Where do you begin when you want to grow your wealth? I have been thinking about that for quite a while. I have tried to grow my wealth by increasing my income (getting a higher-paying job) and by saving more money (doing without extra stuff). I still never seem to get ahead.
All that leaves is either to win the lottery, inherit a fortune, or maybe grow my income and save at the same time. All three seem very unlikely.
To get a better paying job at this point in my career I would have to go back to school. That would take more money than I have in savings.
To save more money I would almost have to stop eating. I have a few thousand dollars stashed away so I am not a complete failure at saving money but there is always an emergency.
My father-in-law buys only the highest quality merchandise. He lives in retirement and watches every penny he spends. But if he has to get his roof done he'll go for the $2000 job instead of the $500 one because he wants the work and materials to be the highest quality.
In addition to earning more money and saving money the secret seems to be spending wisely. We don't spend our money well these days. Cheap, easy-to-manufacture merchandise makes it so easy to add an extra thing to the shopping cart that we don't even think about how stuff adds up.
What I would like is a non-invasive smart phone app (where no one but me collects the data) that tracks my purchases without me entering anything into the phone. And when I step out of budget I want it to tell me so I can stop and think one more time.
Making money is the hardest thing to do once you have locked yourself into a job. Does that sound weird? I just mean that you negotiate to devote 40-50 hours of your week in exchange for a certain salary and then you have to settle for that, or else bust your gut working an extra job or after-hours business.
Lance Roberts says that making money is not hard because all you have to do is "spend less than you make" but that is easier to say than to live. You don't just have to deal with your own expectations in life you have to deal with the people around you. I once had a boss criticize my car because it was "so budgetary". Yeah, I was trying to save money. He was driving a Cadillac and making all the money.
I was thinking of starting a business on the side and couldn't come up with any ideas for how to get the seed money. Then I found a blog that says you can do that without credit and that got me to thinking. Does negotiating for payment in advance only apply in the business world? No, it doesn't. When you are being courted by a large company for a new job they may be willing to make you a payment in advance. That is called a hiring bonus. Not everyone gets a hiring bonus but it doesn't hurt to ask.
And if you can get a hiring bonus is there any other way you can get people to pay you more than normal? For example, what about banks that offer to deposit money in your account for you? Of course there is always a catch with those offers but sooner or later they will put the money there. You could maybe open 3 or 4 accounts a year and get a few hundred dollars by doing that, just rolling the deposits over into new accounts.
Is that making money or just saving money? Maybe it's a little bit of both?
I am still working on the next big financial choice in my life but as you can tell I have been giving this a lot of thought. I don't think the answer is really on the Internet. I mean, my wife has looked at a thousand "work from home" articles and they all offer the same useless advice. She can't write and won't work for a call center. I am sure call centers have a lot of applicants thanks to those articles anyway.
We just have to figure out how to make better choices about what we buy, how we save, and how we're going to earn more money in the future. We can't do anything about past decisions but we can still change our future.
If it sounds like I am ending this on a hopeful note I guess I am. I'm not ready to throw in the towel on my finances. I hope you aren't, either.
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