super important to, again, I think I mentioned this earlier. This isn't going to be easy, right? And I think that's one trap that a lot of people fall into. They think about, oh, I want to have a passive income stream, or I just want to make so much more money, but not put in the time, not put in the energy, not put in any type of effort or resources. And that's it's pretty close on possible. You might have heard of some lucky situations where things just happen to match up. That's not going to be a dependable strategy at all, as to depend on luck. So just be aware, you're going to have to invest something of value. And that could be time, it could be energy, it could be your talents. So maybe you're you're specialized in a way, maybe you're really good at something, and you can turn those talents into monetary benefit for yourself. And there's also just you pouring assets into something. So whether it's using your savings accounts, tapping into retirement accounts, taking out student loans, taking out some type of debt so you can kind of jumpstart whatever it is that you're looking to generate more income for yourself. It's usually going to take one of those things or multiple of those different things between the time, energy, talents, and assets to really get meaningful changes, meaningful income coming in. And so the list is going to be exhaustive to the point where I'd probably be able to go just for an hour of just naming all the specific different ways you could earn money. I'm not going to do that. It's not going to just be a laundry list of things that I just name off of the next hour. But instead, I'm going to focus on things that I've seen people in my community, my network, share as far as ways that they've made money as well as my clients and in some of these things, even for myself, I've made income from some of these things. So I think the easiest one by far is well, look to your career. What is it that you can do now to just kind of take yourself to the next level, take your career to the next level? And that might be just defining your niche. So maybe you're not specialized, maybe you're just doing a lot of generic stuff, always bouncing around, never getting really nitty-gritty into the specialization and becoming an expert. That's something that could definitely help. There's certifications you can do that to kind of help you do that with work and kind of becoming an expert. It does take experience. So you won't just become an expert just because you read a book or just because you took online class or went through boot camp. Um, you have to kind of blend all those things, right? The education, the experience, and and just time and knowledge of making mistakes and learning from those things. Um, you can get that additional education. It can be formal education, it could be YouTube education, it could be reading books, it could be boot camps. So many different ways for you to educate yourself and become more aware of the basics, then start to be able to transition that and use that towards building real life experience. Working on a communication is sometimes an overlooked one. It's something that definitely has made a huge impact. My current I've seen a lot of my clients and colleagues and friends. Really, that's that's a game changer. If you learn how to communicate, well, then you'll be able to communicate better and you'll start to be elevated within your company, within your circles, as far as like, oh, this person really knows their stuff. And it's because you're being able to communicate it in a way that people understand, and and now you're a go-to person. So another thing that you'll be surprised by is just increasing your confidence could really change your career trajectory. You put yourself out there more, start volunteering for more difficult tasks. And confidence doesn't just grow overnight. It's kind of a blended effort of different things, right? So starting to communicate a little bit more, like, oh, it's super scary, feels like I'm gonna die if I raise my hand, or if I kind of add to this subject or into this meeting and start talking. Well, once you realize that you didn't die and that, hey, there's actually some positive benefits, that starts to increase your confidence. For me, over-educating myself, over-preparing has always helped me build confidence in any situation. So that could be some of what you do as well. Creating content can also help you level up in your career. So maybe, maybe you don't have the opportunities at work to speak up or be known, but no one's stopping you from going out and kind of writing about your experience, writing about the things you are working on. And you don't have to be the expert right now to be creating content because as long as you're past day one, basically, you already have at least one day more knowledge than a true beginner. And so there's always value in content that you could be creating as long as you put it in front of the right people. And yeah, people follow you. And and next thing you know, an opportunity comes up a couple of years down the line, like, hey, I got started because of you because you wrote this, and now there's this opportunity. I'd love for you to come work with me. This is just within your career, and there's so many things you can do. And in order to kind of get more specified and narrowed on, well, which one of these is it going to be for you? Find some mentors, ask your manager, find people who you deem as successful and who you'd want to emulate, and uh go and look at their career path, go look at their LinkedIn, see if they have blog posts, podcasts, videos, anything where you can kind of see what that looks like, and reach out. Who knows? They they might actually take you up to a treat them to a coffee, and then all of a sudden they'll spend a few minutes with you to kind of share what their path looked like, what they would have done differently, what they think would be a good option and opportunity for you to kind of level up in your career. So again, that was all just within your career. There's still other ways that you can earn income, generate more money for yourself. Um, another way within your career too is just change your employer. Sometimes you can get a significant pay month. It is a lot riskier now, as we're likely heading into a recession. But if that new employer is gonna pay you a significant amount more, that that definitely does reduce the risk. So you go from $50,000 to $100,000. Well, for that $100,000 job, if you just work six months out of the year, you're gonna cover that same $50,000 you were making anyways. And so the next six months, if you were to retain your job, you're already so much further ahead, multiple months ahead, start building up to gears ahead the longer you're able to stay with that new employer compared to that old compensation. If the compensation is a lot tighter from 90,000 to 100,000, but yes, there's gonna be more risk. That might not be enough for it. But yeah, if there's a sizable difference from making a change from employer, definitely don't forget to discount that you're actually reducing a lot of risk for just being paid so much more on a monthly basis. You might think that, hey, my career is not that great, or my upside in my existing career is not where you want it to be in order to achieve all your goals, do all the things you want to do and have financial confidence. Well, career change might be something you need to look into. And again, just kind of going back to education and figuring things out. Well, what do you need to know? What's a basic entry-level kind of details you need and what of your old career, old experience can you repurpose to make a new career change successful for you? You can freelance, so that's one nice thing where you can do that in addition to what you're working. So this is now starting to add on different from your current employment or freelance. Maybe it's still related, but now it's being added on to your existing income. Uh, public speaking, again, something totally separate line item where, hey, you can do that during conference season. You can just do a kind of a few one-offs and see if you like it. But that's one way where you kind of set your price and find the people that are looking for content that you'd be creating, the information, the stories that you're looking to share, and and that could generate some income for you. You can create so many different versions of content. The obvious ones are books, courses. You can write articles that contribute to magazines and online publications and things like that. So you can get paid per word, per story, per article. There's lots of different ways you can do that as well. You can create apps that then sell them. I imagine that's a lot trickier, right? You need to find and create something that's gonna be worth being able to sell. But that's something that could definitely generate stuff if that's up your alley. If you like creating stuff, there's do a Google search. You'll see kind of where you'd be able to sell apps that you create for income. You can sell arts and crafts, so totally something different. It might be a creative outlet for you where it's like, oh, this isn't gonna exhaust me the same way as doing freelance or doing public speaking, I can create something with my hands or however you do it, and then sell it. And and it might be actually a good boost for you, not only just income wise, but from mental health wise. Sometimes people enjoy doing those things. So those those are all again, just pretty wild and different things. Once we start talking about arts and crafts, and and things don't have to be specific. If it's your career to your direct experience right now, it could be the experience you want to create for yourself or careers that you want to create for yourself as well. You can also create or buy another business. So you can buy an existing business, you can create a new business, and there's no one says that it can't be a donut shop, coffee shop. You can't just do more of what you're doing now, but now you're running a either a solo shop as a freelancer or starting to build a whole enterprise of other people like you. So that there's really no endless upper limit to income once you're starting to create businesses, once your demand for your skills and white services and that you're offering are pretty limitless. You can also do stuff normal side hustles that you may have heard of. So driving Uber, delivering DoorDash, things like that. The downside of those is yes, they'll bring in more income, but if you're already in a higher income-related field or just have skills where you could get paid more than what the hourly rate is for those things, you might be able to just find a better use of your time and still create income, but doing it in less hours. So that's one thing that when I launched my business, I was like, oh, yep, I'm gonna do whatever I need to to make ends meet and make sure I give my business the best chance of success. And so I started looking at that and I was like, oh, like $10, $15, $20 an hour to be doing stuff that isn't the most exciting. I was like, well, let me look at my skills. And what I did is I ended up outsourcing my financial planning to advisors that don't do financial planning or aren't aware of it. And so it ended up being a good fit. I was paid another $10 more an hour, a lot more flexible in scheduling, and and I was leveraging my experience and kind of knowledge already. So it felt just a lot better versus doing those things. So definitely make sure you weigh those things as far as whenever you're committing your time to something. Is that the best use of your time, even if you're getting some money? Does is it paying you enough to make it worth it for you? Another big question I always get all the time is like, oh, how can I just create passive income streams? And again, we go back to those kind of four things I said: time, energy, talents, and assets. You it's so hard to create passive income that would be significant enough without pouring significant amounts of something of those, right? You have to pour either significant amount of time, energy, talents, or assets to have something that's gonna generate enough income that would be worth it to you. So not to say you can't do it, but it's gonna take some heavy lifting on the front end in order for it to actually become something that would be truly impactful as far as generated income streams. So which one of these things is gonna work best for you? But I would say just off the top of my head, probably one that excites you the most, the one that you're actually gonna stick to and not fizzle out of, because usually with any of these types of things, what you need to create for yourself is time to let it catch on, time for you to find it, find your groove. And if that's the case, then yeah, most of these things will provide some amounts of success if you give yourself enough time. And so definitely pick the one that's gonna excite you, that's gonna fit best with kind of what you have going on or what you're gonna have fitted in with this. If you want to kind of back into it from a financial side of things, well, what is the financial need that you have? Is it that you truly do have an income gap? And and not only do you need more money now, but you need more money for the rest of your earning career. Well, then there is definitely an income gap. We just need to create an income stream that you would need to increase, whether it's through your current employments, current career, or something that you could add on and sustain throughout the rest of your work and career. If it's more of a stop gap, there's one big monkey on your back in terms of student loans, credit card debt, something that's really once you just make enough to pay this thing off, then the rest of your path will be fine with your normal career, with your normal income trajectory where it is today. Well, that definitely changes things. You might just need a quick fix, quick money infusion for a shorter term time period that, yeah, maybe you just pour a lot of hours and maybe you're working 80 hours for a year or two to just get that out of the way. But then after that monkey's off your back, then you kind of just be like, nope, now I'm sticking to my normal career. The income that I'm making on that path would actually be fine once I get rid of this nasty thing that's bothering you. So as you go on the journey to explore new ways of generating more income and creating more possibilities for your future, you're just gonna level up naturally. So even if you decide to pivot, even if you don't make as much money as you probably thought you were going to, you're learning along the way that you're gonna take that information and knowledge, you're gonna use it later in your life, later in your career, as different future opportunities come up, you're gonna be like, oh, yep. And now I'm able to apply this unique thing as a result of you exploring these new opportunities of generating more income. So if you are actually in a good place financially and don't need new income, then I definitely caution you from avoiding putting yourself in a position where you're gonna drain your energy or compromise your long-term mental health because burnout is real, definitely significant in the tech space where a lot of my clients are. And I hate for you to burn yourself out for something that's only generating a small portion of your income. And then really it impacts your life and impacts your everyday living. And it also impacts your ability to enjoy your main thing where you're earning a majority of your income. So definitely be careful with those things as you're navigating all this. Thank you for joining me for this first episode of season five. And yeah, I'm excited uh to bring out more guests and tackle more topics that are important to you.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Thank you so much for listening to Techie Personal Finance Bootcamp. You can find show notes by visiting levelfinancialplanning.com and finding the podcast page. You'll also be able to find strategy guides, videos, and tunes to help you take your financial confidence to the next level. If you feel this episode has added a ton of value for you, please array and share this with friends and colleagues. Catch you next time on Techie Personal Finance Bootcamp.