No matter what walk in life you are in, having a vision and a realistic goal is essential for personal and professional growth.
The biggest challenge is starting from scratch. An even greater challenge is to keep making money consistently and saving it for rainy days.
In this article, I’ll lay down tips on how to make money essentially from scratch. I insist you read this article imagining you have zero savings at this moment, which of course, isn’t true, but doing that harmless mental exercise could help you internalize my message quickly.
Utilize Your Time
It’s a sad fact of life that most people don’t understand the importance of time. They either waste time or don’t make the most optimized use of it. When you don’t have any money, all you have is time and you’d want to make the best use of it.
There are no hard and fast rules on how to utilize your time. Do what’s best for you and your future endeavors. For example, if you have dreams of becoming a pilot, spend your time learning every nitty-gritty of flying. If you want to be a successful surgeon, spend most of your time studying hard to get into med school, and don’t be distracted by other things.
Learn New Skills
Smart people can quickly bridge the gap between acquiring new skills and making money. If you don’t believe me, check out the list of wealthy people. True, some are rich because they were lucky enough to receive an enormous amount of ancestral property and some became rich overnight by winning the lottery. But the majority used their skills to laugh all the way to the bank.
Learning new skills has never been easier. The Internet is a great resource. It has inexpensive courses, it also has a wide collection of books, available free of cost. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get into college and paying one-tenth of that cost can make you a pro in a particular field if you exhaust all the relevant online resources and spend a couple of years doing so. Lately, there have been many offline communities active on meetup websites. Join those communities to learn new skills.
Have an Investment Plan
A lot of people cower at the thought of investment. They prefer the safety net of interest income offered by banks over doing something on their own that might lead to a financial debacle. Guess what? Interest income is going to be a thing of the past pretty soon. Sure, banks will always be obligated to pay you a certain interest against your deposit. But the amount would be so low that you won’t be able to rely on it.
All over the world, the cost of living is going up. I think you’d agree with me on this. A day job may be enough to meet necessary expenses, but not enough to meet luxury expenses. We all have whims and fancies, interests, and preferences. A day job and interest income are not sufficient to fulfill desires like a cruise vacation or a trip to Europe.
A stable source of additional income is needed. Investment can be that source. By investment, most people think of investing in the capital market. There are other forms of investment like affiliate earning, online product reselling, renting garage space, etc.
You May Like to Read: Money Managing Tips for Alzheimer’s Caregivers
Save Smart, Not Hard
Saving is an art. If correctly done, it can save you from financial distress. If wrongly done, it’ll amount to lost time or lost opportunities. The most important thing about smart saving is expense tracking. If you are serious about saving, tracking monthly expenses is a must for you. Some people use a notebook, a pen, and a calculator to track monthly expenses. If you want to be 100% accurate, use automated tools, custom-built for this very purpose.
What happens when you are done with tracking expenses? The next step is to manage all your expenses and create a diversified income portfolio. The portfolio would be useful in saving because smart saving is all about tallying monthly expenses tracked by automation and monthly earnings. Whatever money remains after tallying the two categories is the real saving.
Anticipate the Future
Predicting the future is not easy. But not impossible if you know the methods. The two key requirements are intellect and information. Assuming you have the former, acquiring the latter won’t be too difficult, especially when you are in the digital age.
Analyze the world around you. Synthesize the constant stream of information you are receiving. And while you are doing it, look for opportunities. Every piece of information has value. Understand the value and use it in your favor and convert it into money. I agree that it’s easier said than done, but one who knows the right moves can pull it off.