Increasing Your Income There are many ways to increase your income. I cover the three that worked best for us. 

1. Selling things. 

You probably have a lot of stuff you didn’t even realize you had. I admitted that I had more stuff than I thought and when I actually let go I decided to get rid of things. We sold everything we could, from furniture that wasn’t necessary, to old computer monitors, to our kayak. When you can start to let go of the excess stuff you own, you can start to feel better. You feel more organized, and you feel like you are in control of things. As you downsize, it’s important to show appreciation for what you do have. There are so many people with much less, even if you are living paycheck to paycheck. Taking old things and donating them to Goodwill or friends in need may not help your budget, but it will help your mind. Giving during a time of scarcity is a great experience.

2. Increase your wage at your current job. 

I know the economy isn’t great, but if you are providing a lot of value to your employer, it doesn’t hurt to ask for a raise. I remember I was only three months into working at my company, and even though I was making more money than I ever imagined possible before, I asked for a raise. I even asked for a big raise. I’m not usually someone who enjoys risk, so it seemed a bit out of character for me. However, when I looked at the risk logically, I realized the worst they could do was say no. They had loved me as an employee so far. In fact, they hired one of my friends from college based on my recommendation. If they said no, then they would at least see my eagerness to improve. Although I was very nervous when the words came out of my mouth, just a few short days later, they said yes.

If you want to ask for a raise, here are a few tips: Make sure you are going above and beyond your current job description already. Employers love to see eager workers and know that they have people they can count on. They don’t want to lose people who are willing to go above and beyond. Make sure there is no ultimatum implied. When asking for a raise, it may sound like you aren’t happy with your current salary or that you are unhappy with your job. To keep things peaceful, make sure you validate that you appreciate your current situation, too. You can alienate your boss or company if they think you dislike the work and just want more money to justify it. Go in prepared and use numbers. Make sure you go in knowing what you are asking for. Don’t just say, “I want a raise.” Your employer needs to know how much you are looking for. Use numbers to show how much value you are delivering. If your job has any direct relation to creating gross revenue, make sure you explain how much you are bringing in. If you have had a direct impact and have created happier customers or fewer problems with software, and so on, make sure you back up your claim with numbers. You want to make it a no-brainer for your employer to give you a raise, even if they don’t have the funds to pay you now. This will give you a good chance to show how valuable you are. If you don’t feel like you have anything to show them to justify a raise, then go create more impact in your company before you ask for one. If you can’t show your value to an employer, then don’t ask for a raise. If your company is holding you back so you can’t show your value, then ask them for more responsibilities!

3. Starting a business. 

If your goal is to start a business, start it now as a side hustle. The next few chapters go over finding a solid idea and how millionaires started their businesses. Ahead, you’ll also find help with goal setting and creating a three-month action plan. You want the side hustle to start now so you can start to learn a lot about business while you have the security of your job. It also allows for more income so you can pay off your debt faster. That way you can set yourself up financially to quit your day job.

The Eventual Millionaire: How Anyone Can Be an Entrepreneur and Successfully Grow Their Startup

When it comes to money, fear is one of the most debilitating factors that will work against you in succeeding with the millionaire method. Fear can limit you, break you, second-guess you, and destroy you financially. It can cripple you to the point where you can’t act because you’re too afraid of the consequences. Either it’s the fear of investing your money, fear of not being able to enjoy life and have enough money to spend, fear of paying too much money in taxes, or whatever it may be. Fear and anxiety are severely crippling when it comes to your finances.

If you feel the fear when it comes to money or your future nest egg, remove yourself from the situation that you’re in immediately. Take a moment and go get some fresh air, or grab a pen and paper and begin writing out your thoughts. Write out why you’re afraid and try to react the opposite of how you would normally react. If you normally lose your temper, or begin to get agitated, do something to avoid that. Hit the gym, go for a run, or do some other stress-releasing activity. If you can interrupt the pattern and look at why you’re so fearful in the first place, you can work on correcting the problem.

Finally, think about your choices logically. If situations confront you where your emotions begin to take over, stop and really analyze that, and analyze how you want to react. If you’re very susceptible to spending money in certain situations, realize that and do something about it. Fix the problem by not putting yourself into those situations. If you spend too much money at the bar, or by going out for meals too often, then cut up your credit cards. Whatever you need to do, make sure that you make a logical and conscious decision, and don’t allow your thoughts and your emotions to control you. Learn to control them.

By taking control of your emotions, you can take control of your financial future. We can talk all we want about how and where to invest your money, how to generate more income, but none of that will help you if you can’t get control of the driver of the ship. If you can’t steer your mind in the right direction, even if you make good choices from time to time, you might end up jumping ship later on. When people get too comfortable, they begin to make poor decisions. And, it’s very easy to slip into this, believe me; I’m speaking from experience. But, as you make mistakes, you must learn from them. Don’t repeat the mistakes of your past. The definition of crazy is doing the same thing over, and over again, but expecting different results. Don’t repeat your same debilitating patterns. Make conscious changes, and be aware of your thoughts and your emotions.

The Millionaire Method: How to get out of Debt and Earn Financial Freedom by Understanding the Psychology of the Millionaire Mind by R.L. Adams

If I was handed $100 today to start a business, here is how I would invest that money:   

What Cost A great domain name from NameCheap $10 one off 

Domain hosting from Hostgator $6 monthly 

WordPress Design (use Elance or oDesk) $50 one off 

Logo design (through fiverr.com) $5 one off 

Mentoring by a successful entrepreneur $10 lunch 

PayPal Account to receive payments $0 

e-Junkie account to sell digital products $5 monthly 

3 Social Media profile designs (Fiverr.com) $15 one off 

Total Spent $96 

There are plenty of services that let you build a business for next to nothing. Take advantage of them.   

No need to break the bank is there? In fact, you should make your biggest investment in yourself: 


The Suitcase Entrepreneur: Create freedom in business and adventure in life by Natalie Sisson

You must shift your mentality from one that’s expecting instant gratification, to one that’s patiently awaiting deferred gratification. Eventually it will come. 

When you look at a person who chain smokes cigarettes, overspends, overeats, or indulges in drugs or alcohol, you may ask yourself why they do it. You may ask yourself why they make those decisions when clearly they are going to lead to more pain than pleasure. Since we do more to avoid pain than we do to gain pleasure, the decision-making process can seem skewed. An alcoholic may not understand why they overdrink, or why the person in financial ruins continues to overspend. It’s because their decision-making processes are only limited to short-term causes and effects. They are doing more to avoid pain than gain pleasure in the short term, not in the long term. If they were doing more to avoid pain in the long term, then they wouldn’t engage in excessive behavior.

In order to master your financial life and start on the road to wealth building, you must first master your psychic apparatus. The difficulty is however, that most of this self-talk which occurs in your mind, is purely subconscious. The id is a purely subconscious construct, and both the ego and superego live in both the conscious and subconscious realms of your mind. So in order to be able to recognize the self-talk that’s going on, and to take control of it, you must learn to build awareness. You build awareness by paying attention to your emotions, because your emotions are the gateway to your thoughts. Learning to recognize and understand those emotions is the key.


Even if you’re facing a scary situation, you must realize that many people in the past have faced the same or similar situation, and have overcome it. Many people in the future will also face that same or similar situation. Fear-based thoughts won’t serve you, and in fact, it will just foster more physiological problems. The stress, fear, and anxiety wreak havoc on your body. Try to look at your situation from a bird’s-eye view. Think back to other times in your life when you were in a bad situation, but you were able to pull yourself out of it. The strong emotions that take hold of your body are only the result of the ego blinding you to the truth. When you can look at the truth, and see it for what it is, then take steps towards fixing it, you’ll feel remarkably better. However, if you continue to feel the emotions, yet don’t do anything about it, then it will only get worse. 

The Millionaire Method: How to get out of Debt and Earn Financial Freedom by Understanding the Psychology of the Millionaire Mind by R.L. Adams

What did you do to make money after you went broke? –@ScottEPowers

I did several things:

DOWNSIZED. I had to sell my house. I severely downsized. I went from a 4,500 square foot penthouse to a 1,400 square foot house 70 miles north and I cut my expenses by 75%.

I HAD TO GET IN SHAPE. I worked out every day, I emotionally stopped dealing with people who were dragging me down, I made lists of ideas every day, and I either meditated or read from various spiritual or inspirational texts each day. I knew it was going to be a tough battle to climb back up so I did everything I could to prepare.

IMMEDIATELY STARTED WRITING ABOUT FINANCE TO GENERATE INCOME. Within a few months I had a book deal and I was writing for TheStreet.com and The Financial Times. Back then it was still possible to make money by writing.

I was also day-trading and doing well back then (2002-05). I don’t think day trading is practical now but it was then.

I STARTED TRADING FOR HEDGE FUNDS then I started helping people sell their companies, then I started a fund of hedge funds. One day at the time, as the ideas I wrote began to flourish I got back into the game.

I STARTED A COMPANY:

STOCKPICKR.COM http://bit.ly/qV3Q5E which I sold to TheStreet.com. There was a six year period where nobody was paying my salary and I had to hustle for every dollar. But that proved to me that no matter how bad the economy gets, if you’re the one eyed man (the optimist) in the land of the blind (the pessimists) then you will find the ways to make money even if we are in a Depression.

It might be your own creativity and flexibility that wants to get out and help you on your next idea. That creativity is a sleeping monster and it never gets smaller if you keep feeding it,  nurturing it, loving it, taking care of it. Persistence in developing that creativity will make you better at execution, better at idea generation, and more optimistic (simply because over time you will be more confident that you can always awaken it). Creativity becomes your loving friend instead of your enemy. And optimism, creativity, and persistence are all close siblings that want to play together as much as possible.

I also always made sure I delivered at least one extra feature that the company didn’t ask for.

When you make other people make money, then you will make money. Then you repeat that and it’s a business.

Faq Me by James Altucher

What is controlling you?   I will tell you. Your parents are. Your friends are. Your spouse is. Your job is. Your colleagues are. Your children are. So many people have expectations of you. Each one draws a circle around you. You can’t move beyond each person’s circle without disappointing their expectations.   And so where can you stand? You stand in the center, in the tiniest circle of all, the tiny circle that is the intersection of all the many circles drawn around you. You need to step out of the circles. Forget about “it” for a second. There is no “it”. There is you. You need to step out of those circles but it’s not so easy. You’ve just spent the first half of your life keeping inside of  

To step out in one second is impossible or , at the very least, hard.  You are now a spy. A spy on your own life. There are enemies everywhere, keeping track of your position. You must attempt to fool them.   Do something a little different. Finger-paint.  Take the wrong subway. Go vegetarian for a week. Leave in the middle of the day and don’t comeback. Go to a museum instead. Write a one page novel. Give advice to someone who didn’t ask for it and doesn’t want it.

Give yourself time. Practice stepping outside the circles. Eventually you will break free into the above world. And nothing will ever hold you back  

Faq Me by James Altucher

Acquiring clients at a breakeven or a slight loss and making substantial profits on back-end repurchasing is one of the most overlooked and underutilized methods of client growth and generation available to you. But it can’t work for you until you first recognize a very important fact. If your business or practice is one that has a high probability of clients coming back, again and again, to repurchase from you the same or different products or services, you owe it to that business or practice to do everything within your power to get clients into the buying stream as quickly and easily as you possibly can. 

Many companies increase their clients and profits merely by shifting their focus from trying to make a huge profit on the acquisition of a new client to making their real profit on all the repeat purchases that result from those new clients.

Knowing how much a client will spend with you over a period of years tells you how much you can spend on the process of acquiring a client. The most profitable thing you’ll ever do for your business or career is to understand and ethically exploit the marginal net worth of a client.

What is the current lifetime value of one of your clients? It’s the total profit of an average client over the lifetime of his or her patronage—including all residual sales—less all advertising, marketing, and incremental product or service-fulfillment expenses. 

If you haven’t calculated your clients’ marginal net worth yet, here’s how to do it: 

1. Compute your average sale and your profit per sale. 
2. Compute how much additional profit a client is worth to you by determining how many times he or she comes back. 
3. Compute precisely what a client costs by dividing the marketing budget by the number of clients it produces. 
4. Compute the cost of a prospect the same way. 
5. Compute how many sales you get for so many prospects (the percentage of prospects who become clients). 
6. Compute the marginal net worth of a client by subtracting the cost to produce (or convert) the client from the profit you expect to earn from the client over the lifetime of his or her patronage.

Once you’ve calculated the lifetime value of a client, you have many ways to accomplish your break-even objective. Remember, the goal isn’t just to cut the price of the first purchase. The goal is to make that first purchase so much more appealing that people find it harder to say no than yes . . . please! 

While reducing the price of your product or service is the most common and obvious way to get the first sale, there are other powerful ways to obtain first-time buyers. For example, you can calculate your allowable marketing or selling cost, which is how much money you’re willing to either spend or forgo receiving (by reducing the selling price), in order to make that very first purchase more appealing to a prospective client. 

Let’s say your product or service sells for $200 and your cost is $100. Also assume your average client repurchases several times a year for several years and you will realize a good long-term profit. Obviously you can reduce your price by $100 on the first sale to reach a break-even point and gain a new client. But you could put that $100 to a number of other uses. You could keep the price at $200 and use the $100 as “spiff” or extra selling incentives to your salespeople. Giving salespeople greater financial incentive to bring in new, first-time clients can produce tremendous results in the right situation. You could also use that same $100 to buy more of your product or service. So you still charge the full $200, but you give prospects twice the quantity on the first purchase.

Or you could take the $100 and use it to buy other complementary products or services (at wholesale) to package and add to your product or service without raising the $200 price—so the value of your offer becomes far greater and thus more attractive. Or you could use that $100 to invest in advertising, sales letters, additional salespeople, free seminars, or any other marketing and selling programs. Or you could rent promotional space in someone’s store or trade-show booth and pay them the $100 for every new client you gain through their facility. The only limitation you have on how to use your allowable marketing or selling cost to help you strategically break even on the initial sale is that it must be ethical and legal. And after testing it out it must be economically viable in the long term.

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham

When it comes to creative endeavors, so often we find people going at them from the wrong end. This generally afflicts those who are young and inexperienced—they begin with an ambitious goal, a business, or an invention or a problem they want to solve. This seems to promise money and attention. They then search for ways to reach that goal. Such a search could go in thousands of directions, each of which could pan out in its own way, but in which they could also easily end up exhausting themselves and never find the key to reaching their overarching goal. There are too many variables that go into success. The more experienced, wiser types, .... are opportunists.

Instead of beginning with some broad goal, they go in search of the fact of great yield—a bit of empirical evidence that is strange and does not fit the paradigm, and yet is intriguing. This bit of evidence sticks out and grabs their attention, like the elongated rock. They are not sure of their goal and they do not yet have in mind an application for the fact they have uncovered, but they are open to where it will lead them. Once they dig deeply, they discover something that challenges prevailing conventions and offers endless opportunities for knowledge and application.

Mastery by Robert Greene

The animal world can be divided into two types—specialists and opportunists. Specialists, like hawks or eagles, have one dominant skill upon which they depend for their survival. When they are not hunting, they can go into a mode of complete relaxation.

Opportunists, on the other hand, have no particular specialty. They depend instead on their skill to sniff out any kind of opportunity in the environment and seize upon it. They are in states of constant tension and require continual stimulation. We humans are the ultimate opportunists in the animal world, the least specialized of all living creatures. Our entire brain and nervous system is geared toward looking for any kind of opening.

This opportunistic bent of the human mind is the source and foundation of our creative powers, and it is in going with this bent of the brain that we maximize these powers.

Mastery by Robert Greene

Karl Popper said many wise things, but I think the following remark is among the wisest: “The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.”

Focus your energy on one skill at a time. One of the easiest mistakes to make when acquiring new skills is attempting to acquire too many skills at the same time.

It’s a matter of simple math: acquiring new skills requires a critical mass of concentrated time and focused attention. If you only have an hour or two each day to devote to practice and learning, and you spread that time and energy across twenty different skills, no individual skill is going to receive enough time and energy to generate noticeable improvement.

Pick one, and only one, new skill you wish to acquire. Put all of your spare focus and energy into acquiring that skill, and place other skills on temporary hold. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (2002), recommends establishing what he calls a “someday/maybe” list: a list of things you may want to explore sometime in the future, but that aren’t important enough to focus on right now.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Focusing on one prime skill at a time is absolutely necessary for rapid skill acquisition. You’re not giving up on the other skills permanently, you’re just saving them for later.

Define your target performance level. A target performance level is a simple sentence that defines what “good enough” looks like. How well would you like to be able to perform the skill you’re acquiring?

Deconstruct the skill into subskills. Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. Once you’ve identified a skill to focus on, the next step is to deconstruct it—to break it down into the smallest possible parts.

Deconstructing a skill also makes it easier to avoid feeling overwhelmed. You don’t have to practice all parts of a skill at the same time. Instead, it’s more effective to focus on the subskills that promise the most dramatic overall returns.


The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!  by Josh Kaufman